The desires for security of the basic necessities of life as well as our inability to be perfectly contempt with the power we already have are the fundamental conceptions in explaining why competition is prevalent in the state of nature, since the measures of one's power is relative to the power of others. ...
Gibbon was born in 1737, a young man of delicate health and fairly good fortune; he had a partial and interrupted education at Oxford, and then he completed his studies in Geneva; on the whole his outlook was French and cosmopolitan rather than British, and he was much under the intellectual influence of that great Frenchman who is best known under the name of Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694 1778). Voltaire -was an author of enormous industry; seventy volumes of him adorn the present -writer's shelves, and another edition of Voltaire's works runs to ninety- four; he...
