610 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
hrough a Pre-Social State ; and the proof which had been offered of this supposi- 
tion, though partly theoretical and @ prior, had partly also been inductive and 
based on experience. Further, the experience of ‘primitive Man’ which was 
actually open to the philosophers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries had been, in fact, such as to force the conclusion not merely that a Pre- 
Social State had once existed, but that some barbarous peoples had not yet 
emerged from it. It was a sad error of observation, as we now know, which led 
to that conclusion; but given the travellers’ tales, in the form in which we can 
read them in the ‘Cosmographies’ and ‘ Voyages’ of the time, I do not see how 
that conclusion could have been avoided without culpable neglect of such evidence 
as there was. If blame is to be assigned in this phase of inquiry at all, it is tobe 
assigned to the travellers and traders, for making such poor use of their eyes and 
ears. All, however, that I am concerned to establish at present is this, that one 
of the most important and far-reaching speculations of modern political philo- 
sophy, the speculation as to a Pre-Social Condition of Mankind, and a Social 
Contract which ended it and brought in Society and the State, arose directly 
and inevitably from the new information as to what primitive man was and did, 
when he was studied in the seventeenth century at Tombutum, or Saldanha 
Bay, or the ‘ backwoods of America,’ or the ‘ bank of the Orinoco River.’ 
But the Social Contract Theory has long since passed out of vogue. Its 
political consequences are with us to-day, like the political consequences of the 
belief in the Divine Right of Kings; but the theories themselves are dead, 
and likely to remain so. Plato and Aristotle, with their belief in Man as a 
Naturally Social Animal, have come by their own again, for most of us, if not 
for all; and the search for an ideal State, which shall realise and fulfil Man’s 
social instincts, is again in full cry. 
What part, if any, has the direct study of barbarous people played at this 
fresh turn of the wheel? Let us look once again at the state of geographical 
knowledge, and more particularly, as before, at the regions in which by transi- 
tory chance of circumstances, there was most to be learned at the moment. 
First, the British occupation of India was the occasion, on the one hand, of the 
discovery of Sanskrit, the creation of this science of comparative philology, and the 
demonstration of a new link of cultural affinity over the whole realm of Aryan 
speech. The same political event led no less directly to the discovery of the 
patriarchal structure of Hindoo society, and so through the comparative study of 
Indian, Roman, and ancient Celtic and Teutonic law to an inductive verification 
of Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘ naturalness’ of patriarchal society. This doctrine 
dominated political science for nearly fifty years. ‘The effect of the evidence 
derived from comparative jurisprudence,’ Sir Henry Maine could write in 1861,* 
‘is to establish that view of the primeval conditions of the human race which is 
known as the Patriarchal Theory. There is no doubt, of course, that this theory 
was originally based on the Scriptural theory of the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower 
Asia. ... It is to be noted, however, that the legal evidence comes nearly 
exclusively from the institutions of societies belonging to the Indo-European 
stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and Sclavonians supplying the greater part of it; 
and indeed the difticulty, at the present stage of the inquiry, is to know where to 
stop; to say of what races of men it is not allowable to lay down that the society 
in which they are united was originally organised on the patriarchal model,’ 
And he refers explicitly to the former controversy between Filmer and Locke, to 
point out how the tables had now been turned upon the latter. 
Thus in the half-century which intervenes between Herder and Maine the 
political philosophy of Europe seemed to have turned almost wholly from 
exploration to introspection; from the Pacific to early Rome and the German 
forests; and from the study of survivals in the modern practice of savages, to that 
of primeval usages betrayed by the speech and customs of the civilised world. 
It was Aristotle over again, with his appeal to custom, ancestral belief, and 
canonical literature, following hard upon the heels of the visionary revolutionary 
Plato. Maine’s own words, indeed, about Rousseau* would be applicable almost 
without change to the course of Greek thought in the fourth century B.c. ‘ We 
} Maine, Ancient Lan, pp. 122-3. 2 Ibid. pp. 86-9, 
