While practical politics was thus becoming more and more of a stupid war of ecclesiastical prejudices, in which the shiftiest came best off, and even theoretic politics ran to a vain disputation on the purposes of God towards Adam, some of the best intelligence of the nation, happily, was at work on more fruitful lines. The dire results of the principles which had made for union and strife of late years, drove thoughtful men back on a ground of union which did not seem to breed a correlative malignity.[1171] It was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, that the Royal Society was constituted; but its real beginnings lay in the first years of peace under Cromwell, when, as Sprat records, a "candid, unpassionate company" began to meet at Oxford in the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham College,[1172] to discuss questions of natural fact. "The University had, at the time, many Members of its own, who had begun a free way of reasoning; and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of Philosophical Minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the security and ease of a retirement amongst Gowns-men, had drawn thither."[1173] In constituting the Society, the associates "freely admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of life," taking credit to themselves for admitting an intellectual shopkeeper, though "the far greater number are Gentlemen, free, and unconfined."[1174] Above all things they shunned sectarian and party feeling. "Their first purpose was no more then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag'd in the passions and madness of that dismal Age;"[1175] and when they formally incorporated themselves it was expressly to discuss "things and not words."

It is noteworthy that the French Academy, which gave the immediate suggestion for the constitution of the English Royal Society, contained almost no authors save belletrists and ecclesiastics. In the list of members down to 1671 (Relation cited, p. 336), I find no writer on science save De la Chambre, the King's physician. And the first important undertaking of the Academy (projected about 1637) was a Dictionary. Sprat (p. 56) suggests that the Royal Society has usefully influenced the Academy in the direction of the study of things rather than words. (Compare the avowed literary ideal of the authors of the Relation, p. 373.) But although the French group from the first tended mainly to literary pursuits, they too aimed at a "free way of reasoning," "et de ce premier âge de l'Académie, ils en parlent comme d'un âge d'or, durant lequel avec toute l'innocence et toute la liberté des premiers siècles, sans bruit, et sans pompe, et sans autres loix que celles de l'amitié, ils goûtoient ensemble tout ce que la société des esprits, et la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux et de plus charmant" (Relation, p. 7).

And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a translation of A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other (sic) Natural Knowledge made in the Assembly of the Beaux Esprits at Paris, by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation (2 vols. sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study. In 1666 Colbert established the Académie Royale des Sciences, for the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France Cassini and Huygens (Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of Colbert's Last Testament, 1695). Colbert further founded the Académie Royale d'Architecture in 1671; and had set up what came to be the Académie des Inscriptions in his own house. All three bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards science, in Lawrence's Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, etc., 1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand, Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech "received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines of the French project.

The English naturalists would have nothing to do with theology, "these two subjects, God and the Soul, being only forborn."[1176] Reasoning from the development of military faculty in the Civil War, they decided that "greater things are produced by the free way than the formal"[1177]—a principle already put forth by Renaudot, in the preface to the reports of the French Academy, as the guide of their procedure. By attending solely to results and questions of concrete fact, the inquirers were "not only free from Faction, but from the very causes and beginnings of it";[1178] and in the language of the time they held that "by this means there was a race of young Men provided against the next Age, whose minds receiving from them their just Impressions of sober and generous knowledge, were invincibly arm'd against all the inchantments of Enthusiasm"[1179]—that is, of religious fanaticism. And with this recoil from fanaticism there went the stirring and energetic curiosity of people habituated to action by years of war, and needing some new excitement to replace the old. While many turned to debauchery, others took to "experiment."[1180] Says Sprat:—

"The late times of Civil War and confusion, to make some recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr'd up men's minds from long ease and a lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests and Thunders in the State, as well as in the skie, that they purifie and cleer the Air which they disturb. But now, since the King's return, the blindness of the former Age and the miseries of this last are vanish'd away: now men are generally weary of the Relicks of Antiquity, and satiated with Religious Disputes; now not only the eyes of men but their hands are open, and prepar'd to labour; Now there is a universal desire and appetite after Knowledge, after the peaceable, the fruitful, nourishing knowledge; and not after that of antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments, or sharp contentions, instead of food: which when the minds of men requir'd bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a serpent."[1181]

Here too, then, there was reaction. It could not suffice to lift the plane of national life, which was determined by the general conditions and the general culture; nor did it alter the predominance of belles lettres in the reading of the educated; but it served to sow in that life the seed of science, destined to work through the centuries a gradual transformation of activity and thought which should make impossible the old political strifes and generate new. Out of experiment came invention, machinery, theory, new scepticism, rationalism, democracy. It is difficult to measure, but not easy to over-estimate, the gain to intellectual life from even a partial discrediting of the old preoccupation with theology, which in the centuries between Luther and Spinoza stood for an "expense of spirit" that is depressing to think of. Down even to our own day, the waste of labour and learning continues; but from the time when two-thirds of Europe had been agonised by wars set up or stimulated by theological disputes, the balance begins to lean towards saner things. The second generation after that in which there arose a "free way of reasoning"[1182] saw the beginnings of "Freethinking" in those religious problems which were for the present laid aside, and the foundation of a new experiential philosophy. New and great reactions against these were to come; reactions of endowed clericalism, of popular sloth, of new "enthusiasm" generated in new undergrowths of ignorance, of recoil from terrific democratic revolution. But the new principle was to persist.

§ 4

It is not easy, at this time of day, to accept as a scientific product the confused theory of constitutionalism which gradually grew up in English politics from William the Third onwards. The theory in all its forms is in logic so invertebrate, and in morals so far from satisfying any fairly developed sense of political justice, that we are apt to dismiss it in derision. In so far, indeed, as it proceeds on a formulation of the "social contract" it is always severely handled by the school of Sir Henry Maine, which here represents the anxiety of the upper classes since the French Revolution to find some semblance of rational answer to the moral plea that all men are entitled to political enfranchisement and social help on the simple ground of reciprocity, supposed to be canonised for Christians in the "Golden Rule." Locke, of course, was not thinking of the working mass when he wrote his Letters on Government, any more than when he helped to draw up a constitution for South Carolina endorsing slavery.[1183] But he was at least much nearer rational morals than were his antagonists; the provisions for liberty of conscience in the South Carolina Constitution are notably far in advance of any official view ever previously promulgated; and in subsuming the "social contract" he was but following Hooker and Milton, and indeed adapting Aristotle, an authority whom Locke's later critics are wont to magnify.

Sir Frederick Pollock, in his Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (p. 20), assumes to have saved Aristotle from the criticism which assails the "social contract" theory, by saying that Aristotle regards a "clanless and masterless man" as a monster or an impossibility, whereas the "theorists of the social contract school" take such a man to be the social unit. There is really no reason to suppose that Aristotle would have denied a pre-political state of nomadic barbarism such as is vaguely figured by Thucydides (i, 2); and as a matter of fact he does expressly posit a process of society-making by compact, first by the utility-seeking combination of families in a village, later by the villages joining themselves into a State, whose express purpose is "good life" (Politics, I, ii). It does not cancel this to say that Aristotle also makes the State "prior" in the rational order to man, for his "prior" (I, ii, 12-14) is not a historical but a metaphysical or ethical proposition. In the third book, again (c. 9), he endorses a proposition of Lycophron which virtually affirms the social contract.

And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for defining a State as a society of men assembled to live well and happily. Bodin insists (De la République, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5; l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i, ad init. p. 350) that all States originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly. Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.