It is after pages of the freest philosophical discussion, that he arrives at this conclusion--discussion, in which the historical elements and powers are for the first time scientifically recognized and treated throughout with the hand of the new master. For this is a philosopher, who is able to receive into his philosophy the fact, that out of the most depraved and vicious social materials, by the inevitable operation of the universal natural laws, there will, perhaps, result a social adhesion and predominance of powers--a social 'whole,' more capable of maintaining itself than any that Plato or Aristotle, from the heights of their abstractions, could have invented for them. He ridicules, indeed, those ideal politics of antiquity as totally unfit for practical realisation, and admits that though the question as to that which is absolutely the best form of government might be of some value _in a new world_, the basis of all alterations in existing governments should be the fact, that we take a world already formed to certain customs, and do not beget it, as Pyrrha or Cadmus did theirs, and by what means soever we may have the privilege to rebuild and reform it anew, we can hardly _writhe it_ from its wonted bent, but we shall _break all_. For the subtlest principles of the philosophy of things are introduced into this discussion, and the boldest applications of the Shakspere muse are repeated in it. 'That is the way to _lay all flat_,' cries the philosophic poet in the Roman play, opposing on the part of the Conservatist, the violence of an oppressed people, struggling for new forms of government, and bringing out fully, along with their claims, the anti-revolutionary side of the question. 'That which tempts me out on these journeys,' continues this foreign philosopher, speaking in his usual ambiguous terms of his rambling excursive habits and eccentricities of proceedings, glancing also, perhaps, at his outlandish tastes--'that which tempts me out on these journeys, is _unsuitableness to the present manners of_ OUR STATE. _I_ could easily console myself with this corruption in reference to the _public interest_, but not to _my own: I_ am _in particular_ too much oppressed:--for, _in my neighbourhood_ we are of late by _the long libertinage of our civil wars grown old_ in so _riotous a form of state_, that in earnest _'tis a wonder how it can subsist_. In fine, I see by our example, that the society of men is maintained and held together _at what price soever; in what condition soever they are placed they will close and stick together_ [see the doctrine of things and their original powers in the "Novum Organum"]--_moving and heaping up themselves, as uneven bodies, that shuffled together without order, find of themselves means to unite and settle_. King Philip mustered up a rabble of the most wicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them altogether in a city which he had built for that purpose, which bore their name; I