|
We have seen, that our nature is evidently organized to this end: for it our finer senses and instincts, our reason and liberty, our delicate yet durable health, our language, art, and religion, were bestowed. In all states, in all societies, man has had nothing in view, and could aim at nothing else, but humanity, whatever may have been the idea he formed of it. For it, the arrangements of sex, and the different periods of life, were made by nature; that our childhood might be of long continuance, and we might learn a kind of humanity by means of education. For it, all the different modes of life, throughout the wide World, have been established, all the forms of society introduced. Hunter, or fisherman, shepherd, husbandman, or citizen, in every state man has learned to discriminate food, and construct habitations for himself and his family; to clothe and adorn either sex, and regulate his domestic economy. He invented various laws, and forms of government, the object of all which was, that every one might exercise his faculties, and acquire a more pleasing and free enjoyment of life, undisturbed by others. For this purpose, property was secured, and labor, arts, trade, and an extensive intercourse between persons, facilitated: punishments were invented for culprits, rewards for the deserving; and numberless moral practices for people of different classes, in public and private life, and even in religion, were established. For this, wars were carried on, treaties were made; by degrees a sort of law of nations and of war, and various compacts of hospitality and commerce were framed, so that man might meet compassion and respect beyond the confines of his own country. Thus whatever good appears in history to have been accomplished, humanity was the gainer; whatever foolish, vicious, or execrable, was perpetrated, ran counter to humanity: so that in all his earthly institutions man can conceive no other end, than what lies in himself, that is, in the weak or strong, base or noble nature, that God gave him. Now if throughout the whole creation we know nothing, except by what it is, and what it effects, man’s end upon Earth is shown us by his nature and history, as by the clearest demonstration.
Let us take a retrospect of the regions, over which we have been wandering: in all the civil establishments from China to Rome, in all the varieties of their political constitutions, in every one of their inventions, whether of peace or war, and even in all the faults and barbarities that nations have committed, we discern the grand law of nature: let man be man; let him mould his condition according as to himself shall seem best. For this nations took possession of their land, and established themselves in it as they could. Of women and of the state, of slaves, clothing, and habitations, of recreation and food, of science and of art, everything has been made, in the different parts of the Earth, that man thought was capable of being made for his own or for the general good. Thus we everywhere find mankind possessing and exercising the right of forming themselves to a kind of humanity, as soon as they have discerned it. If they have erred, or stopped at the half way of a hereditary tradition; they have suffered the consequences of their error, and done penance for the fault they committed. The deity has in nowise bound their hands, farther than by what they were, by time, place, and their intrinsic powers. When they were guilty of faults, he extricated them not by miracles, but suffered these faults to produce their effects, that man might the better learn to know them.
|
print version
return to list
previous document