Examine the meaning of this argument and its conclusion. It involves an answer to Godwin’s first defence against Wallace. Here is something very like a law of nature, a truth past, present, and future, or, in other words, a truth which, being scientific, ought not to be stated in terms of time at all: “Where goods increase, they are increased that eat them.” The “struggle for existence” (Malthus uses the very phrase) is a present fact, as it has been a past fact, and will be a future. No good is gained by rhetorical references to the wideness of the world and the possibilities of the ages.[30] In our own day and land we see people multiplying up to the limit of the food, and a “great restrictive law” preventing them, as it prevents all other animals, from multiplying beyond that limit.[31] In our own day and country, men marry when they cannot support a family; the children whom they cannot support die of hunger or sickness, if the charity of the public does not interfere;—or else the fear of misery makes men avoid a marriage for which they have not the means, and their celibacy, whether pure or impure, keeps the numbers of the people on a level with the food.[32] Godwin himself had written in so many words: “There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.”[33] Why did he not take one step more, and discover what that principle is?[34] The fact is that Godwin was at once intellectually sanguine and emotionally cold. His ideal would have been a man “of large brain and no affections;” and when he wrote the _Political Justice_ he was not aware of his own defect. At a later time he was not only aware of it, but anxious to remove it. In his Memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), and in the story of _St. Leon_ (1799), the man who found the philosopher’s stone, and became, to his own sorrow, immortal on earth, he confesses that he has hitherto taken too little thought of feeling as an element in human action. If Mary had been too much of a Werther, her husband had been too little. Like Condorcet (and like Buckle), he had believed civilization to be a purely intellectual movement. He had dogmatized on the omnipotence of truth and reason, and inferred the growth of a perfect society. He had dogmatized on the development of intellect, and inferred an earthly immortality. Moreover, in the _Memoir_, and in _St. Leon_, if he had added a little to his doctrines, he had recanted little or nothing, even in regard to immortality.