United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of human faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the duration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but the ultimate end was sure.
"Good God, Béclère! it is terrible to think one knows nothing, and life, like the desert, is full of solitude." Béclère did not answer, and, forgetful that it was impossible to answer a cry of anguish, Owen began to suspect Béclère of thoughts regarding the perfectibility of mankind, of thinking that with patience and more perfect administration, &c.
This notion, that the whole people cannot err, opens the door for any license. It logically leads to that other idea, of the native majesty of man and the perfectibility of society, which this sophist boldly accepted.
They talked as usual of virtue and human perfectibility; and as the intimacy grew, Shelley, whose chief employment at this time was to discover and relieve genius in distress, began to place his present resources and future prospects at Godwin's disposal.
The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the great whole of Mankind. This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man.
Malthus, transformed into a monster, deserves the 'execrations' noticed by Chalmers. There is a thorough coincidence between this view and that of the sentimental Radicals. Malthus argues that 'perfectibility' gives an impossible end because equality would lead to vice and misery. But why should we not suppose with Godwin a change of character which would imply prudence and chastity?
Certainly the sights he saw there were not calculated to destroy his revolutionary longings, though they were often such as might well have made him doubt of the ultimate perfectibility of the human race. "Oh, I am so glad to find you, Raymond, and I should enjoy a nice long talk together; but you must be tired; you have, I suppose, only just come in after working all night?"
Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year 1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later.
Something of the kind may happen, in case the American or any other democracy seeks patiently and intelligently to make good a complete and a coherent democratic ideal. For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in the direction of realizing such an aspiration.
Men are rather the infinitely malleable, variable stuff on which education and persuasion can play. The first essential dogma of perfectibility, the first presupposition of progress is, then, that men's characters depend on external circumstances. The second dogma, the second condition of hope is that the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions.
Word Of The Day