Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ORIGIN OF THE STATE A T the basis, then, of politics lies the question, - What is just ? Political philosophy, as I just now insisted, is a chapter in the Philosophy of Right, and in it we may proceed either by synthesis or by analysis. We may take certain rights, and investigate their ethical source and their primary principles. But we cannot deduce from a principle alone—even if it be a true principle—its varying applications and ramifications, in the varying conditions and needs of human society. In politics both the a priori and the a posteriori methods are equally valid and equally valuable. Neither is sufficient by itself. History teaches us the Jimv, metaphysics the why. To know anything scientifically, we must know it in its development; in the process by which it has become what it is. But that is not enough; we must know it also in its cause. The a priori method has never been popular in England. And the absurdities and atrocities of the Jacobin disciples of Rousseau, in the last century, not unnaturally overwhelmed it with discredit.The mistake of the legislators of the French Kevo- lution did not, however, lie in their belief that there are first principles in politics. It lay in their gross misapprehension of those principles, and in their fond conceit that what Avould suit the phantoms "") 1 of their ratiocination—all alike, equal, independent, and entering for the first time into a social contract—would also suit the beings of flesh and blood, so widely differing in character, capacity, and condition, who inhabited eighteenth-century France. I do not know who has written more wisely on this subject than Taine. And it may be worth while here to translate a page which he has devoted to it, although in an English version small justice can be ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.