past experience. The historian began to feel an ambition to deal in philosophical theories. He was, moreover, touched by the great scientific movement. A complete survey of the intellectual history of the time would of course have to deal with the great men who were laying the foundations of the modern physical sciences; such as Black, and Priestley, and Cavendish, and Hunter. It would indeed, have to point out how small was the total amount of such knowledge in comparison with the vast superstructure which has been erected in the last century. The foundation of the Royal Institution at the end of the eighteenth century marks, perhaps, the point at which the importance of physical science began to impress the popular imagination. But great thinkers had long recognised the necessity of applying scientific method in the sphere of social and political investigation. Two men especially illustrate the tendency and the particular turn which it took in England. Adam Smith's great book in 1776 applied scientific method to political economy. Smith is distinguished from his French predecessors by the historical element of his work; by his careful study, that is, of economic history, and his consequent presentation of his theory not as a body of absolute and quasi-mathematical truth, but as resting upon the experience and applicable to the concrete facts of his time. His limitation is equally characteristic. He investigated the play of the industrial mechanism with too little reference to the thorough interdependence of economic and other social conditions. Showing how that mechanism adapts itself to supply and demand, he comes to hold that the one thing necessary is to leave free play to competition, and that the one essential force is the individual's desire for his own material interests. He became, therefore, the prophet of letting things alone. That doctrine--whatever its merits or defects--implies acquiescence in the existing order, and is radically opposed to a demand for a reconstruction of society. This is most clearly illustrated by the other thinker Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, unlike Smith, shared the contempt for history of the absolute theorists, and was laying down a theory conceived in the spirit of absolutism which became the creed of the uncompromising political radicals of the next generation. But it is characteristic that Bentham was not, during the eighteenth century, a Radical at all. He altogether repudiated and vigorously denounced the 'Rights of Men' doctrines of Rousseau and his followers, and regarded the Declaration of Independence in which they were embodied as a mere hotchpotch of absurdity. He is determined to be thoroughly empirical--to take men as he found them. But his utilitarianism supposed that men's views of happiness and utility were uniform and clear, and that all that was wanted was to show them the means by which their ends could be reached. Then, he thought, rulers and subjects would be equally ready to apply