Page:An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).djvu/382

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AN ESSAY ON THE

experience we have of the nature of mind, it shall appear, upon investigation, that the phenomena around us, and the various events of human life, seem peculiarly calculated to promote this great end: and especially, if, upon this supposition, we can account, even to our own narrow understandings, for many of those roughnesses and inequalities in life, which querulous man too frequently makes the subject of his complaint against the God of nature.

The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body[1].

  1. It was my intention to have entered at some length into this subject, as a kind of second part to the essay. A long interruption, from particular business, has obliged me to lay aside this intention, at least for the present. I shall now, therefore, only give a sketch of a few of the leading circumstances that appear to me to favour the general supposition that I have advanced.
They