I have just spoken of the ‹wants› of man, and after presenting an approximate enumeration of them, I observed that they were not of a stationary, but of a progressive nature; and this holds true, whether we consider these wants each singly, or all together, in their physical, intellectual, and moral order. How could it be otherwise? There are wants the satisfaction of which is exacted by our organization under pain of death, and up to a certain point we may represent these as fixed quantities, although that is not rigorously exact, for however little we may desire to neglect an essential element—namely, the ‹force of habit›—however little we may condescend to subject ourselves to honest self-examination, we shall be forced to allow that wants, even of the plainest and most homely kind (the desire for food, for example), undergo, under the influence of habit, undoubted transformations. The man who declaims against this observation as materialist and epicurean, would think himself very unfortunate, if, taking him at his word, we should reduce him to the black broth of the Spartans, or the scanty pittance of an anchorite. At all events, when wants of this kind have been satisfied in an assured and permanent way, there are others which take their rise in the most expansible of our faculties, desire. Can we conceive a time when man can no longer form even reasonable desires? Let us not forget that a desire which might be unreasonable in a former state of civilisation—at a time when all the human faculties were absorbed in providing for low material wants—ceases to be so when improvement opens to these faculties a more extended field. A desire to travel at the rate of thirty miles an hour would have been unreasonable [p085] two centuries ago—it is not so at the present day. To pretend that the wants and desires of man are fixed and stationary quantities, is to mistake the nature of the human soul, to deny facts, and to render civilisation inexplicable. It would still be inexplicable if, side by side with the indefinite development of wants, there had not been placed, as possible, the indefinite development of the means of providing for these wants. How could the expansible nature of our wants have contributed to the realization of progress, if, at a certain point, our faculties could advance no farther, and should encounter an impassable barrier? Our wants being indefinite, the presumption is that the means of satisfying these wants should be indefinite also, unless we are to suppose Nature, Providence, or the Power which presides over our destinies, to have fallen into a cruel and shocking contradiction.