the past; opinion knows by signs or forms that it is so for the present. But the knowledge of the essence, which is what we term science, can alone answer for the future, and through it fully for the past and present. For it must needs come to corroborate its own postulates and principles. Thus, at all times and with even savages, the present theory of the solar system must needs have been implied in some one or other of their common sentiments; as the succession of day and night, the main direction of the sun's course, and even the worship of this luminary in quality of deity—that is, as source of life and light and goodness to the earth. The ancient Pythagoreans went further and gave this sentiment a form, by conjecturing that the effects, instead of divine attributes or emanations, were caused by the earth's rotation and its revolution round the sun instead of the reverse as was the sentiment of the savages. But the philosophers, too, could prove it but by a shibboleth of their own sect, which, although it might respond to the facts then before them, went to pieces before changes presupposed by them, both past and future. It was this latter view, accordingly, that Copernicus at last came, not to feel himself, nor to opine with some others, but to prove to all mankind who had the requisite intelligence, and by the evidence called demonstration, of which the object is science. It should be noted, however, that, even in astronomy, although the most advanced because the simplest of the sciences, the demonstration is still imperfect in even its Newtonian stage. The notion called attraction of the planets and other bodies, and of their original distribution throughout space by the deity, is, as this agency indeed confesses, a knowledge still of mere opinion. It accounts statically for the present, but leaves the history at loose ends. In the knowledge of the social system, also, as of the solar, although infinitely the more complex, the march must be the same at bottom. There was never a tribe, perhaps, or other portion of mankind whether civilized or savage, who had not the persuasion that the annals of themselves and of the fellowmen they had to do with proceeded from the special valor or other gifts of the rival tribes, or from deities who favored them, which meant the same by reflexion. Ages later, when historians came to treat in form of such events, they spoke expressly of the causative force or faculties of certain peoples, as of the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, and in our own day, the Anglo-Saxons. Each of these. were, for the time, represented as destined to rule mankind. But, according as the relative future brought them severally to decay, the etiology of race was abandoned as a mere opinion. A cognate cause of this effect was, that the theory was ap plied usually but to the race of the theorist himself and when a ruling one, and took no notice of the races ruled, as this condition seems to need no faculty. So the partial and purblind'notion was cast aside with the day. It was only when all the races throughout all times and all vicissitudes of weakness or strength, of ignominy or glory, of virtue or corruption, could be viewed as moved by one great law, that the moving cause could take the scientific character implied by race. Thus, all the plants of the wilderness must have been known throughout all ages in their uniformities of growth and of form and of propagation. But it was only with the idea of the law of their development that we can master any thorough comprehension of the chaos. Now such a chaos, such a wilderness, continues still to be all social history, with the enormous aggravations of immensity and abstraction. For it stretches through all times and regions, and remains visible but through the intellect. That human races form the organs, the mechanism of this social history seems thus a position which all admit by implication or express opinion, and which awaits the recognition of integral theory from demonstration. But the present small occasion is no time or place for such a task. So we propose but a specimen of the enterprise, a monogram, by way of inciting other wills of less inadequate scope and leisure. For this end, take a transverse section, or cut, of the social system at its point of utmost European unity and intensity, and which must needs disclose the grain of its specific texture through all time. Such an epoch in Europe is confessedly the middle-ages, when under the grand unity which took accordingly the name of Christendom-thus imaging the unity of a family or house, domus-and the intensity or elevation of the social development will be determined by the philosophy known as the Scholastic System. So that a theory of general history will thus have been contracted to the most compendious scale both of precision and perfection. But, as is familiar to many readers, the philosophy called the Scholastic is distinguished from all others, perhaps known to speculative history, by the regular mechanism which pervades its entire composition. Throughout its whole course of some five or six centuries, it consisted in the contention of three rival sects, who rose progressively with its development, and retroceded from its culmination-the former march being thus a free philosophy, and the other properly a close system. In the ancient Greek philosophy there were indeed