standing the inconveniences it involved. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural, at the outset, than that, by domestic imitation, the easiest and most powerful means of education, employments should descend from fathers to sons and it was the only possible training in an age when oral transmission was the sole means of communicating conceptions. In fact, there is, and always will be, a tendency, though ever diminishing to the hereditary adoption of employments, however different the modern method may be from the ancient, in which the succession was tyrannically decreed by law. When men have no special impulse to a particular occupation, they naturally adopt that of the family; and the only way of diminishing the tendency is by improving general education, so as to provide by abstract and systematic instruction the training which formerly required a concrete and empirical domestic apprenticeship. It was in this way that Catholicism put an end to the hereditary practice of the priesthood, which was once as universal as that of any other functions whatever, public or private.

The distinguishing properties of the system are not less evident than its natural origin. We owe to it the first permanent division between theory and practice, by the institution of a speculative class, invested with grand prerogatives of dignity and leisure: and to this period we must refer the primitive elements of genuine knowledge, it being that in which the human mind began to regulate its general course. The same may be said of the fine arts, then carefully cultivated, not only for the sake of their charm, but as tributary to dogma and worship on the one hand, and information and religious propagation on the other. The industrial development was the most remarkable of all, requiring no rare intellectual qualifications, inspiring no fear in the ruling class, and furnishing, under the reign of peace, forces adequate to the most colossal undertakings. The loss of many useful inventions before the preservative institution of caste arose must have suggested the need of it, and have proved its advantages afterwards in securing the division of labour which was here and there attained. No institution has ever shown itself more adapted to honour ability of various kinds than this polytheistic organization, which often exalted into apotheosis its commemoration of eminent inventors, who were offered to the adoration of their respective castes. In a social view, the virtues of the system are not less conspicuous. Politically, its chief attribute was stability. All precautions against attack from within and from without were most energetically instituted. Within, all the castes were united by the single bond of their common subordination to the sacerdotal caste, from which each derived all that it had of special knowledge and perpetual instigation. There never was elsewhere such a concentration, for intensity, regularity, and permanence of human power,

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as that possessed by the supreme caste, each member of which (at least, in the higher ranks of the priesthood) was not only priest and magistrate, but also philosopher, artist, engineer, and physician. The statesmen of Greece and Rome, superior as they were in accomplishment and generality to any examples that modern times can show, appear but incomplete personages in comparison with the fine theocratic natures of early antiquity, of whom Moses is the most familiar, if not the most accurate type. The only pressing external danger was from the growth of military activity, for which, however, the sacerdotal policy found employment, when necessary, in distant expeditions and irrevocable colonization. As to its influence on morals, this system was favourable to personal morality, and yet more to domestic, till the military phase of polytheism became preponderant; for the spirit of caste was a mere extension of the family spirit. The condition of Women was improved, notwithstanding the prevalence of polygamy; for they were rescued from the subjection to rude toil which had been their lot in a barbaric age; and their seclusion, according to the customs of polygamy, was the first token of homage, and of their assignment to a position more conformable to their true nature. As to social morals, the system was evidently favourable to respect for age, and homage to ancestors. The sentiment of patriotism did not as yet transcend love of caste, which, narrow as it appears to us, was a necessary preparation for the higher attachment. The superstitious aversion to foreigners which exists under a system of caste must not be confounded with the active contempt maintained at a later period by military polytheism.

Notwithstanding all these qualities, the theocratic system could not but be hostile to progress, through its excessive stability which stiffened into an obstinate immovableness when new expansions required a change of social classification. The supreme class appropriated all its immense resources of every kind to the preservation of its almost absolute dominion, after it had lost, by long enjoyment of power, the chief stimulus to its own progression. At first sight, the political system looks well, in its aspect of a reign of mind; though it was rather a reign of fear, resting as it did on the use of superstitious terrors, and the spells offered by the possession of the earliest physical knowledge; but we must frankly admit, on consideration, that the political rule of intelligence is hostile to human progression. Mind must tend more and more to the supreme direction of human affairs; but it can never attain it, owing to the imperfection of our organism, in which the intellectual life is the feeblest part; and thus it appears that the real office of mind is deliberative; that is, to modify the material preponderance, and not to impart its habitual impulsion. The same comparative feebleness which precludes the dominion of intelligence would render such dominion dangerous, and hostile to progress; for it

would lose its chief stimulus, and, being adapted to modify and not to command, it would be occupied in maintaining its monstrous ascendency, instead of advancing towards perfection. I shall have to enlarge further on this consideration in another chapter. I advert to it here because it discloses the principle of the stationary characte: imputed to the theocratic system by the very persons who profoundly admire its apparent rationality. It is clear, from this point of view, that the extreme concentration of powers which gives its consistency to the theocratic system must retard human advancement, because no separate portion could make any progress without involving the great whole so bound up together. In regard to science, for instance, which ought to be the glory of the system, we know that scarcely any progress was made, not only from want of stimulus, but because any considerable development of science would have been fatal to the whole social economy. We all know that, after the first mental revolution, the sciences can flourish only by being cultivated for their own sakes, and not as instruments of political rule; and analogous considerations hold good of every other department of the social system. Thus, we must admit that the theocratic régime institutes a general human progression and that it afterwards retards that progression. In any nation in which the military caste has failed to subordinate the sacerdotal, no immediate triumph of the military caste has saved it from submission, sooner or later, to the sacerdotal. The vanquished have absorbed the victors: the conquering foreigner has ended by being chief among the native priests, and everything goes on much as before. The case is the same when, by internal revolution, military chiefs have triumphed over the priests; they soon involuntarily acquire the theocratic character, and all that has happened has been a change of persons or of dynasties. The transition from theocratic to military polytheism was effected by means of populations whose external circumstances were unfavourable to theocracy and favourable to war; and by means of that colonization, which, issuing from a society of castes, could not plant down the political qualities of the institution on a new soil, though they might retain its intellectual and moral advantages. While the hereditary principle continued to settle almost everything, the grand new power of choice for personal qualities was introduced, remaining subordinate to the old principle for awhile, but ever gaining in extent and independence. The political equilibrium of the two principles, which might at length be obtained, depended mainly on the contemporary degree of military activity, which was an admirable test of the merits of corresponding vocations. Thus, the balance was maintained among the Romans for a course of centuries, as an indirect but necessary consequence of the expansion of the system of conquest; whereas, among the Greeks, for an opposite reason, legislators and philosophers had always been laboriously striving to

