Even should the whole human race be absorbed in one vast polity, within
which "absolute political justice" reigns, the struggle for existence
with the state of nature outside it, and the tendency to the return of
the struggle within, in consequence of over-multiplication, will remain;
and, unless men's inheritance from the ancestors who fought a good fight
in the state of nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out
by some method at present unrevealed, at any rate to disbelievers in
supernaturalism, every child born into the world will still bring with
him the instinct of unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn
the lesson of self-restraint and renunciation. But the practice of
self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be
something much better.
That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of a vast amount of
improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his
intelligence to the adaptation of tne conditions of life to his higher
needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains
liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be
perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not
his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted
by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the
recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge
his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of
attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely,
deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an
illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there
have been many of them.
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain
and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of
an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy
civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself,
until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its
downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once
more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.