three like compartments, known in order as the Pythagoric, the Eliatic, and the Socratic, and this last again was subpartitioned into Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics. But there was a deep difference admitted by the very language. The Greek divisions were all viewed as independent schemes of doctrine, and therefore were styled "schools," and denominated from the personal founder-all except the last, or Stoics, who took this title from their place of teaching. The several forms of Scholasticism had a compact reference to one another, were described as "sects" or sections of a single sphere of doctrine, and took their name, not from the authors, who remained un known, but from the subject essences. It is a further proof of the advance of this philosophy upon the ancient. These three sects of the Scholastic System are famous through the Christian world, by the names of Realists, Nominalists, and Conceptualists, in this succession. And the reason of this order is the law itself of all progression, which must proceed first upon the things themselves, then on their names as the noting contraries, and at last compass, by oscillations from these two extremities, the solid essence. For the extremes can show the thing but in the mere surface or the mere section, from both of which we come by infinite adjustments to conceive the essence. Now the present and practical thesis is, that those three sects of Scholasticism have, as a point of fact, as well as a direction from the foregoing principles, represented the three contemporary civilizing races, and which were in order, the Roman, the Gothic, and the Celtic. And surely the results should be of rare moment on their own account, and apart from all extension to a science or theory of social history. But first it will be proper to delineate the three doctrines, that we may know precisely how to identify them with the races. Those three appellatives of Realist, Nominalist, and Conceptualist are taken quite literally from contrasted grounds of human knowledge, and of course by men conformed intellectually to these differences. With the foremost class of Realists, as the name itself declares, the knowledge lay in the bare perception of what several objects present all in common, and which was thus regarded as something distinct from their points of difference. It seemed to possess a more stable and thus independent unity, either in or anterior or posterior to the central subject. These variations of in re, ante rem, post rem, which formed in their day so many subjects or shadings, were, however, but the mere historical development of the main notion, to meet the exigencies of attack upon the manner of the common nexus. This general substratum was alone deemed real—or flowed through time without cessation, in the manner of all matter-and thence the name of Realism. It is primitively from the Greek verb pέw, to flow. The existence of this substratum the class called Nominalists quite denied. With them all knowledge and even reality were not alone founded on, but also strictly bounded or confined to, the bare particulars; besides which they could see nothing throughout nature except words or names-thence the potency of words or names with them to change the nature or the powers of things. The name, as it applied, in its quality of mere sign alike, to all the different individuals of the classbeing itself an emanation from an individual person-appeared in this way to represent the objects jointly, and thus generalize them. But it was only through the subjective medium of man or his personality, as, on the other side, the Realists had generalized them through a physical substratum. In this the result seemed indeed more stable, as a thing of sense and objectivity; whereas the names appeared to lie at the discretion of the personal utterer. So, then, all positive and real nature would be a chaos of mere particulars. "The Nominalists (defines Leibnitz, who was himself of the sect) are those who hold that all things beyond individual substances are but mere names-qui omnia putant esse nuda nomina, præter substantios singulares. The reality of abstract ideas and of essences they reject utterly." These universals both of substance and essence they called entities; and which were not to be multiplied, said Occam, beyond necessity-men being thus left each the judge of his own needs to admit or create them! Thus this celebrated summary of the wisdom of the sect was a maxim less unfit for the economy of a kitchen than for the organization of a system of philosophy. Now, these two doctrines were in principle, as they are known to have been in history, directly in the teeth, so to speak, of one another. What the one side asserted, the other denied. Wherefore, as having nothing to proceed upon in common, they could only affirm and deny without proving, and so were kept to an air-beating oscillation for ages. Whence the Nominalists, too, had, like the Realists, various subjects, through the means of which the two parties had often graded toward each other. Accordingly, upon this ground of mutual convergence, there gradually arose between them a third and the supreme doctrine, which came to comprehend through them that things in their contexture consist neither in abstract substances nor yet in verbal signs, but in something which controls the energies or operations of their |