The Malay Archipelago - Volume 2 - A Narrative Of Travel By Alfred Russel Wallace.






























































 -  If so, there must be some state of
perfection, some ultimate goal, which we may never reach, but to
which - Page 408
The Malay Archipelago - Volume 2 - A Narrative Of Travel By Alfred Russel Wallace. - Page 408 of 412 - First - Home

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If So, There Must Be Some State Of Perfection, Some Ultimate Goal, Which We May Never Reach, But To Which All True Progress Must Bring Nearer.

What is this ideally perfect social state towards which mankind ever has been, and still is tending?

Our best thinkers maintain, that it is a state of individual freedom and self-government, rendered possible by the equal development and just balance of the intellectual, moral, and physical parts of our nature, - a state in which we shall each be so perfectly fitted for a social existence, by knowing what is right, and at the same time feeling an irresistible impulse to do what we know to be right., that all laws and all punishments shall be unnecessary. In such a state every man would have a sufficiently well-balanced intellectual organization, to understand the moral law in all its details, and would require no other motive but the free impulses of his own nature to obey that law.

Now it is very remarkable, that among people in a very low stage of civilization, we find some approach to such a perfect social state. I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are cone of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, products also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates.

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