necessary to continue that activity which they first awakened.
The savage would slumber for ever under his tree unless he were
roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger or the pinchings
of cold, and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by
procuring food, and building himself a covering, are the
exercises which form and keep in motion his faculties, which
otherwise would sink into listless inactivity. From all that
experience has taught us concerning the structure of the human
mind, if those stimulants to exertion which arise from the wants
of the body were removed from the mass of mankind, we have much
more reason to think that they would be sunk to the level of
brutes, from a deficiency of excitements, than that they would be
raised to the rank of philosophers by the possession of leisure.
In those countries where nature is the most redundant in
spontaneous produce the inhabitants will not be found the most
remarkable for acuteness of intellect. Necessity has been with
great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest
exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the
necessity of satisfying the wants of the body. Want has not
unfrequently given wings to the imagination of the poet, pointed
the flowing periods of the historian, and added acuteness to the
researches of the philosopher, and though there are undoubtedly
many minds at present so far improved by the various excitements
of knowledge, or of social sympathy, that they would not relapse
into listlessness if their bodily stimulants were removed, yet it
can scarcely be doubted that these stimulants could not be
withdrawn from the mass of mankind without producing a general
and fatal torpor, destructive of all the germs of future
improvement.