HABIT AND PROGRESS. 245 look forward with confidence to the establishment of more salu- tary institutions and to the enactment of more beneficent laws, they count with even greater confidence on the attainment of a still higher perfection in the arts of communication and locomo- tion, of nutrition and education, of attack and defence. But " the truth is " (to use a favourite phrase of his own) that Sir H. Maine, while he has made special contributions of great value to the theory of evolution, never seems to have grasped that theory as a whole, nor fairly to have faced its implications. His is a pre-scientific mind. His earliest laurels were won in a. campaign against the metaphysical idea of Nature, and his dislike for that idea has driven him to the opposite pole of thought. I have elsewhere endeavoured to show that, when the idea of Nature first came into prominence, it was met by the counter-idea of what the Greeks called Nomos, that is to say, convention, custom or subjectivity ; and that this became the rallying point of a school whom I have called Humanists, but who are perhaps most generally known as Sceptics. The note of this school is an excessive dependence on the unanalysed opinions and feelings of mankind, whether individual or corporate, and an equally excessive estimate of the part played by voluntary effort or chance in shaping the course of human affairs. Thinkers with such a bias still attribute much more importance to the arbitrary and accidental elements in history than those of the opposite school. This, it seems to me, is the characteristic weakness of Sir H. Maine. Traces of a similar tendency crop up now and then in the writings of a still more eminent thinker, John Stuart Mill. Mill also was a great enemy of Nature ; but, remarkably enough, he made war on her in the interest of those democratic tendencies which the author of Popular Government watches with such distrust and dislike. Finding certain social arrangements, which to him seemed highly inexpedient, consecrated as natural and therefore indefeasible, he sought to prove, and, in my opinion, did prove, that natural is not synonymous with right. The two publicists also agree in attributing to forms of government a great influence on human happiness. But, while to Mill the enfran- chisement of classes hitherto excluded from political power meant the promise of new and valuable additions to the existing stock of ideas, to Sir H. Maine it threatens the possible extinction of originality and the loss of what has been gained under a monar- chical or aristocratic regime. For, according to him, progress, whatever else it may mean, means change of some sort, and change runs against the grain of average human nature, even continuing to be unacceptable for some considerable time after its introduction. With this point we enter on the very heart of the discussion. In order to prove the profound unpopularity of change much stress is laid on the force of Habit ; the repulsion excited by what we call bad manners is ascribed to the same inbred conservatism, while the evidence of Oriental races and of women in all countries
