on the true point of quiet.  It discovers every day some craving want in a body, which really wants but little.  It every day invents some new artificial rule to guide that nature which, if left to itself, were the best and surest guide.  It finds out imaginary beings prescribing imaginary laws; and then, it raises imaginary terrors to support a belief in the beings, and an obedience to the laws.—­Many things have been said, and very well undoubtedly, on the subjection in which we should preserve our bodies to the government of our understanding; but enough has not been said upon the restraint which our bodily necessities ought to lay on the extravagant sublimities and eccentric rovings of our minds.  The body, or as some love to call it, our inferior nature, is wiser in its own plain way, and attends its own business more directly than the mind with all its boasted subtlety.

In the state of nature, without question, mankind was subjected to many and great inconveniences.  Want of union, want of mutual assistance, want of a common arbitrator to resort to in their differences.  These were evils which they could not but have felt pretty severely on many occasions.  The original children of the earth lived with their brethren of the other kinds in much equality.  Their diet must have been confined almost wholly to the vegetable kind; and the same tree, which in its flourishing state produced them berries, in its decay gave them an habitation.  The mutual desires of the sexes uniting their bodies and affections, and the children which are the results of these intercourses, introduced first the notion of society, and taught its conveniences.  This society, founded in natural appetites and instincts, and not in any positive institution, I shall call natural society.  Thus far nature went and succeeded:  but man would go farther.  The great error of our nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable acquirement; not to compound with our condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit after more.  Man found a considerable advantage by this union of many persons to form one family; he therefore judged that he would find his account proportionably in an union of many families into one body politic.  And as nature has formed no bond of union to hold them together, he supplied this defect by laws.

This is political society.  And hence the sources of what are usually called states, civil societies, or governments; into some form of which, more extended or restrained, all mankind have gradually fallen.  And since it has so happened, and that we owe an implicit reverence to all the institutions of our ancestors, we shall consider these institutions with all that modesty with which we ought to conduct ourselves in examining a received opinion; but with all that freedom and candor which we owe to truth wherever we find it, or however it may contradict our own notions, or oppose our own interests.  There is a most absurd