280 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [it. ii. 



in accordance with a system of edicts framed in an age when 

 the changes in question coukl not possibly have been con- 

 templated or provided for. Yet among ourselves, where the 

 dread of novelty is comparatively slight, there is some 

 difficulty in realizing how all-essential is this kind of artifice 

 in early times. " To this day many semi-civilized races have 

 great difficulty in regarding any arrangement as binding and 

 conclusive unless they can also manage to look at it as an 

 inherited usage. Sir Henry Maine, in his last work, gives a 

 most curious case. The English^Government in India has in 

 many cases made new and great works of irrigation, of which 

 no ancient Indian Government ever thought; and it has 

 generally left it to the native village community to say what 

 share each man of the village should have in the water ; and 

 the village authorities have accordingly laid down a series of 

 most minute rules about it. But the peculiarity is, that in 

 no case do these rules ' purport to emanate from the personal 

 authority of their author or authors, which rests on grounds 

 of reason, not on grounds of innocence and sanctity ; nor do 

 they assume to be dictated by a sense of equity ; there is 

 always, I am assured, a sort of fiction under which some 

 customs as to the distribution of water are supposed to have 

 emanated from a remote antiquity, although, in fact, no such 

 artificial supply had ever been so much as thought of.' So 

 difficult does this ancient race — like, probably, in this respect 

 so much of the ancient world — find it to imagine a rule 

 which is obligatory, but not traditional." ^ 



Now among the European Aryans, within historic times, 

 this species of artifice assumed a form which made it in a 

 very high degree conducive to the permanent progressiveness 

 of the race. If we look into the great writers who in the 

 seventeenth century illustrated with exquisite beauty and 

 clearness the doctrines of Public Law, we find their heads 

 filled with the notion of a primitive natural code, fit for 

 * Bagehot, Physics avd Politics, p. 142. 



