more memorable steps. The long Egyptian dynasties indicate the intervals of stagnation, like the reaches of its canals between the water-sluices. When the Father of History was at Thebes he was shown a series of 345 colossal images, each a Piromis, and the son of his predecessor. It was easy to overlook a slight movement of progress at the end of one of those all but interminable avenues.

Passing from Egypt to the upper shores of the Mediterranean, do we find a consciousness of social progress in classic antiquity? I think we must say, no. Its greatest philosophers analyzed its successive political revolutions with that symmetrical precision, which was the characteristic of the Greek mind. Aristotle produced an immortal work, in which he referred them all to general laws. Such and such catastrophes, he said, befal states from recurring causes and in such and such order. But beyond the limits of the Greek states, he had no knowledge of a common impulse and therefore no conception of a common advance. Plato and his disciples discussed progress ardently; but it was the progress of the individual man, the purification of the unit and his preparation for immortality. Of the contemporary progress of society, they had no intimation.

If we reflect for a moment, the idea of a progress of mankind in the mass could only be conceived in the maturity of history. We must know that empires have risen and fallen, and that systems have arisen, flourished, and decayed before we can elevate ourselves to the general laws which govern the pro

THE NEW SCIENCE.

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duction or the fate of either. The world must have survived many revolutions and many catastrophes before the order to which they are subordinated could be clearly seen. The ancients conceived of nothing paramount to the fortunes of the states of which they were respectively members. When "the

Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind" made his celebrated voyage from Ægina to Megara, he was filled with the spectacle of their mournful vicissitudes. He was not privileged to discern their respective contributions to the tide of human progress; he could only see bubbles, some smaller, some larger, rising and bursting on a tranquil sea. He was unconscious of the current into which they subsided, and of which the discovery was reserved—to be the boast of modern history.

It was essential to this discovery that history should have become modern.' An accumulation of experience was necessary; in addition to this, the continuity of progress could only be realized under a prospect of permanence. It was not therefore till the European system was consolidated, that men began to conceive the notion of a necessary sequence, in all that had preceded. It would be difficult, perhaps, to say, who was the first to discern what most acknowledge now-a-days. Bossuet, in his 'Histoire Universelle,' was apparently the first who vaguely promulgated the idea to the world. Yet, as late as 1725, it was unknown to Vico when he published the remarkable work on history, which he appropriately designated Scienza Nuova,' the New Science.

The new science was thus imperfectly understood in its first rudiments until the German Herder indicated its subject in a connected form, as the aesthetic, the intellectual and the moral advancement, from the beginning of time, of the human race.

Since the work of Herder, the various contributions to the new science have been so numerous, that I should only weary you if I attempted to enumerate them. Lessing, Kreuzer, and Hegel in Germany; Michelet, Cousin, and Comte in France, have treated it in various senses. Some of our English historians, and among them I must especially distinguish Dr. Arnold, have incidentally illustrated some of its branches; and I mention the latter, as I remember to have heard him express his belief that the time would come when the deductions of the new science' would be accepted as equally certain with other conclusions that are based on any moral' evidence.

I need scarcely tell you that those who have ventured to treat the subject as a whole have done so with a varied, an imperfect success. The most signal contributions hitherto have been monographs on certain portions. There is a beautiful example in the little work of Mons. Guizot on the civilization of Europe, a popular manual of learned research and sagacious inferences, illustrating the continuity of the Roman with the medieval world, and indicating the elementary sources of our present civilization. I will mention another, the work of Mons. de Tocqueville

America, which contains the most acute and

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searching analysis of that tendency to equality which was so invariably fatal to the states of antiquity and which we now meet with under more complex conditions. Of this work, I will only state my impression, that if it be not more familiarly known among ourselves, it is because of that national indifference to social philosophy in which we compare so disadvantageously with the first nations of the continent.

It would be too much to say that either of the authors I have mentioned have exhausted the great divisions of which they treat. But I shall not undertake to follow them on what may be considered the leading questions of social philosophy, but I propose to occupy your time this evening with a very subordinate branch of the inquiry. Passing over the primary elements and conditions of progress, I wish only to dwell on the single circumstance that it has been affected by the narrative of its prior stages, that it has been modified in the presence and through the knowledge of history.

Now I do not mean by this, the knowledge of history which has influenced most men more or less as individuals; for the aggregate of such impressions, however immense, it is impossible to analyze. In every varying circumstance of life men have been affected by what they believed others had antecedently said or done in like conditions, but this influence can only be tested upon general principles where they have been so affected conjointly and in masses. Charles XII. may have learnt how to contend from Alexander, or that poor Louis XVL

at the Tuileries may have studied how to die by the example of Charles the First. Such instances, and thousands of others less illustrious, are nothing to our purpose, for they are individual and exceptional, and are not capable of any appropriate classification.

Again, I do not mean by the influence of history its general effect in deterring mankind from a repetition of the errors registered on its pages. If, for instance, the excesses of the first French Revolution have taught us (as I do not doubt they have) considerable caution for all time to come, I could not pretend to reason on their influence, unless I knew certainly from what they had saved us. The negative effect of history I pass over entirely. It is only where its agency is of a positive kind, where it has induced movement instead of repressing it; where it has acted, if I may so speak, as a disturbing influence on the current of human affairs, that I propose to consider. it.

History being a record of former events, it can only so operate by presenting certain representations of the past, which men may be induced deliberately to imitate. Accordingly, we find that in various instances men have attempted to restore the past according to the notion which they have conceived of it from history.

These attempts at revival have certain features in common, but I will first endeavour to illustrate them by examples. One of the first and most remarkable was that of the Emperor Julian.

The attempt of Julian was not the mere impulse