begin to make their appearance, and intellectual instead of bodily
excellence becomes the qualification for sovereignty.

Other points, as the rise of law and the like, are dwelt on in a
somewhat modern spirit, and although Polybius seems not to have
employed the inductive method of research in this question, or
rather, I should say, of the hierarchical order of the rational
progress of ideas in life, he is not far removed from what the
laborious investigations of modern travellers have given us.

And, indeed, as regards the working of the speculative faculty in
the creation of history, it is in all respects marvellous how that
the most truthful accounts of the passage from barbarism to
civilisation in ancient literature come from the works of poets.
The elaborate researches of Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have
done little more than verify the theories put forward in the
PROMETHEUS BOUND and the DE NATURA RERUM; yet neither AEschylus nor
Lucretias followed in the modern path, but rather attained to truth
by a certain almost mystic power of creative imagination, such as
we now seek to banish from science as a dangerous power, though to
it science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities. (5)

Leaving then the question of the origin of society as treated by
the ancients, I shall now turn to the other and the more important
question of how far they may he said to have attained to what we
call the philosophy of history.

Now at the outset we must note that, while the conceptions of law
and order have been universally received as the governing
principles of the phenomena of nature in the sphere of physical