Man is a creature of boundless ambition.
It is probably our natural wants that first awaken us from that
lethargy and indifference in which man may be supposed to be plunged
previously to the impulse of any motive, or the accession of any
uneasiness. One of our earliest wants may be conceived to be hunger,
or the desire of food.
From this simple beginning the history of man in all its complex
varieties may be regarded as proceeding.
Man in a state of society, more especially where there is an
inequality of condition and rank, is very often the creature of
leisure. He finds in himself, either from internal or external
impulse, a certain activity. He finds himself at one time engaged in
the accomplishment of his obvious and immediate desires, and at
another in a state in which these desires have for the present been
fulfilled, and he has no present occasion to repeat those exertions
which led to their fulfilment. This is the period of contemplation.
This is the state which most eminently distinguishes us from the
brutes. Here it is that the history of man, in its exclusive sense,
may be considered as taking its beginning.
Here it is that he specially recognises in himself the sense of power.
Power in its simplest acceptation, may be exerted in either of two
ways, either in his procuring for himself an ample field for more
refined accommodations, or in the exercise of compulsion and authority
over other living creatures. In the pursuit of either of these, and
especially the first, he is led to the attainment of skill and
superior adroitness in the use of his faculties.
No sooner has man reached to this degree of improvement, than now, if
not indeed earlier, he is induced to remark the extreme limitedness of
his faculties in respect to the future; and he is led, first earnestly
to desire a clearer insight into the future, and next a power of
commanding those external causes upon which the events of the future
depend. The first of these desires is the parent of divination, augury,
chiromancy, astrology, and the consultation of oracles; and the second
has been the prolific source of enchantment, witchcraft, sorcery,
magic, necromancy, and alchemy, in its two branches, the unlimited
prolongation of human life, and the art of converting less precious
metals into gold.