360 HENRY JAMES SUMNER MAINE. 



transition from one idea to another. Maine's disposition and temper 

 of mind were essentially scientific and scholarly. Maine's work as a 

 statesman was the work of a scholar and literary artist in the field of 

 statesmanship. He drafted statutes, he formulated opinions on political 

 questions, and expressed them finely, but his motive was, in all this 

 work, scientific and artistic, not practical. 



It is as a scientific man and as a man of letters that Maine will be 

 remembered, not as a statesman. He will not be remembered as the 

 man who drafted certain statutes and gave his advice in connection 

 with the government of India, but as the author of the " Ancient Law." 

 The Ancient Law is certaiuly one of the great books of this century, 

 remarkable in its contents and in its consequences. The book was 

 published in 1861, only fifteen months after the publication of Darwin's 

 Origin of Species. There is an interesting and significant connection 

 between the two books. We have in Darwin's work the application of 

 the doctrine of evolution to the history of organic life. We have in 

 Maine's work the application of the same doctrine to our intellectual 

 life in some of its chief phases or aspects. A new purpose and a new 

 method of study were given to students in the field of custom, law, and 

 politics. The purpose was to explain existing social, legal, and politi- 

 cal ideas according to a theory of evolution, development, diversification, 

 or differentiation. The new method of study by which it was proposed 

 to discover the natural order and succession or generation of social, 

 legal, and political ideas was that which Darwin had employed to dis- 

 cover the order in which organic forms in plant and animal life have 

 been evolved. It was the comparative method of the naturalist. The 

 method is described by Maine as follows. " We take," he says, " a num- 

 ber of contemporary facts, ideas, and customs, and we infer the past 

 form of those facts, ideas, and customs, not only from historical records 

 of that past form, but from examples of it which have not yet died out 

 of the world and are still to be found in it. . . . Direct observation 

 comes thus to the aid of historical inquiry, and historical inquiry to 

 the help of direct observation." 



Of course the question comes up whether this method is applicable 

 to the phenomena of mind, whether we can hope to explain by it the 

 developments of the human intelligence, and find out what were the 

 primitive, elementary thoughts and practices of mankind. Our ideas 

 are very largely the result of external conditions and circumstances. 

 They are composed out of experiences, and experiences differ. It 

 might be inferred from this that the comparative method would be in- 

 applicable to the field of intellectual life. We might not expect to dis- 



