A few are greedy of novelties, and are always
for trying experiments; but the great body of the people of all
nations have an invincible repugnance to abandon what they know
for what they know not. They are, to a great extent, the slaves
of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the necessary
exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
better. Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
prejudice, habits, and usages. Never were philosophers more
ignorant of human nature than they, so numerous in the last
century, who imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of
interest, and that enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien
entendu, suffices to found and sustain the state. No reform, no
change in the constitution of government or of society, whatever
the advantages it may promise, can be successful, if introduced,
unless it has its root or germ in the past. Man is never a
creator; he can only develop and continue, because he is himself
a creature, and only a second cause. The children of Israel,
when they encountered the privations of the wilderness that lay
between them and the promised land flowing with milk and honey,
fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back to Egypt,
and permit them to return to slavery.
In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it,
there is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil
society would not be a development, but a complete rupture with
the past, and an entire new creation.
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