PROLEGOMENA 77 



cally determined and carefully followed out, it cannot 

 put an end to the struggle for existence in the state of 

 nature; and it will not so much as tend, in any way, 

 to the adaptation of man to that state. 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 to the struggle within, in conse- 

 quence 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 les- 

 son 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 instruc- 

 tion, and by the application of his intelligence to the 

 adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I 

 entertain not the slightest doubt. But so long as he re- 

 mains 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 recog- 

 nition of his intellectual limitations forces him to ac- 

 knowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of 

 existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happi- 

 ness, 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. 



