Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive.Ages on ages roll over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr has well remarked with others, that history records no instance of a savage tribe or people having become civilized by its own spontaneous or indigenous efforts.If savage tribes have ever become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age.
Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized.But the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage.The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged state of nature have none.
The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of the civilized man.It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away on some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish and maintain civil government.They are civilized men, and bear civil society in their own life.But these are no representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature.These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they have thus far lived.How then can they, since, on the theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial creation, even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?
These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel they could do in case civil society were broken up, what men may do and have done in a state of nature.Men cannot divest themselves of themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it, they think, reason, and act as they are.
Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.The advocates of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete, should have presented their primitive man as below the lowest known savage, unprogressive, and in himself incapable of developing any progressive energy.Unprogressive, and, without foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for your primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from the alleged state of nature to that of civilization, of which he has no conception, and towards which no innate desire, no instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some happy inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the state of nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil government, how could he carry his conception into execution?
Conception is always easier than its realization, and between the design and its execution there is always a weary distance.The poetry of all nations is a wail over unrealized ideals.It is little that even the wisest and most potent statesman can realize of what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom generations come and go without effecting them.The republics of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities of Robert Owen and M.Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life, which only their introduction and realization can supply.So to be able to execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits, and characters in the public which are not possible without civilization itself.Some philosophers suppose men have invented language, forgetting that it requires language to give the ability to invent language.
Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it may be.They are moved by their affections, passions, instincts, and habits.Routine is more powerful with them than logic.A few are greedy of novelties, and are always for trying experiments;