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reconcile what they called oligarchy and democracy, and always pretty much in vain.

When we turn from theocratic to military polytheism, we find a distinction arising between intellectual and social The Greek or progression, which were hitherto inseparable. The intellectual. intellectual is represented by the Greek régime, which was intermediate between the Egyptian and the Roman, being more intellectual than the one and less social than the other. In Greek society there was abundance of military activity; but it was, in relation to human progression, merely desultory, leaving to the Romans the political function of permanent conquest. Greece was the scene of perpetual conflicts of small states, till Roman dominion spread over all. The peculiarity is explained partly by geographical causes,the singular partition of territory by gulfs, isthmus, and mountain chains, favouring divisions into states; and partly by the social cause of these states having populations almost identical in language, and the origin and degree of civilization of their colonies. From these causes arose the inability of the Greek states to employ a warlike activity equal to that of the Romans in subjugating their nearest neighbours, and the necessity of pushing it to a distance; thus pursuing a course inverse to that of Rome, and radically incompatible with the progressive establishment of such an extended and durable dominion as might furnish a solid basis for the ulterior development of humanity. Thus it was that the Athenian people, triumphant in the Archipelago, in Asia, in Thrace, etc., was confined to a central territory no larger than our modern provinces, camped about with numerous rivals who could not be subdued; so that Athens might more reasonably propose the conquest of Egypt or Asia Minor than of Sparta, Thebes, or Corinth, or even of the little adjacent republic of Megara. Thus while there was military activity enough to preserve the Greeks from the intellectual and moral torpor induced by theocracy, their military life was not preponderant enough to engross the faculties of the most eminent men, who could not feel an exclusive interest in the futile struggles of which Greek wars mainly consisted. Their cerebral energy, finding no adequate political occupation, was thrown back upon the intellectual life; and the masses, under the same influences, were disposed towards the same culture, especially in the direction of the fine arts. Still, the germs of this intellectual and moral development were derived from theocratic societies, by means of colonization. Through the concurrence of these conditions there arose in Greece an entirely new class, destined to be the organ of mental progression, as being eminently speculative without being sacerdotal, and active without being engrossed by war. By a slight change of this antagonism, in both directions, the philosophers, men of science, and artists, continued to be simply pontiffs more or less elevated in the sacerdotal hierarchy, or became humble servitors, charged with

the instruction of great military families. Thus, though military activity was politically barren among the Greeks, it wrought in favour of human progression, independently of its special importance in rescuing from theocratic influences that little nucleus of freethinkers who were in some sort charged with the intellectual destinies of our race, and who would probably have been overwhelmed in theocratic degradation, but for the sublime achievements of Thermopyla, Marathon, Salamis, and of Alexander in his immortal career of conquest.

Science.

Of the operation of the Greek régime on the fine arts enough has been said for my purpose here. As to the scientific aspect, as a manifestation of a new intellectual element, largely affecting the rise of philosophy, we must fix our attention on the formation, nearly thirty centuries ago, of a contemplative class, composed of free men, intelligent and at leisure, with no determinate social function, and therefore more purely speculative than theocratic dignitaries, who were occupied in preserving or applying their predominant power. In imitation of their sacerdotal precursors, these sages or philosophers at first cultivated all the parts of the intellectual domain at once,-with the one exception that poetry was early separated from the other fine arts, in virtue of its more rapid expansion: but soon that great division arose which furnished the basis of our scientific development, when the positive spirit began to manifest itself, amidst the philosophy, first theological and then metaphysical, which governed all ancient speculation. The first appearance of the true scientific spirit was naturally in the form of mathematical ideas,—the necessary origin from their simplicity, generality, and abstract character, of rational positivism. It was by these qualities that mathematical ideas were the first to be withdrawn from the theological jurisdiction under which they had been only implicitly comprehended; and it was through them that purely arithmetical ideas were a subject of study before geometry was disengaged from the art of measurement, with which it was incorporated in theocratic speculation. The very name of the science, however, indicates a culture almost as ancient and geometry, properly so called, could alone offer an adequate field for arithmetical, and yet more for algebraic pursuit; which could not at first be separated. Thence Thales derived the first true geometry, which he presented in his fundamental theory of rectilinear figures, soon extended by the immortal discovery of Pythagoras, which might indeed have been derived from the theorems of Thales on proportional lines, if the power of abstract deduction had been sufficiently advanced, but which proceeded from the distinct principle of the direct study of areas. The well-known fact of Thales teaching the Egyptian priests to measure the height of their pyramids by the length of their shadows is, to the thoughtful, a symptom of vast significance, disclosing the true state of science,