Godwin, William. Of Population. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row, 1820. CHAPTER V. Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times Les hommes ne multiplient pas aussi aisément qu'oun le pense. Voltaire, Histoire Générale, CHAP. I. It is not a little singular, and is proper to be commemorated here, that a controversy existed in the early part of the last century, as to the comparative populousness of ancient nations, or the contrary. One of the leaders in this debate was the celebrated Montesquieu; and what he says on the subject is so much to the purpose, that I shall translate the passage. "To amuse in some part," says one of the correspondents in the Persian Letters to another, "the time of my visit to Europe, I devoted myself to the perusal of the historians, ancient and modern; I compare the different ages of the world; I am pleased to make them p...
The most complicated pieces of mechanism are often not the latest but the earliest results of the inventor's skill in a particular direction. Improvements in machinery very frequently take the form of a reduction in the number of wheels and principles of motion, necessary to obtain the desired result, and a machine is considered to be more nearly perfect in proportion as its action becomes more direct. It is safe to conclude, too, that this law of human progression from the complicated to the direct, is by no means confined to mechanics. In philosophy and in sociology similar phenomena may be observed. Thus the Social Democratic scheme for reorganizing society--based as it is upon an insufficient knowledge of the principles which govern the... (From : AnarchyArchives.)