the founders of the comparative method as applied to the moral and political sciences.
He began at the other end. This may seem a little thing. In reality it was a very great thing. The human mind is intensely conservative. For generations men go on working at the old subjects in the old ways. Then comes a man who, by some new thought, it may be by some new phrase, which becomes a catchword, like 'evolution,' takes his fellow men out of the old ruts, and opens up to them new regions of speculation and discovery. These are the men that change the world. And Montesquieu was one of these men.
He has been claimed on high authority[1], but with less accuracy, as the founder of the historical method, which is at least as old as Thucydides. That he appreciated the importance of this method is true. 'I could wish,' he says in one of his fragments[2], 'that there were better works on the laws of each country. To know modern times, one must know antiquity: each law must be followed in the spirit of all the ages.' But for its application he had neither the requisite knowledge nor the requisite capacity. Like his predecessors, he speculated about the state of nature. But for any knowledge of savage or uncivilized man, without which all speculations and theories as to the origin of society are idle, he was dependent on books of travel and accounts of missionaries, with no means of checking their accuracy. Of the Iroquois, who stood for the typical savage in the early eighteenth century, he had doubtless read in Lahortan and in The Relations of the Jesuits, but one is sometimes tempted to think that he
