For this transgression humanity has fallen; error and ignorance have become its sustenance.

Read history, you will find universal proof of this necessity for evil in the permanent misery of nations.

Man suffers and always will suffer; his disease is hereditary and constitutional.

Use palliatives, employ emollients; there is no remedy." Nor is this argument peculiar to the theologians; we find it expressed in equivalent language in the philosophical writings of the materialists, believers in infinite perfectibility.

Destutt de Tracy teaches formally that poverty, crime, and war are the inevitable conditions of our social state; necessary evils, against which it would be folly to revolt.