thought, habits, manners, character, life, which only their
introduction and realization can supply. So to be able to
execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the
habits, and characters in the public which are not possible
without civilization itself. Some philosophers suppose men have
invented language, forgetting that it requires language to give
the ability to invent language.

Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and
convincing it may be. They are moved by their affections,
passions, instincts, and habits. Routine is more powerful with
them than logic. A few are greedy of novelties, and are always
for trying experiments; but the great body of the people of all
nations have an invincible repugnance to abandon what they know
for what they know not. They are, to a great extent, the slaves
of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the necessary
exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
better. Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
prejudice, habits, and usages. Never were philosophers more
ignorant of human nature than they, so numerous in the last
century, who imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of
interest, and that enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien
entendu, suffices to found and sustain the state. No reform, no
change in the constitution of government or of society, whatever
the advantages it may promise, can be successful, if introduced,
unless it has its root or germ in the past. Man is never a
creator; he can only develop and continue, because he is himself
a creature, and only a second cause. The children of Israel,
when they encountered the privations of the wilderness that lay