Читать книгу A Treatise on Political Economy - Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy - Страница 19

From the faculty of will arise all our wants and all our means.

The same intellectual acts emanating from our faculty of will, which cause us to acquire a distinct and complete idea of self, and of exclusive property in all its modes, are also those which render us susceptible of wants, and are the source of all our means of providing for those wants.

For 1st. Every desire is a want, and every want is never but the need of satisfying a desire. Desire is always in itself a pain.

2d. When our sensitive system re-acts on our muscular system these desires have the property of directing our actions, and thus of producing all our means.

Labour, the employment of our force, constitutes our only treasure and our only power.

Thus it is the faculty of will which renders us proprietors of wants and means, of passion and action, of pain and power.

Thence arise the ideas of riches and deprivation.