perfectibility, because it is one of the principal notions that the
intellect can conceive, and because it constitutes of itself a great
philosophical theory, which is every instant to be traced by its
consequences in the practice of human affairs. Although man has many
points of resemblance with the brute creation, one characteristic is
peculiar to himself--he improves: they are incapable of improvement.
Mankind could not fail to discover this difference from its earliest
period. The idea of perfectibility is therefore as old as the world;
equality did not give birth to it, although it has imparted to it a
novel character.

When the citizens of a community are classed according to their rank,
their profession, or their birth, and when all men are constrained to
follow the career which happens to open before them, everyone thinks
that the utmost limits of human power are to be discerned in proximity
to himself, and none seeks any longer to resist the inevitable law of
his destiny. Not indeed that an aristocratic people absolutely contests
man's faculty of self-improvement, but they do not hold it to be
indefinite; amelioration they conceive, but not change: they imagine
that the future condition of society may be better, but not essentially
different; and whilst they admit that mankind has made vast strides
in improvement, and may still have some to make, they assign to it
beforehand certain impassable limits. Thus they do not presume that they
have arrived at the supreme good or at absolute truth (what people
or what man was ever wild enough to imagine it?) but they cherish a
persuasion that they have pretty nearly reached that degree of greatness
and knowledge which our imperfect nature admits of; and as nothing
moves about them they are willing to fancy that everything is in its fit
place. Then it is that the legislator affects to lay down eternal laws;
that kings and nations will raise none but imperishable monuments; and