Thomas Robert Malthus
THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS  Macroknow Library
   

   
An Essay on the Principle of Population. "It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery . . . "1a

" . . . [T]he vices and moral weakness of mankind, taken in the mass, are invincible."1b

" . . . [W]hen . . . we turn our eyes to the book of nature, where alone we can read God as he is, we see a constant succession of sentient beings, rising apparently from so many specks of matter, going through a long and sometimes painful process in this world, but many of them attaining . . . such high qualities and powers as seem to indicate their fitness for some superior state."1c DARWIN


     
   
   
   

1 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary View of the Principle of Population. Edited with an Introduction by Antony Flew. Antony Flew, 1970. London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985.
a Chapter I, at 67.
b Chapter XIV, at 170.
c Chapter XVIII, at 201.