Excerpt from Robert Owen, and His Social Philosophy His youth was contemporaneous with the sudden and vast extension of the cotton manufacture which began at the close of the last century. He was. One of the most vigorous offshoots of that trade; and the history of his growth and of his characteristics, seems to me eminently worthy of our attention. Wanting a liberal education, and early entangled in the perplexities of religious controversy, he thought out in a childish fashion a moral philosophy of his own; which he prudently nursed while he was rising in life, but which the warmth of prosperity developed into a surprising monster: into something which was not merely hetero doxy, not merely scepticism, not merely a disbelief of all known religion. He publicly declared that there was no such thing as moral responsibility: he said that man was the creature of circumstances; that his cha racter was formed for him, partly by nature at his birth, and then by the external influences to which he was exposed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.