In this general picture of the earliest development of the human mind, we can select such nations only as are sufficiently well known, or respecting whom the sources of information are now at least of easier access; for were we to comprehend in this general survey, nations with whom we were less perfectly acquainted, we should be led into minute and interminable researches, without, after all, perhaps, obtaining any new or satisfactory result for the principal object in view. In the first period of antiquity will figure the Chinese, the Indians and the Egyptians, besides the isolated, and the so-called chosen people of the Hebrews; and if I commence by the remotest of the civilized countries of Asia, China, I beg leave to premise that I mean to determine no question of priority as to the respective antiquity of those nations, or to adjudge any preference to one or other amongst them. Indeed their own chronological accounts and pretensions, which often deserve the name of chronological fictions, turn out, on a closer inquiry, to be mere calculations of astronomical periods; and a sound historical criticism will not admit that they were originally meant to be chronological. Suffice it to say that the three nations we have mentioned belonged to the same period of the world, and attained to an equal, or a very similar, degree of moral and intellectual refinement; and so in respect to that higher object, the chronological dispute becomes unnecessary, or is, at least, of minor importance. Among those, however, who take an active part in these researches, a partiality for one or other of these nations, and for their respective antiquity easily springs up; for even objects the most remote will excite in the human breast the spirit of party. In order to keep as free as possible from prepossessions of this kind, I have adopted a species of geographical division of my subject, which, when I come to treat later of the different periods of modern history, will give place to a more chronological arrangement. I said a _species_ of geographical division, for undoubtedly from the special nature of this historical enquiry, it must be supposed I shall take a different point of view in the geographical survey of the earth than ordinarily occurs in geographical investigations. The geographies for common use properly take as their basis the present situation of the different states and kingdoms now in existence. But a more scientific geography adopts the direction of mountains, and the course of rivers, the vallies produced by the former, and the space occupied by the waters of the latter, as the leading clue to the division and arrangement of the earth. Thus in the philosophy of history the series of the principal civilized states will form a high, commanding chain; and the philosophic historian will have to follow from east to west, or in any other direction that history may point out, not merely rivers transporting