With regard to the problems of international law, Kant is of course a hundred and fifty years ahead of Hobbes. But he starts from the same point: his theory of the beginning of society is practically identical with that of the older philosopher. Men are by nature imperfect creatures, unsociable and untrustworthy, cursed by a love of glory, of possession, and of power, passions which make happiness something for ever unattainable by them. Hobbes is content to leave them here with their imperfections, and let a strong government help them out as it may. But not so Kant. He looks beyond man the individual, developing slowly by stages scarcely measurable, progressing at one moment, and the next, as it seems, falling behind: he looks beyond the individual, struggling and never attaining, to the race. Here Kant is no pessimist. The capacities implanted in man by nature are not all for evil: they are, he says, “destined to unfold themselves completely in the course of time, and in accordance with the end to which they are adapted.” (_Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View_, 1784. Prop. 1.) This end of humanity is the evolution of man from the stage of mere self-satisfied animalism to a high state of civilisation. Through his own reason man is to attain a perfect culture, intellectual and moral. In this long period of struggle, the potential faculties which nature or Providence has bestowed upon him reach their full development. The process in which this evolution takes place is what we call history.