86 
MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 
and laws. His whole treatise well deserves to be 
studied, both for its political maxims and its histori- 
cal information. It lays open the elements of stabi- 
lity and decay inherent in the different theories of 
government; and it points out the common principles 
on which the maintenance of civil order, under any 
form whatever, must essentially depend. “ In this 
incomparable work (says Dr Gillies), the reader will 
perceive the genuine spirit of laws, deduced from the 
specific and unalterable distinctions of governments ; 
and, with a small effort of attention, may discern not 
only those discoveries in science unjustly claimed by 
the vanity of modern writers (Montesquieu, Machia- 
vel, Locke, Hume, Smith, &c.) ; but many of those 
improvements in practice, erroneously ascribed to the 
fortunate events of time and chance in these later 
and more enlightened times. The same invaluable 
treatise discloses the pure and perennial spring of all 
legitimate authority ; for in Aristotle’s Politics, and 
his only, government is placed on such a natural and 
solid foundation, as leaves neither its origin incom- 
prehensible, nor its stability precarious ; and his con- 
clusions, had they been well weighed, must have sur- 
mounted or suppressed those erroneous and absurd 
doctrines, which long upheld despotism on the one 
hand, and those equally erroneous and still wilder 
suppositions of conventions and compacts which have 
more recently armed popular fury on the other.” 
Tire second grand division of Aristotle's philoso- 
phy, called the Efficient, includes Dialectics or Logic, 
