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Updated: June 25, 2025
But these equal animal men had one quality beyond the other animals, perfectibility, the power of further development and this was the reason of inequality. Rousseau sees therefore in the existence of equality a step forward. But this advance was self contradictory, it was at the same time a retrogression.
On this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit. The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the angels.
The disciples of this independent doctrine hold forth instances of the perfectibility of human actions, produced by the unassisted decisions of human intellect on the limits of right and wrong. They admire virtue, because it is beautiful. They practice it, because it is heroic.
John Morley, the strongest and sanest of modern English statesmen, says: "Cobden had an intrepid faith in the perfectibility of man. His doctrine was one of non-intervention; that the powerful can afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the light if not too much interfered with.
He was not quite the first of the philosophers to dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunal for the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followed Leibnitz, as he anticipated Kant. It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this which in that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind.
And he appends a note: In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to science.
If we ask, however, whether he had any idea of progress as we understand it, we must answer no. He did not believe in the perfectibility of man, or in the ultimate prevalence of virtue in the world.
Saved from self-indulgence, he naturally turned into the way of political enthusiasm; thither did his temper point him. With some help mostly negative from Clerkenwell Green, he reached the stage of confident and aspiring Radicalism, believing in the perfectibility of man, in human brotherhood, in anything you like that is the outcome of a noble heart sheltered by ignorance.
For this reign of the last absolute king of France was a time of hope and of belief in human perfectibility. One after another, the schemers had come forward with their plans for regenerating society. There were the economists, ready to swear that the world, and especially France, would be rich, if free trade were adopted, and the taxes were laid they could not quite agree how.
She was to put an end to war, and produce, by a pure form of government, a perfectibility of mind which before had never been realized. The monarchs of Europe, seeing the prevalence of these new principles, trembled for their thrones. France, also, perceiving the hostility of kings to her projects, supposed she could not be a republic without the overthrow of thrones.
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