study of civilisation which characterised the latter part of the eighteenth century, following up the problem which was enunciated in Rousseau’s paradox, that “law itself must be created by the social spirit which it aims at creating.” To recognise the social spirit {41} of a people, as the central unity behind its law and culture and politics, was the principle of the various researches dealing with formative art, poetry, language, religion, and the state, which marked the close of the eighteenth century (compare Wolf’s theory of Homer as the utterance of a racial mind), and laid the foundation of nineteenth century idealism. The true Greek renaissance, initiated in the age of Winckelmann, forcing modern minds into contact with Hellenic ideas in their original form, and no longer through Latin intermediaries, furnished a type and focus for these researches by bringing before the thoughts of students the brilliant individuality of the ancient city-state, the crude traditions of which had already exercised the most powerful influence on Rousseau, and through him on the Revolution. At the same time the organic sciences were full of activity. The life-work of Goethe marks the parallelism of the two movements. It is plain that the doctrines of Comte were no more than a very one-sided attempt to formulate the significance of the fermentation around him, and that deeply as he felt the unity of the social being, his expression of it ignored half the lesson of the times. Thus the generalities of Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of culture; and the conception of a national mind and character takes its unquestioned place in modern social theory. It may be well at this point also to call attention to the researches which later historians have directed to what may be called “Comparative Politics”; the relations, that is, of communities under government with respect to the {42} mode in which they are governed. [1] For this branch of inquiry once more, though narrow and empty by itself, yet does aid in bringing to light the purposive and conscious character of society, and in correcting the tendency to treat it altogether as a “natural” phenomenon. [1] Freeman’s _Comparative Politics_, and Seeley’s _Introduction to Political Science_.