Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind

Answers

• Q15TRANSCENDENCE

  Should extending human life indefinitely be a goal of technical progress?

  Yes. indefinite prolongation. Asks whether the interval between birth and decay might have no assignable limit, and expects medicine and better living to lengthen life indefinitely.

  It is manifest that the improvement of the practice of medicine, become more efficacious in consequence of the progress of reason and the social order, must in the end put a period to transmissible or contagious disorders, as well to those general maladies resulting from climate, aliments, and the nature of certain occupations. Nor would it be difficult to prove that this hope might be extended to almost every other malady, of which it is probable we shall hereafter discover the most remote causes. Would it even be absurd to suppose this quality of melioration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement ; to suppose that a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers ; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit ? Certainly man will not become immortal ; but may not the distance between the moment in which he draws his first breath, and the common term when, in the course of nature, without malady, without accident, he finds it impossible any longer to exist, be necessarily protracted ?

  OCR corrected by hand

  Tenth Epoch · Tenth Epoch passage confirmed (Online Library of Liberty); 1795 English translation on Internet Archive.