282 SIB ISAAC NEWTON. 



Nor is this great law of Gradual Progress confined to the 

 physical sciences; in the moral it equally governs. Before 

 the foundations of political economy were laid by Hume and 

 Smith, a great step had been made by the French philosophers, 

 disciples of Quesnay ; but a nearer approach to sound princi- 

 ples had signalized the labours of Gournay, and those labours 

 had been shared and his doctrines patronized by Turgot when 

 Chief Minister. Again, in constitutional policy, see by what 

 slow degress, from its first rude elements the attendance of 

 feudal tenants at their lord's court, and the summons of 

 burghers to grant supplies of money the great discovery of 

 modern times in the science of practical politics has been 

 effected, the Eepresentative scheme, which enables states of 

 any extent to enjoy popular government, and allows Mixed 

 Monarchy to be established, combining freedom with order 

 a plan pronounced by the statesmen and writers of antiquity 

 to be of hardly possible formation, and wholly impossible con- 

 tinuance.* The globe itself as well as the science of its 

 inhabitants, has been explored according to the law which 

 forbids a sudden and rapid leaping forward, and decrees that 

 each successive step, prepared by the last, shall facilitate the 

 next. Even Columbus followed several successful discoverers 

 on a smaller scale ; and is by some believed to have had, 

 unknown to him, a predecessor in the great exploit by which 



Brewster and others have peremptorily denied that his mode of inquiry 

 was either suggested, or at all influenced by those writings. It is certain 

 that neither he, nor indeed any one but Bacon himself, ever followed in 

 detail the rules prescribed in the ' Novum Orgamirn.' 



* The opinion of Tacitus on this subject is well known. "Cunctas 

 nationes et urbes populus, aut primores, aut singuli regunt. Delecta (some 

 editions add consociata) ex his et constituta rei publicae forma laudari 

 facilius quarn evenire ; vel si evenit, haud diuturna, esse potest." (Ann. 

 IV. 33.) Cicero, in his Treatise ' De Kepublica,' giving his opinion that 

 the best form of government is that ' extribus generibus, regali, optimatum, 

 et populari, modice confusa,'' does not in terms declare it to be clumerical ; 

 yet he distinctly says in the same Treatise (II. 23) that liberty cannot exist 

 under a king. Liberty, he says, consists "non in eo ut justo utamur 

 domino sed ut nullo." 



