The philosophy of Bacon was essentially oriented towards the world exterior to man, but it had already taken to consider moral and especially political life in the light of natural causes. The divine origin of the king’s majesty was in due time to be denied in consequence of such a view, although Bacon little suspected the fact and was ready to uphold such divine origin with all the force of his genius. Another consequence was to be the consideration of human society ruled by the same laws that rule the mechanism of nature, and this was certainly pregnant with political revolutions. The systematic empiricism so characteristic of English politics need not be traced farther back. Yet before coming to the political conception of Hobbes, who was the first great follower of Bacon and one of the first great political thinkers of England, the contribution of Grotius must be considered as Hobbes has a good deal in common with him. Hugo Grotius was born 1583, twenty-two years after Bacon and five years before Hobbes. Like Bacon this Dutchman was a statesman and an ambassador. The practice of business had therefore a great influence on his ideas and was apt to temper the excess of doctrine of the man. His idea of natural law is a heritage both of Pagan times and of Scholasticism, and based both on the distinction established by the Roman jurists, between the _jus civile_ and _jus naturale_, and on the mediæval notion of _sociability_, a special sense of which he supposes man to be endowed by Nature. The way such a notion is applied is, on the contrary, due to the more modern theory of Nature; and there we meet with an assertion that would have roused Machiavelli from his grave if he had heard it, and that undoubtedly has given origin to the negative understanding of history against which Idealism and Fascism are reacting with all their forces.