and because ruder minds can supply the former than the latter. This phenomenon has exhibited itself in every country which has run a historical career. The Romans applied to Greece for help in law some centuries before they sought its art and literature,* and in America there were numerous native lawyers before there was one native author deserving of the name.† Hence we need to be at no loss to understand the futile complaint of Innocent IV., in 1254, 'to all the prelates of France, England, Scotland, Wales, Spain, and Hungary, that his ears had been stunned with reports that great multitudes of the clergy, neglecting theology, crowded to hear lectures on secular laws; and that bishops advanced none but such as were either advocates or professors of law.' Roger Bacon, in the same age, lamented that natural science had no followers, while those of civil law were numberless; and his own exception confirms the rule that the occupations and success of genius are determined not by, but for it, through conditions not beyond detection. Why did he strive in vain to found a school of physical inquiry? Why were the mental powers of Europe given for centuries either to forensic art, or to endless controversy respecting the nature of abstractions? Why did the second Bacon withhold his inductive power in a flattering Court, and on the eve of a revolution, from political speculation? What accounts for the late appearance of such philosophers as Newton, Davy, Faraday, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill? The age must be ripe for the man. Roger Bacon's instance, a marvellous anomaly in history, proves the incapacity of the most powerful and fertile genius to lead the energies of a people into a channel for which they are unfitted by previous education, by hereditary and prevailing taste, by more urgent wants, fanciful or real, by personal

*To the close of the Republic the law was the sole field for all ability, except the special talent of a capacity for generalship.'-Cambridge Essays, 1856, p. 27; where the fact is eloquently explained by Mr. Sumner Maine. And see his Ancient Law, p. 361.

In 1775, Burke said, in his speech on conciliation with America,-'In no country in the world, perhaps, is the law so general a study. The profession is numerous and powerful, and in most provinces it takes the lead. All who read endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plantations.'

interests, and by the general structure of society. On a threadbare and unprofitable argument the schoolmen of his epoch lavished an amount of intellectual activity and power which at a later period would have sufficed to rear a true and fruitful philosophy of nature. Necessity seems surely not too strong a term to designate the stress of all the forces which sway the movements of the human faculties. The dominant ideas and associations of the time and place, the help or hindrance which individual genius meets from other minds, the appliances at hand, the things already done, the reward and countenance, or the condemnation or organized resistance of the world around, are inevitable guides or masters. There could be no Demosthenes or Socrates without an Athens; no Cicero without a Roman forum, a senate, and the aid of Greek philosophy. There could be no Shakespeare in a rude and illiterate, a priest-ridden or a puritanical age, nor among a fierce democracy or a servile populace, nor in a nation without a history and a heart, nor yet in one without some mixture of Paganism with Christianity. There could have been no Newton before Kepler, Galileo, and the telescope; no Adam Smith until trade, wealth, and civil liberty had reached a high development; no Mill before Adam Smith and Francis Bacon. Until the eighteenth century geology had neither eyes nor tongue; in the fourteenth, Davy, Herschel, and Faraday would have been alchemists, astrologers, sorcerers, or nothing; and before the twelfth a Walter Scott or Bulwer Lytton must have embellished lives of saints with marvellous fiction to achieve a literary reputation. In 1849, Garibaldi fought in vain; three years ago he would have died obscure; and without the Italy, France, and England of his time, his power would be less at this hour than that of any priest in Naples. What he might have been as the child of nature, we cannot guess; as the child of history, he is what he is. All the memories of his country, all the aspirations of his age for national and human freedom, have inspired his heroic soul.

These are but a few faint indications of the nature of the proofs that might be collected in a longer argument. They tend, it is hoped, to show that although the purposes and aims of society have become more numerous and its machinery more

D

complex, yet individual energy does not disturb the order of history, and that the science contended for remains as possible when it has to account for great numbers of men, each with a definite function and a distinct character, as when the phenomena to which it is applied consist merely of a vast level crowd upon the one hand, and a few tyrants or protectors on the other. The time may come when an exhaustive analysis of the memorials of our race shall enable us to explain as easily the causes which now elicit the most varied genius from the multitude in Western Europe, as those which once stifled it in England, and still stifle it in China, Turkey, and Russia.

But this view of history, as disclosing law and sequence throughout the progress of mankind, proceeds on a conception of the causes of the movement differing widely from the intellectual theory of a learned writer. What the acquisitions of the human intellect, what the progress of knowledge would have been, without human interests and wants, without the passions, impulses, and hopes which actuate mankind, it is impossible even to surmise. We can frame no idea what motives would stimulate the labour and direct the inquiries of purely intellectual beings. In truth, civilization comes of a most promiscuous origin; and we can discover in the career of nations the co-operation towards a common end of the most heterogeneous forces. To make men noble and enlightened citizens of an opulent and happy commonwealth, is the work of civilization viewed as a result. But as a process what has it been? How has it been, in fact, accomplished? By men uncivilized at first; by instinct and necessity, more often than by reason or forethought; by the conflict and eventual reconciliation of many passions and ideas; by courage, enterprise, and patient industry; by experience, suffering, a thousand failures, and by exhausting all the paths of error; by chivalry and commerce, war and peace, by the dispersion and aggregation of mankind, and the mixture of hostile races; by the overthrow of ancient empires, and the occupation of their seats, sometimes by fresh and vigo

The advance of civilization solely depends on the acquisitions of the human intellect, and on the extent to which those acquisitions are diffused.'Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i. p. 307.

rous barbarians, sometimes by the soldiers of a highly cultivated people; by crimes and virtues, sordid cares and generous aims; by homely affections and by public spirit; by faith and doubt; by learning and material wealth; by the useful and the sublime and beautiful; by soaring genius and by common sense. Such and so various have been the human agencies which have contributed to the improvement of the human world. Beneath the seeming chaos of its current history, philosophy detects already some evidence of general order.

IV.

UTILITARIANISM AND THE SUMMUM BONUM.

(Macmillan's Magazine, June 1863.)

THE two questions-what is right? and, what are the motives to do right?-or, what is the foundation of the moral sentiments? and, what rule should regulate their dictates ?-or, again, what is the summum bonum? and what leads men to pursue it?-are now generally opposed as philosophically distinct. They are not so, indeed, according to the theory of an innate sense of right and wrong which assumes that every man's conscience informs him of his duty. But it is of more importance to observe that neither can the two questions properly be opposed according to the theory of moral progress suggested by the study of history upon the plan illustrated in Mr. Maine's Ancient Law. The conclusion to which that historical theory would seem to lead-and it is one to which other considerations also tend-is, that no complete and final philosophy of life and human aims has been constructed; that the world abounds in insoluble problems, and man's ideal of virtue is both historical and progressive; and that the circumstance at which Mr. Mill has expressed a mournful surprise-namely, that neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem nearer to being unanimous on the subject of the summum bonum than when Socrates asserted the theory of utilitarianism against the popular morality," is what might have been expected, and could not have been otherwise, from the nature of the subject. Another conclusion to which the considerations referred to lend at least a probability is, that happiness is not the sole nor even the chief

* Utilitarianism, page 1.