of the living progress of the nation. The history of the early period would be more satisfactory, if it informed us when the pump and the potter's wheel were first used in Britain. Closely akin to this subject is the progress of agriculture, which, however, is a matter simpler and more easy of attainment than many of the historian's other objects of inquiry.
In truth, it may be safely said, that every circumstance that can be discovered concerning the particular country, and every thing, whether animate or inanimate that is on its surface, comes within the compass of its history, using that word in the sense of merely civil history,—unless in so far as it belongs to what is natural history. And yet even from this science civil history has many lights to receive. Human physiology is intimately connected with the elucidations of the historian; and it would appear that, in regard to the influence of political institutions on the physical as well as the moral state of races of men, we are still only on the threshold of knowledge. Here the physiologist, and the recorder of political events, who heretofore have travelled on different roads, may some day or other find a common object of exertion, and may tell us, by their united labours, why the race that inhabited ancient Egypt, from being the most inventive, should have been among the most supine of people; why the Chinese should have passed through an epoch of active discovery, and should have thenceforth, unlike the rest of the world, neither forgotten nor improved the fruits of their original enterprise; why the Celts, once the nurses of European learning, should, at a later time, have appeared as if doomed to retire before the ardent genius of the Teutonic race; and why this race, after being long inferior to other branches of the Caucasian family, should appear,
with British enterprise and German thought, likely to absorb the faculties of the rest of mankind.
The historian must not wholly neglect other natural productions. The inferior animals and the vegetable kingdom are intimately connected with the fate of the human beings who are the immediate object of his labours. With geology he may appear to have comparatively little concern; yet the marble of Greece, and the coal and iron of Britain, have had no little influence on the destinies of these nations.
Hume did so much towards the completion of that circle of knowledge with which the historian has to deal, that he was the first to add to a mere narrative of events, an inquiry into the progress of the people, and of their arts, literature, manners, and general social condition. This attempt was so original, that, as it embodied in some measure the theory developed in Voltaire's "Essai sur les Moeurs," first published in 1756, when the first volume of the "History of the Stuarts" had been two years before the public, it was supposed that Hume might have borrowed the idea from some fragments of that work which had been surreptitiously printed with the title "Abrégé de l'Histoire Universelle." There seems to be no room, however, for such a supposition. Hume's own "Political Discourses" are as close an approach to this method of inquiry as the work of Voltaire; and if we look for such productions of other writers as may have led him into this train of thought, it would be more just to name Bacon and Montesquieu.[129:1] The works of such authors as Guizot and Hallam may teach us that much had to be added to Hume's system
of historical composition, to render it perfect; but they do so in the same manner as the last steam engine shows us how many improvements have been made on the inventions of Watt.
We now resume the correspondence with Millar. The letter immediately following, puts beyond a doubt, what had only been partially believed, that Hume had, at one time, expressed an intention of writing an ecclesiastical history. Of the manner in which he would have executed such a task, opinions will widely vary.
Hume to Andrew Millar.
"Edinburgh, 15th March, 1762.