the transmitted aptitude of the next. Here physical causes do not
create the moral, but moral create the physical; here the beginning
is by the higher energy, the conservation and propagation only by
the lower. But we thus perceive how a science of history is
possible, as Mr. Buckle said,--a science to teach the laws of
tendencies--created by the mind, and transmitted by the body--which
act upon and incline the will of man from age to age.

II.

But how do these principles change the philosophy of our politics? I
think in many ways; and first, in one particularly. Political
economy is the most systematised and most accurate part of political
philosophy; and yet, by the help of what has been laid down, I think
we may travel back to a sort of 'pre-economic age,' when the very
assumptions of political economy did not exist, when its precepts
would have been ruinous, and when the very contrary precepts were
requisite and wise.

For this purpose I do not need to deal with the dim ages which
ethnology just reveals to us--with the stone age, and the flint
implements, and the refuse-heaps. The time to which I would go back
is only that just before the dawn of history--coeval with the dawn,
perhaps, it would be right to say--for the first historians saw such
a state of society, though they saw other and more advanced states
too: a period of which we have distinct descriptions from eye-
witnesses, and of which the traces and consequences abound in the
oldest law. 'The effect,' says Sir Henry Maine, the greatest of our
living jurists--the only one, perhaps, whose writings are in keeping
with our best philosophy--'of the evidence derived from comparative