imals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan,
like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a
regular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals and
nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory
purposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus
promoting a process which, even if they perceived it, they would little
regard. What that process is he states in the following series of
propositions:--

1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by
nature, are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly and
agreeably to their final purpose.

2nd. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies
which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain
their perfect development in the species only, and not in the individual.

3rd. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself alone
everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal
existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or
perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through
his own reason.

4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the development of
all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of those
tendencies in the social state, no farther, however, than to that point
at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded
in law.

5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which
it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a
universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice.

6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most difficult of all, and
the one which is latest solved by man.

7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of
society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations,
adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved.

8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the
unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state
of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and as the
condition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relations
also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human
nature can be all and fully developed.

_Sir Thomas More_.--This is indeed a master of