o the
development of institutions, which, like most generalisations, were
mainly wrong, but stimulated further inquiry. Gibbon, the third of the
triumvirate, uniting the power of presenting great panoramas of history
with thorough scholarship and laborious research, produced the great
work which has not been, if it ever can be, superseded. A growing
interest in history thus led to some of the chief writings of the time,
as we can see that it was the natural outgrowth of the intellectual
position. The rapid widening of the historical horizon made even a bare
survey useful, and led to some recognition of the importance of guiding
and correcting political and social theory by careful investigation of
past experience. The historian began to feel an ambition to deal in
philosophical theories. He was, moreover, touched by the great
scientific movement. A complete survey of the intellectual history of
the time would of course have to deal with the great men who were laying
the foundations of the modern physical sciences; such as Black, and
Priestley, and Cavendish, and Hunter. It would indeed, have to point out
how small was the total amount of such knowledge in comparison with the
vast superstructure which has been erected in the last century. The
foundation of the Royal Institution at the end of the eighteenth century
marks, perhaps, the point at which the importance of physical science
began to impress the popular imagination. But great thinkers had long
recognised the necessity of applying scientific method in the sphere of
social and political investigation. Two men especially illustrate the
tendency and the particular turn which it took in England. Adam Smith's
great book in 1776 applied scientific method to political economy. Smith
is distinguished from his French predecessors by the historical element
of his work; by his careful study, that is, of economic history, and his
consequent presentation of his theory not as a body of absolute and
quasi-mathematical truth, but as resting upon the experience and
applicable to the concrete facts of his time. His limitation is equally
characteristic. He investigated the play of the industrial mechanism
with too little reference to the thorough interdependence of economic
and other social conditions. Showing how that mechanism adapts itself to
supply and demand, he comes to hold that the one thing necessary is to
leave free play to competition, and that the one essential force is th