THE EARLY DISCIPLINE OF MANKIND. 135 



prevailing city : you begin with a town and you end with an empire, 

 and this by unmarked stages. So shrouded, so shielded, in the coarse 

 fibre of other qualities, was the delicate principle of progress, that it 

 never failed, and it was never broken. 



One standing instance, no doubt, shows that the union of progres- 

 siveness and legality does not secure supremacy in war. The Jewish 

 nation has its type of progress in the prophets, side by side with its 

 type of permanence in the law and Levites, more distinct than any 

 other ancient people. Nowhere in common history do we see the two 

 forces both so necessary, and both so dangerous so apart, and so 

 intense : Judea changed in inward thought, just as Rome changed in 

 exterior power. Each change was continuous, gradual, and good. 

 In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military ad- 

 vantage ; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish 

 advantage never did so ; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand 

 analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them ; from 

 that have issued endless consequences. But I cannot deal with such 

 matters here, nor are they to my purpose. As respects this essay, 

 Judea is an example of combined variability and legality not investing 

 itself in warlike power, and so perishing at last, but bequeathing, 

 nevertheless, a legacy of the combination in imperishable mental 

 effects. 



It may be objected that this principle is like saying that men walk 

 when they do walk, and sit when they do sit. The problem is, Why 

 do men progress ? And the answer suggested seems to be, that they 

 progress when they have a certain sufficient amount of variability in 

 their nature. This seems to be the old style of explanation by occult 

 qualities. It seems like saying that opium sends men to sleep because 

 it has a soporific virtue, and bread feeds because it has an alimentary 

 quality. But the explanation is not so absurd. It says : " The begin- 

 ning of civilization is marked by an intense legality ; that legality is 

 the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; 

 but that legality that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke 

 upon all men and all actions if it goes on, kills out the variability 

 implanted by Nature, and makes different men and different ages fac- 

 similes of other men and other ages, as we see them so often. Progress 

 is only possible in those happy cases where the force of legality has 

 gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far enough to 

 kill out all varieties and destroy Nature's perpetual tendency to 

 change." The point of the solution is not the invention of an imagi- 

 nary agency, but an assignment of comparative magnitude to two 

 known agencies. 



