THE EARLY DISCIPLINE OF MANKIND. 133 



new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence ; or 

 else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind to 

 make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in simple compe- 

 tition with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally. At this very 

 moment there are the most rigid Comtists teaching that we ought to 

 be governed by a hierarchy a combination of savants orthodox in 

 science. Yet who can doubt that Comte would have been hanged by 

 his own hierarchy ; that his essor materiel, which was, in fact, troubled 

 by the " theologians and metaphysicians " of the Polytechnic School, 

 would have been more impeded by the government he wanted to 

 make ? And then the secular Comtists, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly, 

 who want to " Frenchify the English institutions " that is, to intro- 

 duce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship found- 

 ed on the proletariat who can doubt that, if both these clever writers 

 had been real Frenchmen, they would have been irascible anti-Bona- 

 partists, and have been sent to Cayenne long ere now ? The wish of 

 these writers is very natural. They want to " organize society," to 

 erect a despot who will do what they like, and work out their ideas ; 

 but any despot will do what he himself likes, and will root out new 

 ideas ninety-nine times for once that he introduces them. 



Again, side by side with these Comtists, and warring with them 

 at least, with one of them is Mr. Arnold, whose poems we know by 

 heart, and who has, as much as any living Englishman, the genuine 

 literary impulse ; and yet, even he wants to put a yoke upon us and, 

 worse than a political yoke, an academic yoke, a yoke upon our minds 

 and our styles. He, too, asks us to imitate France. 



Asylums of commonplace, as Beranger hints, academies must ever 

 be. But that sentence is too harsh ; the true one is, the academies are 

 asylums of the ideas and the tastes of the last age. " By the time," I 

 have heard a most eminent man of science observe, " by the time a 

 man of science attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance 

 upon it, because he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when 

 he was young, but which the new race have refuted." These are the 

 sort of ideas which find their home in academies, and out of their dig:- 

 nified windows pooh-pooh new things. 



I may seem to have wandered far from early society, but I have 

 not wandered. The true scientific method is to explain the past by 

 the present what we do not see by what we see. We can only com- 

 prehend why so many nations have not varied, when we see how hate- 

 ful variation is ; how everybody turns against it ; how not only the 

 conservatives of specidation try to root it out, but the very innovators 

 invent most rigid machines for crushing the " monstrosities and anom- 

 alies," the new forms, out of which, by competition and trial, the best 

 is to be selected for the future. The point I am bringing out is sim- 

 ple : one most important prerequisite of a prevailing nation is that 

 it should have passed out of the first stage of civilization into the sec- 



