Though Montesquieu, however, is the father of the philosophy of history, it is due to Tacitus and Machiavel to say, that he is not the author of political thought. In the first of these writers is to be found the most profound observations on the working of the human mind, whether in individuals or bodies of men, that ever were formed by human sagacity: in the latter, a series of remarks on Roman history, and the corresponding events in the republics of modern Italy, which, in point of deep political wisdom and penetration, never were surpassed. Lord Bacon, too, had in his Essays put forth may maxims of political truth, with that profound sagacity and unerring wisdom by which his thoughts were so preeminently distinguished. But still these men, great as they were, and much as they added to the materials of the philosophy of history, can hardly be said to have mastered that philosophy itself. It was not their object to do so; it did not belong to the age in which they lived to make any such attempt. They gave incomparable observations upon detached points in human annals, but they did not take a general view of their tendency. They did not consider whence the world had come, or whither it was going. They formed no connected system in regard to the march of human events. They saw clearly the effects of particular measures or systems of government at the time, but they did not reflect on the chain of causes which first raised up, and afterwards undermined it. Aristotle, the most powerful intellect of the ancient world, was of the same calibre as a political observer. He considered only the effects of the various forms of government which he saw established around him. In that survey he was admirable, but he never went beyond it. Bossuet's _Universal History_ is little more than a history of the Jews; he refers every thing to the direct and immediate agency of Providence, irrespective of the freedom of the human will. Montesquieu first fixed his eyes upon the rise, progress, and decay of nations, as worked out by the actions of free agents. The _Grandeur et Decadence des Romains_ is as original as the _Principia_, and laid the foundation of a science as sublime, and perhaps still more important to man than the laws of the planetary bodies.