Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself. The
advocates of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete,
should have presented their primitive man as below the lowest
known savage, unprogressive, and in himself incapable of
developing any progressive energy. Unprogressive, and, without
foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for
your primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from
the alleged state of nature to that of civilization, of which he
has no conception, and towards which no innate desire, no
instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?

But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some
happy inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the
state of nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil
government, how could he carry his conception into execution?
Conception is always easier than its realization, and between the
design and its execution there is always a weary distance. The
poetry of all nations is a wail over unrealized ideals. It is
little that even the wisest and most potent statesman can realize
of what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political,
legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and
favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom
generations come and go without effecting them. The republics of
Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the
communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not
solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but
chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in
experience, and require for their realization the modes of