26 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



and finally in his great essay on manners he drew the plan and 

 established the proportions for a concept of unity in history which in 

 another land and age was destined to revolutionize the pursuit. 



Either he never knew or he had forgotten a vital point. Jejune 

 and embryonic as Aristotle's Politics appear when applied to our pro- 

 blems, his experience having been confined to the petty states of 

 Greece, he nevertheless found and set forth the vital principle of soci- 

 ety as an organism. On this were based the ancient concepts of 

 economics. The embryo of modern economics was begotten by Jean 

 Bodin (1580), a lawyer of the sixteenth century, who formulated the 

 ideas of progress, law, and causation in history. Had he combined 

 with his own thoughts (Methodus ad facilem Historiarum Cognitionem) 

 the one great thought of Aristotle, he would have been even more 

 famous than he is, he would have been the father of scientific history 

 as well as of scientific economics. His objective, external attitude 

 toward history was that of all the great, down to the nineteenth cen- 

 tury; it was the basic concept and starting-point of Bossuet, of Vico, 

 of Bodin, and even of Montesquieu. It was likewise the radical vice of 

 Voltaire, as in a still higher degree it was that of Gibbon. The founda- 

 tions of the social union may not be studied in collections of historical, 

 legal, or even social facts, nor in brilliant generalizations therefrom, 

 like those which cause the pages of Montesquieu to flash and scintil- 

 late. The true science of history shows us not merely the operations, 

 what has been called the "play and function" of the social organs, 

 it exhibits under the scalpel the organs themselves. Negative criti- 

 cism has its rights, no doubt, but it is scanty fare for the hungry soul, 

 and the idea of constructive, productive criticism was far better 

 developed in Thucydides than in Voltaire; the most that can be 

 said of the latter is that he saw in a glass darkly the concept, not of 

 the unity of history, but of European history as a totality. 



What then of Gibbon; has he too been weighed in the balances and 

 found wanting? His erudition was immense, his pen facile and power- 

 ful, his grasp gigantic and his method sound. Let us apply the su- 

 preme test. Do scholars read him? or, if they read him, is it for any 

 other motive than a learned curiosity? They copiously correct and 

 annotate him, and freely explore the mazes of his thought: they 

 conspire with publishers to issue new editions of his books, and the 

 public buys edition after edition; but so likewise do they buy edition 

 after edition of Rollin's Universal History! The sets look well on the 

 shelves, but the man who reads either is hard pressed to kill time. 

 There is more light thrown on the Decline and Fall by the short 

 treatise of Fustel than by all the ponderous and erudite rhetoric of 

 Gibbon. We have gleaned, not a few, but many facts, which Gibbon 

 had not, even though the truth of fact is on all his pages; his method 

 struggles to combine the ideas of evolution and of organism, but 



