Limits

"It may be said with truth that man is always susceptible of improvement, or that there never has been, or will be, a period of his history in which he can be said to have reached his possible acme of perfection. Yet it does not by any means follow from this, that our efforts to improve man will always succeed, or even that he will ever make, in the greatest number of ages, any extraordinary strides towards perfection. The only inference that can be drawn is that the precise limit of his improvement cannot possibly be known." (p. 90, chpt. XIV)

When I first read this, I found it incredibly easy to agree with Malthus. But then I re-read the selection, and I started to think that maybe my quick consent was wrong. When I first agreed, I thought the best part was when he said "or even that he will ever make, ... any extraordinary strides towards perfection." It then struck me, however, that perhaps we are stuck, and that we really won't get any nearer perfection than we are at now. Wouldn't that mean that we are in fact at the limit of improvement? Not to say that we are already perfect, but that we are as good as we are going to get, and any perceived improvements are simply variations in how we live imperfectly? It seemed strange to me that Malthus didn't address this possibility in his "desperately grim picture of the human condition," as Patt-man so accurately put it. Are we stuck in the mud, so to speak? And why didn't Malthus indulge this possibility?