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CHAPTER X. 



L 



The social 

 problem in 

 the largest 

 sense not 

 recognised 

 before the 

 eighteenth 

 century. 



OF SOCIETY. 



I. 



MANY influences and interests have combined in the 

 course of the nineteenth century to define and push 

 into the foreground a problem which -in its present 

 comprehensive form did not occupy earlier philosophic 

 thought. This is the social problem, the problem of 

 human society, or, if we take it in the widest sense, 

 the problem of the human race or humanity. Earlier 

 philosophies, among which those of Plato and Aristotle 

 in ancient times stand out prominently, have furnished 

 contributions to the treatment of the problem ; so have, 

 in later centuries, from special points of view, such 

 thinkers as St Augustine, Hobbes, Spinoza, G-rotius, and 

 others. But that the problem is a much larger one, 

 and that its solution must be based on a natural and 

 civil history, combined with a philosophy of the col- 

 lective life of man, this does not seem to have been 

 recognised before the latter half of the eighteenth century. 

 Earlier writers dealt with special aspects of the great 

 subject, starting from historical data or from dogmatic 



