Page:An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).djvu/182

156 themselves, are susceptible of amelioration?

From the improvement of medicine; from the use of more wholesome food, and habitations; from a manner of living, which will improve the strength of the body by exercise, without impairing it by excess; from the destruction of the two great causes of the degradation of man, misery, and too great riches; from the gradual removal of transmissible and contagious disorders, by the improvement of physical knowledge, rendered more efficacious, by the progress of reason and of social order; he infers that though man will not absolutely become immortal, yet that the duration between his birth and natural death will increase without ceasing, will have no assignable term, and may properly be expressed by the word indefinite. He then defines