HISTORICAL METHOD. 517 



a number of requisites, which have been present in every 

 society that has maintained a collective existence, and on the 

 cessation of which it has either merged in some other society, 

 or reconstructed itself on some new basis, in which the condi 

 tions were conformed to. Although these results, obtained by 

 comparing different forms and states of society, amount in 

 themselves only to empirical laws ; some of them, when once 

 suggested, are found to follow with so much probability from 

 general laws of human nature, that the consilience of the two 

 processes raises the evidence to proof, and the generalizations 

 to the rank of scientific truths. 



This seems to be affirmable (for instance) of the conclusions 

 arrived at in the following passage; extracted, with some 

 alterations, from a criticism on the negative philosophy of the 

 eighteenth century,* and which I quote, though (as in some 

 former instances) from myself, because I have no better way 

 of illustrating the conception I have formed of the kind of 

 theorems of which sociological statics would consist. 



&quot; The very first element of the social union, obedience to a 

 government of some sort, has not been found so easy a thing 

 to establish in the world. Among a timid and spiritless race 

 like the inhabitants of the vast plains of tropical countries, 

 passive obedience may be of natural growth; though even 

 there we doubt whether it has ever been found among any 

 people with whom fatalism, or in other words, submission to 

 the pressure of circumstances as a divine decree, did not pre 

 vail as a religious doctrine. But the difficulty of inducing a 

 brave and warlike race to submit their individual arbitrium to 

 any common umpire, has always been felt to be so great, that 

 nothing short of supernatural power has been deemed adequate 

 to overcome it ; and such tribes have always assigned to the 

 first institution of civil society a divine origin. So differently 

 did those judge who knew savage men by actual experience, 

 from those who had no acquaintance with them except in 

 the civilized state. In modern Europe itself, after the fall of 



* Since reprinted entire in Disscrtatioiis and Discussions t as the concluding 

 paper of the first volume. 



