resting
on the same general doctrine of evolution, applied to moral and social
forms, as that which is being applied with so much ingenuity to the
series of organic matter. The historic conception is a reference of
every state of society to a particular stage in the evolution of its
general conditions. Ideas of law, of virtue, of religion, of the
physical universe, of history, of the social union itself, all march in
a harmonious and inter-dependent order.

Curiosity with reference to origins is for various reasons the most
marked element among modern scientific tendencies. It covers the whole
field, moral, intellectual, and physical, from the smile or the frown on
a man's face, up to the most complex of the ideas in his mind; from the
expression of his emotions, to their root and relations with one another
in his inmost organisation. As an ingenious writer, too soon lost to our
political literature, has put it:--'If we wanted to describe one of the
most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we
should say that by it everything is made _an antiquity_. When in former
times our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as
occupied with coins and medals and Druids' stones. But now there are
other relics; indeed all matter is become such. Man himself has to the
eye of science become an antiquity. She tries to read, is beginning to
read, knows she ought to read, in the frame of each man the result of a
whole history of all his life, and what he is and what makes him so.'[3]
Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities
than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals,
inherited predispositions. Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to
be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood. Of usages, we are
beginning first of all to think where they came from, and secondarily
whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got
to accept. In the last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it
true? We now ask, How did men come to take it for true? In short the
relations among social phenomena which now engage most attention, are
relations of original source, rather than those of actual consistency in
theory and actual fitness in practice. The devotees of the current
method are more concerned with the pedigree and genealogical connections
of a custom or an idea than with its own proper goodness or badness, its
streng