4. Man began to perceive and to examine the powers of nature from his immediate wants. His aim extended no farther than to his well being, that is, to the due employment of his own powers in exercise and rest. He became connected with other beings; and still his own state of existence was the measure of his connections. The rule of equity pressed itself upon him; for this is nothing more than practical reason, the measure of the actions and reactions of similar beings for the general security.
5. Human nature is constructed on this principle; so that no individual can suppose himself to exist for the sake of another, or of posterity. If the lowest in the rank of men follow the law of reason and justice, that is within him; he possesses consistency; that is, he enjoys durability and well being; he is rational, just, and happy. These he is not by the will of another creature, or of the creator, but by the laws of a general order of nature, founded on that order itself. If he deviate from the rule of equity, his avenging faults themselves must show him the disorder, and induce him to return to reason and justice, as the laws of his existence and his happiness.
6. As his nature is composed of very different elements, this he seldom does in the shortest way; he vibrates between two extremes, till he accommodates himself to his state of existence, and reaches the temperate mean in which he imagines his well being to consist. If he err in this, he must be secretly conscious of it, and suffer the consequences of his fault. These, however, he suffers but to a certain degree; for either fate corrects them by means of his own endeavors, or his being no longer finds an internal capacity of subsistence. Supreme wisdom could not impart more beneficial uses to physical pain and moral evil, for nothing superior can be conceived.
7. Had one single man alone trodden the Earth, the object of human existence would have been accomplished in him; as we must consider it to be accomplished, in so many individuals and nations, whom circumstances of time and place separated from the general chain of the species. But as everything that can live upon the Earth endures as long as it can remain in its state of permanency; so the human species, like every other kind of living beings, possesses such intrinsic transmissive powers, as could find, and have found, proportion and order suitable to the whole. Thus reason, the essence of man, and its organ, tradition, have been inherited through a series of successive generations. The Earth was gradually filled, and man became everything, that, in such a period and no other, he could become upon Earth.
8. Thus the propagation of families and traditions, connected human reason: not as if it were in each individual no more than a fragment of the whole, a whole existing nowhere in one subject, and therefore by no means the end of the Creator; but because the disposition and concatenation of the whole species led to this. As men are propagated, so are animals; yet no general animal reason arises from their generations: but as reason alone gives permanency to mankind, it must be propagated, as the characteristic of the species; for without it the species would cease to be.
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