it was possible during the last thirty years to put the history of human institutions on as firm a basis as the history of the development of any species of plants or animals.
Of course, it would be very unjust to forget the work that was already accomplished as early as the "thirties" of the nineteenth century by the school of Augustin Thierry in France, and that of Maurer and the "Germanists" in Germany, of which Kostomaroff, Byelayeff and so many others were the followers in Russia. The method of evolution had certainly been applied since the Encyclopaedists to the study of customs and institutions, as well as languages. But to obtain correct and really scientific results became possible only since men of science learned to treat the facts of history in the same way as naturalists examine the gradual development of the organs of a plant or that of a new species.
In their own day, the metaphysical formulas no doubt had helped the thinkers to make some approximate generalisations. They helped especially to rouse numbed minds. They stimulated thought by their sometimes poetical indications of the unity of Nature and its never-ceasing life. At a time when reaction was supreme, as it was in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the inductive generalisations of the Encyclopaedists and their English and Scotch predecessors were nearly forgotten, and when it would have needed moral courage to speak of the unity of physical and "spiritual" nature in the face of triumphant mysticism—in those dark days the poetical conceptions of some French thinkers and the nebulous metaphysics of the Germans upheld at least the taste for generalisations.
But the generalisations of that time, being established either by the dialectic method or by means of a half-conscious induction, were on account of that despairingly vague. The first—the dialectic ones—were mostly based on naïve assertions, similar to those made by Greeks in ancient days, when they affirmed that planets must travel through space along circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve. If the naïve character of such assertions and the total absence of proofs did not strike everyone, it was only because it was concealed by the vagueness of the arguments and nebulous reasonings, as well as by an obscure and grotesquely heavy style. As to the second, i.e., those generalisations which had at their origin a semi-conscious induction, they were always built upon a series of extremely limited observations—like the hasty generalisations of Weismann, built
