maginary being under these ideal circumstances is to be condemned as
having lapsed from an original perfection; every transformation of
society which would give it a closer resemblance to the world over
which the creature of Nature reigned, is admirable and worthy to be
effected at any apparent cost. The theory is still that of the Roman
lawyers, for in the phantasmagoria with which the Natural Condition is
peopled, every feature and characteristic eludes the mind except the
simplicity and harmony which possessed such charms for the
jurisconsult; but the theory is, as it were, turned upside down. It is
not the Law of Nature, but the State of Nature, which is now the
primary subject of contemplation. The Roman had conceived that by
careful observation of existing institutions parts of them could be
singled out which either exhibited already, or could by judicious
purification be made to exhibit, the vestiges of that reign of nature
whose reality he faintly affirmed. Rousseau's belief was that a
perfect social order could be evolved from the unassisted
consideration of the natural state, a social order wholly irrespective
of the actual condition of the world and wholly unlike it. The great
difference between the views is that one bitterly and broadly condemns
the present for its unlikeness to the ideal past; while the other,
assuming the present to be as necessary as the past, does not affect
to disregard or censure it. It is not worth our while to analyse with
any particularity that philosophy of politics, art, education, ethics,
and social relation which was constructed on the basis of a state of
nature. It still possesses singular fascination for the looser
thinkers of every country, and is no doubt the parent, more or less
remote, of almost all the prepossessions which impede the employment
of the Historical Method of inquiry, but its discredit with the higher
minds of our day is deep enough to astonish those who are familiar
with the extraordinary vitality of speculative error. Perhaps the
question most frequently asked nowadays is not what is the value of
these opinions, but what were the causes which gave them such
overshadowing prominence a hundred years ago. The answer is, I
conceive, a simple one. The study which in the last century would best
have corrected the misapprehensions into which an exclusive attention
to legal antiquities is apt to betray was the study of religion. But
Greek religion, as then understoo