ABSTRACT
Man’s social order was the source of all evil. The origin and the progress of wickedness can be demonstrated. Man in his earliest or natural condition was an isolated being; there were no institutions, political or social: no government, no family, and no property, none of the usages of society. There was no need for any bond or constraint, for men obeyed instinctively the commands of that ‘right reason’ which providence had implanted in them. Consequently, all was peaceful and harmonious within man and in the world around him. Thomas Hobbes, who portrayed natural man as ‘a wolf to his kind’, in denying to the primitive man a knowledge of good, he should likewise have denied him a knowledge of evil and, should have seen that inner calmness and the ignorance of vice would be quite sufficient to restrain him from deliberate wrongdoing.
