Now, in view of the case, Philosophy inquiring for life's chief goods,
cannot make them to be fortune's prizes, scattered to tempt the
cupidity of all; but which a few only can catch, while their luck
proves the disappointment and vexation of the many. The supposition
were monstrous. We so instinctively recoil from supposing such to be
the appointment of nature's Author, and so consciously grasp it for a
truth clear by its own light--the conviction of a provision fully made
in nature for all, whenever nature's wants are truly consulted--that we
may safely reject, by this test, every notion of temporal good, which
makes it consist preeminently in whatever, by the nature of the case,
can be the lot of but a limited number.
Eminent above all other conceptions of temporal good, is that which
makes it to consist emphatically in the possession of money, or the
ability to command it by its equivalents. And because the capacities
of enjoyment have never been measured, nor material wealth rationally
estimated as a means of meeting those capacities, riches are prized,
not as a means, but an end; and becoming themselves the end, no amount
of possession lessens the desire to accumulate.
A just philosophy argues on the case, that all cannot be rich, in the
common acceptation of the term, whether be considered the limits to
earth's productiveness, and the possibility of increasing material
wealth; or whether, _rich_ being more a relative than an absolute term,
that the supposition of _all rich_ is self-contradictory: therefore,
in a juster sense, the supposition of all rich must be admissible;--the
sense, namely, that whenever riches shall be reasonably estimated
simply as the means of meeting capacities of enjoyment surveyed and
known, then it will be found that the earth's productiveness, and the
stock of material wealth, admit each to take to the fullness of his
wants, leaving enough for all who come after.
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