86 MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 



and laws. His whole treatise well deserves to be 

 studied, both for its political maxims and its histori- 

 cal information. It lays open the elements of stabi- 

 lity and decay inherent in the different theories of 

 government ; and it points out the common principles 

 on which the maintenance of civil order, under any 

 form whatever, must essentially depend. " In this 

 incomparable work (says Dr Gillies), the reader will 

 perceive the genuine spirit of laws, deduced from the 

 specific and unalterable distinctions of governments ; 

 and, with a small effort of attention, may discern not 

 only those discoveries in science unjustly claimed by 

 the vanity of modern writers (Montesquieu, Machia- 

 vel, Locke, Hume, Smith, &c.) ; but many of those 

 improvements in practice, erroneously ascribed to the 

 fortunate events of time and chance in these later 

 and more enlightened times. The same invaluable 

 treatise discloses the pure and perennial spring of all 

 legitimate authority ; for in Aristotle's Politics, and 

 his only^ government is placed on such a natural and 

 solid foundation, as leaves neither its origin incom- 

 prehensible, nor its stability precarious ; and his con- 

 clusions, had they been well weighed, must have sur- 

 mounted or suppressed those erroneous and absurd 

 doctrines, which long upheld despotism on the one 

 hand, and those equally erroneous and still wilder 

 suppositions of conventions and compacts which have 

 more recently armed popular fury on the other." 



The second grand division of Aristotle's philoso- 

 phy, called the Efficient, includes Dialectics or Logic, 



