592 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
period of prehistoric development or as the result of a psychological analysis of 
mankind in society, assumed in different writers such widely different forms, 
and led—as was only natural—to such widely different proposals for the remedy 
of actual grievances ?_ Why should Hobbes, for example, describe the life of the 
natural man as little better than a hell upon earth, ‘ no arts, no letters, no society ; 
and (which is worst of all) continuall feare, and danger of violent death ; and the 
life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short ’ ; ‘ no property, no dominion, 
no Mine and Thine distinct, but only that to be every man’s, that he can get ; 
and for so long as he can keep it.’ How comes it that Locke, whatever else he 
may deny his natural man, at all events reserves to every man, even in his first 
‘Treatise on Government,’ property in his own person, and (as a corollary to 
this) property in the products of his labour, while in his second ‘Treatise’ he con- 
templates also a natural property in agricultural land? How comes it, again,- 
that Montesquieu bases the whole fabric of civilisation upon the timidity of pre- 
social man; while for Rousseau it is the utter fearlessness of the savage which most 
distinguishes him from the craven members of societies? Flat contradictions 
of this sort, between thinkers who were almost contemporaries, and who agree 
so closely in the form and system of their reasoning, clearly result not so much 
from any defect of method as from some discrepancy in the data which the 
method was employed to explain. The question, therefore, begins to assume 
another shape : Whence did those political philosophers, whose theories involved 
a state of nature, get their respective data as to the character of natural man ? 
It is common knowledge, of course, as I have hinted already, that each 
thinker’s own view of the nature of society went far to determine his imagination 
of its origin; and that his view of its nature was itself suggested by the political 
stresses of his own time. Hobbes, for example, writing in the middle of the 
Great Rebellion, was searching for a Sovereign, whose mandate should be beyond 
dispute ; Locke, standing in even closer relation to the Revolution of 1688, was 
explicitly replying to the advocates of a Divine Right of Kings, and insisting 
that the Contract is revocable; Rousseau, confronted with iniquities which 
resulted from an antiquated distribution of privilege, is all for equality and 
fraternity as the necessary guarantees of liberty. 
But it is possible also to put the sequence in the reverse order, and to make 
the inquiry, how far each thinker’s conclusions as to practical politics resulted 
from his view of the nature of the State; how far his view of its nature is 
deducible from his beliefs as to its origin ; and how far his beliefs as to the origin 
of society were themselves rendered almost inevitable for him, by the state of 
contemporary knowledge of the more primitive specimens of mankind and of the 
State itself. 
The ‘Geographic Control’ of the Renaissance. 
That such a line of reasoning was not foreign to the political thinkers of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is clear from a variety of considerations. 
In the first place, the whole movement in political philosophy, which is in 
question, stands, like the political events with which its turning points are so 
closely connected in point of time and personality, in the closest relation with a. 
larger contemporary movement of scientific inquiry, of which the inquiry into: 
the antecedents of society and of man is only one special, departmental, and 
relatively late application. And in the larger sphere, also, a general advance of 
physiographic theory had gone hand-in-hand with active physiographic dis- 
covery. Bacon’s enlargement of current ideas of scientific method stands, as 
we all know, in the closest historical connection with the discovery of a new 
world by Columbus, and with the new prospects of exploration within the old 
world which were opened by Vasco da Gama. It would therefore be natural 
to expect that Hobbes, for example, should reflect in his ‘Leviathan’ the current 
conceptions of what pre-social man would be like, as inferred from the behaviour 
and circumstances of wnsocial man as reported by contemporary voyagers. 
Two great events of this time, in particular, set the study of mankind, no 
less than all the physical sciences, on a new pinnacle of outlook, and challenged 
all the theories of the Greeks and Arabians which had done duty at second- 
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