PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 591 
In the same way it has for some while been clear to me that neither Plato 
nor Aristotle, the great outstanding figures of fourth-century Greece, was con- 
structing theories of human nature entirely in the air. Their conceptions both of 
the ideal state of society, and of the elements which were fundamental and 
essential in actual societies as they knew them, were determined to a very large 
extent by their observation of real men in Sparta, Persia, or Scythia. But it is 
also clear that much that had been familiar to the historians of the fifth century, 
and particularly to Herodotus, had fallen out of vogue with the philosophers 
of the fourth. Systematic clearness had been attained only by the sacrifice of 
historic accuracy. Thucydides, in fact, standing right in the parting of the 
ways between history and rhetoric, might fairly have extended his warnings to 
a dissociation of history from political philosophy, which was just as imminent. 
Anthropology and the Renaissance. 
At the Revival of Learning it was the same as in the great days of Greece. 
New vistas of the world were being opened up by the voyagers ; new types of 
men, of modes of life, of societies and states, were discovered and described ; 
new comparisons were forced upon men by new knowledge crowding thick into 
their minds ; and new questions, which were nevertheless old as the hills, made 
eddies and rapids in the swift current of thought, and cried out for an answer. 
Take the central political problems for example: What constitutes the right to 
govern, and what is the origin of law? In medieval Europe this was simple 
enough. The duke, or the king, or the bishop governed by authority of the 
emperor, or the pope ; and pope and emperor ruled (like Edward VII.) ‘ by the 
Grace of God.’ Yet here, in Guinea, in Monomotapa, in Cathay, and in Peru, 
were great absolute monarchies which knew nothing of the pope or the emperor, 
and were mighty hazy about God. Yet their subjects obeyed them, and gave 
good reasons for their obedience, and chiefest of their reasons (as in all times and 
places) was this : ‘ We should be much worse off if we didn’t.’ 
Unsocial Man and the Pre-Social State. 
It would take me very far afield if I were to try to show how this universal 
answer came to change its ground from politics to anthropology, so that to the 
question—how men knew that they would be much worse off if they didn’t—the 
answer came, that ‘ once upon a time they had been much worse off, because they 
didn’t.’ For my present purpose it is enough to note that, in all ages, philosophers 
who set out to define the nature of the State, have become involved in speculations 
about its origin ; that historians, in their researches into its origin, have been 
forced into conclusions as to its nature; and that in both cases every belief about 
the Nature of the State has been found toinvolve a belief about aState of Nature; 
an answer of some kind, that is, to the question whether man was originally and 
naturally a social animal, or whether at some early period of his history he 
became social and domestic. In the latter event, how was domestication 
effected, and what sort of thing was undomesticated man? In the ancient 
world, after long controversy, Aristotle's definition of man as the ‘social 
animal’ had carried the day, and ruled that question out of court. But at the 
Revival of Learning, the unnatural behaviour of certain actual societies towards 
their individual members had revived irresistibly the whole question whether 
society was part of the natural order at all, and not a ‘device of the heathen,’ a 
mistake or a pis aller ; and whether, if society was not thus ‘ natural,’ men would 
not really be better off if they returned to their natural, pre-social, wnsocial state, 
and began again at the beginning, to work out their own salvation. This belief 
in a pre-social state played a large part in the political philosophy of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries ; and conversely it was the very fact that the 
pre-social state as a philosophical conception fell out of vogue at the beginning 
of the nineteenth, which has distinguished modern political philosophy so 
markedly from its predecessors. 
Now it is impossible to compare the successive presentations of the pre-social 
state without being struck by the widely different content of them. But how 
was it that the conception of a pre-social state of man, whether conceived as a 
