"This notion, of an actually existing unconnected state of nature, is too wild to be seriously admitted: and, besides, it is plainly contradictory to the revealed accounts of the primitive origin of mankind and their preservation two thousand years afterwards, both which were effected by the means of single families. These formed the first society among themselves, which every day extended its limits; and when it grew too large to subsist with convenience in that pastoral state wherein the Patriarchs appear to have lived, it necessarily subdivided itself by various migrations into more. Afterwards, as agriculture increased, which employs and can maintain a much greater number of hands, migrations became less frequent, and various tribes, which had formerly separated, reunited again, sometimes by compulsion and conquest, sometimes by accident, and sometimes, perhaps, by compact.... And this is what we mean by the original contract of society, which, though perhaps in no instance it has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state, yet, in nature, reason must always be understood and implied in the very act of associating together.... When society is once formed, government results, of course, as necessary to preserve and to keep that society in order ... unless some superior were constituted ... they would still remain in a state of nature." Bentham says of this passage from Blackstone, that "'_society_,' in one place, means the same thing as a '_state of nature_' does: in another place, it means the same as '_government_.' Here we are required to believe there _never was_ such a state as a state of nature: then we are given to understand there _has been_. In like manner, with respect to an original contract, we are given to understand that such a thing never existed, that the notion of it is even ridiculous; at the same time, that there is no speaking nor stirring without supposing that there was one."--_Bentham's "Fragment on Government,"_ p. 9 (London, 1823). The previous and subsequent chapters (ii., xiii.), will be found to meet these strictures of Bentham, although not originally written with reference to them. CHAPTER IV. _CHRONOLOGY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TRADITION._ To many it may seem a fundamental objection that my theory supposes a chronology altogether out of keeping with modern discovery; and I fancy there is a somewhat general impression that modern science has an historical basis, to which not even the Septuagint chronology can be made to conform. This really is not the case; but assuming it to be true, I must still remark, that if facts of primeval tradition have been established, the long lapse of ages will only enhance our notions of the persistency of tradition; or if the lapse of ages is disproved, this conclusion will be in recognition of a truth to which tradition testifies.