Immanuel Kant. The idea of a universal history in a world-civil plan (№ 430009)

Blessed be nature for quarrelsomeness, for enviously rival vanity, for an insatiable thirst for possession and dominion! Without them, all the excellent natural inclinations of humanity would remain forever undeveloped. Man wants consent, but nature knows better what is good for his kind; and she wants contention. He wants to live carelessly and cheerfully, and nature wants him to get out of the state of negligence and inactive contentment and plunge headlong into work and experience difficulties in order to find a reasonable way to get rid of these difficulties. Thus, natural incentives, sources of uncommunication and universal resistance, causing so many disasters, but also constantly prompting a person to a new tension of forces and, therefore, to a greater development of natural inclinations, perfectly reveal the device created by a wise creator; and this has nothing to do with the evil spirit, which allegedly interferes with the magnificent arrangement created by the creator, or spoils it out of envy.