Page:An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).djvu/171

Rh, and folly, as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age, must have been such a tremendous shock to his ideas, of the necessary and inevitable progress of the human mind, that nothing but the firmest conviction of the truth of his principles, in spite of all appearances, could have withstood.

This posthumous publication, is only a sketch of a much larger work, which he proposed should be executed. It necessarily, therefore, wants that detail and application, which can alone prove the truth of any theory. A few observations will be sufficient to shew how completely the theory is contradicted, when it is applied to the real, and not to an imaginary, state of things. Rh