gressive being. The fundamental institutions
of the state were almost everywhere believed to have been divinely
established, and to be still, in a greater or less degree, of divine
authority. The divine right of certain lines of kings to rule, and even
to rule absolutely, was but lately the creed of the dominant party in
most countries of Europe; while the divine right of popes and bishops to
dictate men's beliefs (and not respecting the invisible world alone) is
still striving, though under considerable difficulties, to rule mankind.
When these opinions began to be out of date, a rival theory presented
itself to take their place. There were, in truth, many such theories,
and to some of them the term metaphysical, in M. Comte's sense, cannot
justly be applied. All theories in which the ultimate standard of
institutions and rules of action was the happiness of mankind, and
observation and experience the guides (and some such there have been in
all periods of free speculation), are entitled to the name Positive,
whatever, in other respects, their imperfections may be. But these were
a small minority. M. Comte was right in affirming that the prevailing
schools of moral and political speculation, when not theological, have
been metaphysical. They affirmed that moral rules, and even political
institutions, were not means to an end, the general good, but
corollaries evolved from the conception of Natural Rights. This was
especially the case in all the countries in which the ideas of
publicists were the offspring of the Roman Law. The legislators of
opinion on these subjects, when not theologians, were lawyers: and the
Continental lawyers followed the Roman jurists, who followed the Greek
metaphysicians, in acknowledging as the ultimate source of right and
wrong in morals, and consequently in institutions, the imaginary law of
the imaginary being Nature. The first systematizers of morals in
Christian Europe, on any other than a purely theological basis, the
writers on International Law, reasoned wholly from these premises, and
transmitted them to a long line of successors. This mode of thought
reached its culmination in Rousseau, in whose hands it became as
powerful an instrument for destroying the past, as it was impotent for
directing the future. The complete victory which this philosophy gained,
in speculation, over the old doctrines, was temporarily followed by an
equally complete practical triumph, the French Revolution: wh