ts office
was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from
which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be
deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental,
thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century
against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from
various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to
read with interest even before the change in my opinions; from the
Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had
read of Goethe; from Carlyle's early articles in the _Edinburgh_ and
Foreign Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my
father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. From these
sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature
of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning
upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost,
these in particular: That the human mind has a certain order of possible
progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which
governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an
unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are
relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not
only _will_ have, but _ought_ to have, different institutions: that
government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of
whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is,
does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any
general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of
human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of
history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated
and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed
to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half
of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But
though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that
great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as
firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight
between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of
the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other
black. I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed
against o