society is not out of nature, but is in
it--is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and
government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.
The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state,
an actual state, and never was; but an abstraction, in which is
considered, apart from the concrete existence called society, what is
derived immediately from the natural law. But as abstractions have no
existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature has no
actual existence in the world of reality as a separate state.

But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a real and
separate state, in which men at first lived, there is great difficulty
in understanding how they ever got out of it. Can a man divest himself
of his nature, or lift himself above it? Man is in his nature, and
inseparable from it. If his primitive state was his natural state, and
if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural,
how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the
latter? The ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of
creation, asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the
earth, and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art,
law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the
Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of
that state alone by his own unaided efforts. They ascribed the
invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil
society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods. It
remained for the Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern
successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first
cause, believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own unassisted
efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out of the primitive
state, and institute what in modern times is called civilta, civility,
or civilization.

The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which men have
emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of civil society,
forget that if government is not the sole condition, it is one of the
essential conditions of progress. The only progressive nations are
civilized or republican nations. Savage and barbar