I think the same may be said of his book on ‘Physics and Politics,’ a book in which I find new force and depth every time I take it up afresh. It is true that Bagehot had a keen sympathy with natural science, that he devoured all Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Wallace’s books, and many of a much more technical kind, as, for example, Professor Huxley’s on the ‘Principles of Physiology,’ and grasped the leading ideas contained in them with a firmness and precision that left nothing to be desired. But after all, ‘Physics and Politics’ could never have been written without that sort of living insight into man which was the life of all his earlier essays. The notion that a ‘cake of custom,’ of rigid, inviolable law, was the first requisite for a strong human society, and that the very cause which was thus essential for the _first_ step of progress—the step towards unity—was the great danger of the second step—the step out of uniformity—and was the secret of all arrested and petrified civilisations, like the Chinese, is an idea which first germinated in Bagehot’s mind at the time he was writing his cynical letters from Paris about stupidity being the first requisite of a political people; though I admit, of course, that it could not have borne the fruit it did, without Mr. Darwin’s conception of a natural selection through conflict, to help it on. Such passages as the following could evidently never have been written by a mere student of Darwinian literature, nor without the trained imagination exhibited in Bagehot’s literary essays:— ‘No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilisations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not. And then they themselves were caught in their own yoke. The customary discipline which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation which are the principle of progress. Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality;’[15]