Aristotle. He began his treatise on the State by investigating the elements out of which he believed it to have grown; and he was right in his method and his facts. The search for origins is now so favourite an occupation of the learned as to be occasionally laughed at; but it only shows that we live, like Aristotle, in a scientific age, which is not content with getting to know facts, but seeks to obtain a better knowledge of them by accounting for them. The student of the life of plants or animals must in- these days also learn their morphology, i.e. the beginning and growth of the various forms which they have taken as species. And the principle is the same in all sciences, including the science of the State. The reason for this is very simple. The conditions present at the beginning and during the early stages of a State, as of any species of plant or animal, have deeply influenced the whole life and nature of the organism. "Back to Aristotle" has to be said in these days in many departments of knowledge;[1] for it was he who first taught that the object of your study is better understood if you can discover how it was born and how it grows.
The origin of the modern State is a complicated study, and of course each individual State has had its own peculiar experiences in its early days, and
- ↑ Sir F. Pollock, History of the Science of Politics, p. 124.
who start at a later date are either lawyers like Professor Dicey (Law of the Constitution, p. 14), or historians who post-date the origin of modern States, like M. Boutmy, who considers that in the seventeenth century "the French nation was still in embryo" (English Constitution, p. 19).
