conjecture, yet as he has produced some appearances, which in his
conception favour the supposition, he must certainly intend that
these appearances should be examined and this is all that I have
meant to do.



CHAPTER 13

Error of Mr Godwin is considering man too much in the light of a
being merely rational--In the compound being, man, the passions
will always act as disturbing forces in the decisions of the
understanding--Reasonings of Mr Godwin on the subject of
coercion--Some truths of a nature not to be communicated from
one man to another.


In the chapter which I have been examining, Mr Godwin professes
to consider the objection to his system of equality from the
principle of population. It has appeared, I think clearly, that
he is greatly erroneous in his statement of the distance of this
difficulty, and that instead of myriads of centuries, it is
really not thirty years, or even thirty days, distant from us.
The supposition of the approach of man to immortality on earth is
certainly not of a kind to soften the difficulty. The only
argument, therefore, in the chapter which has any tendency to
remove the objection is the conjecture concerning the extinction
of the passion between the sexes, but as this is a mere
conjecture, unsupported by the smallest shadow of proof, the
force of the objection may be fairly said to remain unimpaired,