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Updated: May 25, 2025
On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, not less suspicious, which, to realize the chimera of a general perfection common to the whole universe, would not be embarrassed for a choice of means.
From the ephemera to the star he accepted and conjectured, and while he often thought ill of the living, he had never yet thought ill of life. He had long been allied with a thinker who, with a low estimate of at least so much of human nature as ran counter to his purposes, yet believed with devoutness in the perfectibility of his species, and had of the future a large, calm, and noble vision.
On this double foundation he based an opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was the belief in perfectibility.
After having showed, that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other faculties, which natural man had received in potentia, could never be developed of themselves, that for that purpose there was a necessity for the fortuitous concurrence of several foreign causes, which might never happen, and without which he must have eternally remained in his primitive condition; I must proceed to consider and bring together the different accidents which may have perfected the human understanding by debasing the species, render a being wicked by rendering him sociable, and from so remote a term bring man at last and the world to the point in which we now see them.
Where men talk only in whispers; where they feel that their words must be weighed ere they utter them; where their single idea of the powers that be, is of an influence which oppresses, or keeps an eye of unsleeping vigilance upon their movements; where they are not permitted to form any judgment as to what is, or what is not, best for their social condition, but imbibe, from childhood, one conviction only, that it is their wisdom to obey implicitly, in such a state of society it is vain to look either for true dignity of individual character, or for the developement of powers which elevate both nations and private men in the scale of human perfectibility.
Like all you Americans, John Meavy was a man of perfect faith in all that regarded 'Progress, and especially did he believe in the infinite perfectibility of Science in the hands of an energetic people. This was the chord upon which I played, and the responsive note was easily evoked. He sought me out, came to me eagerly, and, by degrees, I divulged to him all my plans.
I admit, that in some respects the use of animal food retards, though it cannot materially inhibit, the perfectibility of the species.
This earth and its mortal life is but the threshhold the vestibule of human destiny that reaches far into the eternal ages. Believe, as he may, in human equality or in the perfectibility of humanity, no such theory has ever yet been realized, nor will it ever be realized in this probationary state of man.
I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them.
The perfectibility of the human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Staël, consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to preceding generations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought.
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