COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



tial. Its career has been frequently interrupted 

 by periods of stagnation or declension, and 

 wherever it has gone on, it has been forwarded, 

 not by an inexplicable tendency or nisus, but by 

 a concurrence of favourable conditions, external 

 and internal. We must remember, moreover, 

 as Sir Henry Maine reminds us,^ that the com- 

 munities which have attained to a conspicuous 

 degree of civilization constitute a numerical mi- 

 nority of mankind. Contemporaneous with the 

 rapidly advancing nations of Europe exist the 

 sluggish nations of Asia, and the almost station- 

 ary tribes of Africa and Polynesia. 



** Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.'* 



So irregular, indeed, has been the march of 

 civilization, that most stages of progress may be 

 made the subject of ocular investigation at the 

 present day. 



In the science of history, therefore, old 

 "means not old in chronology, but in struc- 

 ture : that is most archaic which lies nearest to 

 the beginning of human progress considered as 

 a development, and that is most modern which 

 is farthest removed from that beginning.*'^ 



Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the 

 career of progress has been neither universal 



1 Ancient Law, p. 24 ; cf. Lewis, Methods of Observa- 

 tion in Politics, vol. i. p. 302. 



^ M'Lennan, Primitive Marriage, p. 9. 

 286 



