artificial obstruction were created by the comparison with death, or with the winter of vegetation, having already got possession of men's minds.

The generalization of the planets, or the tracing of a common character, in spite of accompanying dissimilarity, among these wandering bodies, would be interesting to follow, if we could now recover the history of the process. The discovery of the common fact of their circling round the entire heavens, was by no means easy in the case of the inferior planets, Mercury and Venus; men's minds would in their case be carried away with the more limited circumstances of their attending on the sun, and their appearing as morning and as evening stars.

The successions of Evolution are exemplified chiefly in the growth of living beings. Each plant and animal, in the course of its existence, presents to our observation a number of successive phases. The great salient facts of birth and death are an easy conquest to the identifying faculty. Special modes of growth can be traced among limited groups, which are thereupon formed into classes; as in animals, the Oviparous and the Viviparous. The successions of insect life are more complicated. Close observation of individuals is necessary to strike out these identities; so is the absence of vulgar wonderment, poetic illusion, and strong prepossessions. The physiological department called Embryology, includes the knowledge of the earliest evolutions of animals, and is very much dependent upon identifying the modes of growth of creatures considerably different from one another, as the chicken and the infant. The difficulty in such a case is to prove that an apparent identity is real; so that what is known of the one member of the comparison may, with absolute certainty, be believed of the other. Whereas in other instances the discovery is difficult, but the proof easy; in this the discovery is easy, and the proof difficult. As to the means employed in ascertaining the genuineness of an identity seen by the intellectual glance of similarity, or the logic of the case, we are not at present concerning ourselves.

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31. The Successions making up Human History offer abundant instances of Similarity. Nowhere are comparisons, good and bad, more abundantly struck. Plutarch is not the only writer that has set to work expressly to construct historical parallels. In the situations arising in public affairs, in the problems that have to be solved, in the issues of critical periods, and in the catastrophes that have overwhelmed empires, the intellect of enquiring and observing men finds numerous identities. Sometimes we compare the past with the present, sometimes one past epoch with another. And such comparisons are seldom barren efforts of the identifying faculty; they are usually employed for some end of mutual illustration, or in order to infer in the one all the good or bad features belonging to the other. The rise of the British empire is compared, by one class of minds, to the history of the great empires of antiquity; the object of the comparison being to carry out the analogy to the full length of anticipating for Britain a similar course of decay. The parallelisms that set forth popular government, as conducting to anarchy and ending in military despotism, have been repeated ad nauseam. But such are not the comparisons that illustrate happily the operation of the principle now under discussion, or that show the results of identification in enlarging the grasp of the human intellect. For these ends, I should choose rather to point to comparisons made in more limited chains of historic succession. The narrower the field of view contemplated, the more likelihood there is of hitting upon a real and instructive comparison. Take the following from GROTE'S History of Greece. In discussing the changes made in Sparta by the institutions of Lycurgus, the historian calls in question the alleged re-partition of the lands of the state among the citizens. He shows that this is not stated by the earliest authorities, and that it appears to have gained credence only after the revolutionary proceedings of Agis and Kleomenês in the third century, B.C.; at which time he

Knight.

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thinks the idea grew up in consequence of its being strongly suggested by the then present desire for a similar re-division. 'It was under the state of public feeling which gave birth to these projects of Agis and Kleomenês at Sparta, that the historic fancy, unknown to Aristotle and his predecessors, first gained ground, of the absolute equality of property as a primitive institution of Lycurgus. How much such a belief would favour the schemes of innovation is too obvious to require notice; and, without supposing any deliberate imposture, we cannot be astonished, that the predispositions of enthusiastic patriots interpreted according to their own partialities an old unrecorded legislation, from which they were separated by more than five centuries. The Lycurgean discipline tended forcibly to suggest to men's minds the idea of equality among the citizens-that is, the negation of all inequality not founded on some personal attribute-inasmuch as it assimilated the habits, enjoyments, and capacities of the rich to those of the poor; and the equality thus existing in idea and tendency, which seemed to proclaim the wish of the founder, was strained by the later reformers into a positive institution which he had at first realized, but from which his degenerate followers had receded. It was thus that the fancies, longings, and indirect suggestions of the present assumed the character of recollections out of the early, obscure, and extinct historical past. Perhaps the philosopher Sphoerus of Borysthenês (friend and companion of Kleomenês, disciple of Zeno the Stoic, and author of works now lost, both on Lycurgus and Socrates, and on the constitution of Sparta) may have been one of those who gave currency to such an hypothesis. And we shall readily believe that, if advanced, it would find easy and sincere credence, when we recollect how many similar delusions have obtained vogue in modern times far more favourable to historical accuracy-how much false colouring has been attached by the political feeling of recent days to matters of ancient history, such as the Saxon Witenagemote, the Great Charter, the rise and growth of the English House of Commons, or even the Poor Law

