42 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



The simplest view that can be taken is that which 

 regards history as " philosophy teaching by ex- 

 amples." This view has been eagerly pressed upon 

 our generation by one of its most brilliant teachers, 

 Sir J. R. Seeley, though with a special reference to 

 politics in the stricter sense, rather than to what we 

 distinguish as social problems. Political history, ac- 

 cording to Seeley, gives us the politics of the past, 

 while present-day politics are, to the statesman of wide 

 views, history in the making. All manner of experi- 

 ments in living, some of them successful and others 

 unsuccessful, are recorded in the book of history. 

 We moderns, with so immense a volume to study, 

 ought to be safeguarded against many errors; and 

 we ought to find ourselves in possession of many 

 pieces of practical wisdom, not as discoverers but 

 as heirs. 



Now Comte sometimes falls back upon the teach- 

 ing of history in this simple and obvious sense. For 

 example, he demands that the modern nation state 

 should be broken up, under the positivist regime of 

 the future, into fragments not much greater than the 

 city states of antiquity. He allots to each a popula- 

 tion of from one to three millions, the population of a 

 great city, or of a canton or province of moderate 

 dimensions. And he gives as his reason the teaching 

 of experience, which is said to show that tyranny in- 

 variably sets in when larger aggregates are massed 

 together in one political organisation. The assertion 

 perhaps may startle us, but, true or false, it is an 

 appeal to history, and an appeal to history in the 

 obvious sense, in which history is regarded as a col- 

 lection of examples or of experiments in living. 



