asting causes which influence the fate
of mankind; he first traced the general laws which in every age
determine the rise or decline of nations. Some of his conclusions were
hasty; many of his analogies fanciful; but he first turned the human
mind in that direction. It is by repeatedly deviating into error that
it can alone be discovered where truth really lies: there is an
alchemy in the moral, not less than in the material world, in which a
vast amount of genius must be lost before it is discovered that it has
taken the wrong direction. But in Montesquieu, besides such occasional
and unavoidable aberrations, there is an invaluable treasure of
profound views and original thought--of luminous observation and deep
reflection--of philosophic observation and just generalization. His
fame has been long established; it has become European; his sayings
are quoted and repeated from one end of the world to the other; but to
the greater part of English readers, his greatness is known rather
from the distant echo of continental fame, than from any practical
acquaintance with the writings from which it has arisen.

Though Montesquieu, however, is the father of the philosophy of
history, it is due to Tacitus and Machiavel to say, that he is not the
author of political thought. In the first of these writers is to be
found the most profound observations on the working of the human mind,
whether in individuals or bodies of men, that ever were formed by
human sagacity: in the latter, a series of remarks on Roman history,
and the corresponding events in the republics of modern Italy, which,
in point of deep political wisdom and penetration, never were
surpassed. Lord Bacon, too, had in his Essays put forth may maxims of
political truth, with that profound sagacity and unerring wisdom by
which his thoughts were so preeminently distinguished. But still these
men, great as they were, and much as they added to the materials of
the philosophy of history, can hardly be said to have mastered that
philosophy itself. It was not their object to do so; it did not belong
to the age in which they lived to make any such attempt. They gave
incomparable observations upon detached points in human annals, but
they did not take a general view of their tendency. They did not
consider whence the world had come, or whither it was going. They
formed no connected system in regard to the march of human events.
They saw clearly the effects of particular measures