hat if he had come down further he might have comprehended
the possibility of a deliberate transformation of societies by the
intelligent action of the human will--an historical force to which he
does not do justice, apparently because he fancied it incompatible
with strict causal sequence. The value of his work does not lie in
the philosophical principles which he applied. Nor was it a useful
contribution to history; of him it has been said, as of Bossuet, that
facts bent like grass under his feet. [Footnote: Jouffroy, Melanges,
p. 81.] But it was a notable attempt to do for human phenomena what
Leibnitz in his Theodicy sought to do for the cosmos, and it pointed
the way to the rationalistic philosophies of history which were to be a
feature of the speculations of the following century.

2.

The short essay of Kant, which he clumsily called the Idea of a
Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan, [Footnote: 1784. This work
of Kant was translated by De Quincey (Works, vol. ix. 428 sqq., ed.
Masson), who is responsible for cosmopolitical as the rendering of
weltburgerlich.] approaches the problems raised by the history of
civilisation from a new point of view.

He starts with the principle of invariable law. On any theory of free
will, he says, human actions are as completely under the control of
universal-laws of nature as any other physical phenomena. This is
illustrated by statistics. Registers of births, deaths, and marriages
show that these events occur with as much conformity to laws of nature
as the oscillations of the weather.

It is the same with the great sequence of historical events. Taken alone
and individually, they seem incoherent and lawless; but viewed in their
connection, as due to the action not of individuals but of the human
species, they do not fail to reveal "a regular stream of tendency."
Pursuing their own often contradictory purposes, individual nations and
individual men are unconsciously promoting a process to which if they
perceived it they would pay little regard.

Individual men do not obey a law. They do not obey the laws of instinct
like animals, nor do they obey, as rational citizens of the world would
do, the laws of a preconcerted plan. If we look at the stage of history
we see scattered and occasional indications of wisdom, but the general
sum of men's actions is "a web of folly, childish vanity, and often even
of the idlest wickedness and spirit of destruction."

The problem