Note 3 — TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Mary Campbell Smith translation
The theory that the golden age was identical with the state of nature, Professor D. G. Ritchie ascribes to Locke (see Natural Right, Ch. II., p. 42). Locke, he says, “has an idea of a golden age” existing even after government has come into existence—a time when people did not need “to examine the original and rights of government.” [Civil Government, II., § 111.] A little confusion on the part of his readers (perhaps in his own mind) makes it possible to regard the state of nature as itself the golden age, and the way is prepared for the favourite theory of the eighteenth century:—
“Nor think in nature’s state they blindly trod; The state of nature was the reign of God: Self-love and social at her birth began, Union the bond of all things and of man. Pride then was not, nor arts that pride to aid; Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade; The same his table, and the same his bed; No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.” [Essay on Man, III., 147 seq.]
In these lines of Pope’s the state of nature is identified with the golden age of the Greek and Latin poets; and “the reign of God” is an equivalent for Locke’s words, “has a law of nature to govern it.”