The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers—perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority”—was unacceptable, he declared. It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery. . . . I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.
