These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of
mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we
have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right
to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are,
without an immediate act of power in that Being who first
arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his
creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its
various operations.

I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth
man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr Godwin
has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be
extinguished. As, however, he calls this part of his work a
deviation into the land of conjecture, I will not dwell longer
upon it at present than to say that the best arguments for the
perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great
progress that he has already made from the savage state and the
difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the
extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever
has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at
present as it did two thousand or four thousand years ago. There
are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as
these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would
surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer, merely
from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in
time, become the rule, and the rule the exception.

Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power
of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth
to produce subsistence for man.