[I]f adaptation is everywhere and always going on, then adaptive modifications must be set up by every change of social conditions.To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men’s modes of action — compelling, or restraining, or aiding, in new ways — so affects them as to cause, in course of time, fresh adjustments of their natures. Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most — a re-moulding of the average character: a re-moulding which may be of a desirable kind or of an undesirable kind, but which in any case is the most important of the results to be considered.
Herbert Spencer, “The Sins of Legislators,” in The Man versus the State (1884).
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Herbert Spencer
