Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I. OF SOCIETY. 1. God does not appear to have created men by chance, for we find all mankind to possess certain qualities, faculties, and desires, which move and rule them, whether they are savages or call themselves civilized, and whether they are black, brown, yellow, or white. 2. One of the principal and most important qualities of mankind is gregariousness. This means that men have a propensity to gather in flocks or herds ; a propensity also of many animals, as sheep, cattle, horses, blackbirds, elephants, and some monkeys. This desire for the society of their kind leads animals to go in droves—as the buffaloes upon the plains; and it collects savage men into tribes, and civilized men into nations, which are only larger and more highly organized tribes. 3. But as man has received from God qualities, faculties, and desires which the beasts have not, men are able to do something more than herd together; and the rudest tribe of savages has laws or rules for the conduct of its members which the most highly developed society of apes or blackbirds or elephants of which we know is without. 4. Animals have, 1, desire to live; 2, desire for sufficient food; 3, desire to propagate their kind and to protect their young; and, 4, desire to avoid pain, and to live, therefore, in the circumstances for which their nature best fits them: in other words, to be comfortable. When you see more of men, you will discover that some men are very much like animals, and have no aspirations or desires which can not properly be ranged under the above heads. Such a man I do not want you to be. 5. Besides the desires which we have in common withbeasts, and which are necessary to us in order to preserve our species from extinction, God has given men other desires, and faculties which, if t...