It is surely time that this palæo-theological fashion of explaining human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century before the conservative reaction (see the _Esprit des Lois_, vii, 6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20; Dunbar's _Essays_, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be applied to many questions of moral science after they have been wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (_Evolution and Ethics_, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting "that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because "slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.