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. The poetry of all nations is a wail
over unrealized ideals. It is little that even the wisest and most
potent statesman can realize of what he conceives to be necessary for
the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly
demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not
seldom generations come and go without effecting them. The republics
of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities
of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because
intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are
innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their
realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life,
which only their introduction and realization can supply. So to be
able to execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits,
and characters in the public which are not possible without
civilization itself. Some philosophers suppose men have invented
language, forgetting that it requires language to give the ability to
invent language.

Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it
may be. They are moved by their aff