These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no
conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to
that in which they have thus far lived. How then can they,
since, on the theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is
a purely artificial creation, even conceive of civilization,
much less realize it?
These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they
feel they could do in case civil society were broken up, what
men may do and have done in a state of nature. Men cannot divest
themselves of themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it,
they think, reason, and act as they are.
Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself. The
advocates of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete,
should have presented their primitive man as below the lowest
known savage, unprogressive, and in himself incapable of
developing any progressive energy. Unprogressive, and, without
foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for
your primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from
the alleged state of nature to that of civilization, of which he
has no conception, and towards which no innate desire, no
instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some
happy inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the
state of nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil
government, how could he carry his conception into execution?
Conception is always easier than its realization, and between the
design and its execution there is always a weary distance.
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