INSTITUTIONAL COMPARISONS.

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of Elizabeth.** The comparisons contained in this last sentence, both suggest the explanation above given of the rise of the belief in question, and impart probability to it when suggested. The same historian has effectively illustrated the general body of Grecian legends, by a comparison with the middle age legends of the Roman Catholic Church. The range of knowledge possessed by an historical enquirer on the one hand, and the force of his identifying intellect on the other, are the sources of his fertility in those comparisons that illuminate the darker specks of the ill-recorded past. Whether those comparisons are strictly applicable and good, depends on a quite different mental aptitude, the accurate judgment, or the logical faculty. We find among historians, no less than among Zoological enquirers, the characteristics of the Oken mind; a fulness of analogical suggestion with an absence of the tests of truth.

32. It is not stepping far out of the class of instances typified in the foregoing paragraph, to advert to Institutional comparisons, whether of different ages or of the same age. The social and political institutions of nations and races have often points of agreement in the midst of great diversity; and a penetrating mind—in other words, a strong identifying faculty-can bring together the like, out of the enveloping clouds of unlikeness. It is easy, for example, to identify the fact of government as belonging to every tribe of men that act together; so, it is not difficult for one absolutism to bring to view all the other instances of absolutism that have at different times been impressed on one's mind; and the same with free or responsible governments. By this operation, we gather up various classifications of agreeing institutions, the one throwing light upon the other, and the whole concurring to make one broad luminous effect, which we call the general notion of government; of absolutism, of constitutionalism, &c. The vast complexity and the seemingly endless variety of human institutions are thus simplified; out of chaos order

Vol. ii., pp. 538-40.

arises, as soon as similarity begins to draw together the agreeing elements of the discordant heap. Our great writers on Society, Aristotle, Vico, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Hume, Millar, James Mill, De Tocqueville,-have shown admirable tact in this kind of Comparative History, with all the effects of intellectual illumination and expansion that flow from the bringing together of remote sameness. What the historian does incidentally, the writer on Society does upon system; he searches the whole world for analogies, and finds, if possible, a class for every variety that presents itself. Forms of Government, of Legislation and Justice, Modes of Industry, Distribution of Wealth and Arrangement of Ranks, Domestic Institutions, Religion, Recreative Amusements, &c., are identified and classified so far as they agree, with notification of difference; and out of the particulars drawn together in a powerful identifying mind, there crystallize, one after another, the corresponding generals, and the human reason advances in its endeavours to comprehend this wide subject.*

33. To return to Successions. There remains the comprehensive department of scientific Cause and Effect (in which many of the foregoing instances are included), or those successions where the consequent depends on its antecedent, and is always produced by it. Here we remark, that the same link of causation is often repeated in circumstances so widely apart, that the sameness is veiled from the perception of the general mass of minds; indeed it not seldom happens, that until some preparatory operation has drawn aside the veil, the identity does not disclose itself to the most piercing intellect. Thus, to take the two phenomena—combustion and the rusting of iron-it was not possible for any mind to see a common feature in these two effects as they appear to the common eye. It was necessary to go through a long series of investigations to ascertain the precise import of the two actions apart. Other phenomena had to be interposed having relations to both, in order that effects so unlike

MILLAR on Ranks, and the examination of the Hindu Institutions in MILL'S History of British India furnish striking examples.