The very same course of incidents, which taken separately and individually would have seemed perplexed and incoherent, 'yet viewed in their connection and as the action of the human _species_ and not of independent beings, never fail to observe a steady and continuous, though slow, development of certain great predispositions in our nature.' As it is impossible to presume in the human race any _rational_ purpose of its own, we must seek to observe some _natural_ purpose in the current of human actions. Thus a history of creatures with no plan of their own, may yet admit a systematic form as a history of creatures blindly pursuing a plan of nature. Now we know that all predispositions are destined to develop themselves according to their final purpose. Man's rational predispositions are destined to develop themselves in the species and not in the individual. History then is the progress of the development of all the tendencies laid in man by nature. The method of development is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state, and its source the _unsocial sociality_ of man--a tendency to enter the social state, combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency, which is ever threatening to dissolve it. The play of these two tendencies unfolds talents of every kind, and by gradual increase of light a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of 'exalting a social concert that had been _pathologically_ extorted from the mere necessities of situation, into a _moral_ union founded on the reasonable choice.' Hence the highest problem for man is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice; and 'the history of the human species as a whole may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and, as the condition of that, in its external relations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed.' Nor is this all. We shall not only be able to unravel the intricate web of past affairs, but shall also find a clue for the guidance of future statesmen in the art of political prediction. Nay more, this clue 'will open a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall observe the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil, where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted within it, and its destination on this earth accomplished.'