I ought perhaps again to make an apology to my readers for dwelling so long upon a conjecture which many, I know, will think too absurd and improbable to require the least discussion.  But if it be as improbable and as contrary to the genuine spirit of philosophy as I own I think it is, why should it not be shewn to be so in a candid examination?  A conjecture, however improbable on the first view of it, advanced by able and ingenious men, seems at least to deserve investigation.  For my own part I feel no disinclination whatever to give that degree of credit to the opinion of the probable immortality of man on earth, which the appearances that can be brought in support of it deserve.  Before we decide upon the utter improbability of such an event, it is but fair impartially to examine these appearances; and from such an examination I think we may conclude, that we have rather less reason for supposing that the life of man may be indefinitely prolonged, than that trees may be made to grow indefinitely high, or potatoes indefinitely large.  Though Mr Godwin advances the idea of the indefinite prolongation of human life merely as a conjecture, yet as he has produced some appearances, which in his conception favour the supposition, he must certainly intend that these appearances should be examined and this is all that I have meant to do.

CHAPTER 13

Error of Mr Godwin is considering man too much in the light of a being merely rational—­In the compound being, man, the passions will always act as disturbing forces in the decisions of the understanding—­Reasonings of Mr Godwin on the subject of coercion—­Some truths of a nature not to be communicated from one man to another.

In the chapter which I have been examining, Mr Godwin professes to consider the objection to his system of equality from the principle of population.  It has appeared, I think clearly, that he is greatly erroneous in his statement of the distance of this difficulty, and that instead of myriads of centuries, it is really not thirty years, or even thirty days, distant from us.  The supposition of the approach of man to immortality on earth is certainly not of a kind to soften the difficulty.  The only argument, therefore, in the chapter which has any tendency to remove the objection is the conjecture concerning the extinction of the passion between the sexes, but as this is a mere conjecture, unsupported by the smallest shadow of proof, the force of the objection may be fairly said to remain unimpaired, and it is undoubtedly of sufficient weight of itself completely to overturn Mr Godwin’s whole system of equality.  I will, however, make one or two observations on a few of the prominent parts of Mr Godwin’s reasonings which will contribute to place in a still clearer point of view the little hope that we can reasonably entertain of those vast improvements in the nature of man and of society which he holds up to our admiring gaze in his Political Justice.