Of course, it was impossible to get out any scientific doctrine of the human society, without coming at once in collision with that doctrine of the divinity of arbitrary power which the monarchs of England were then openly sustaining. Who needs to be told, that he who would handle that argument scientifically, then, without military weapons, as this inquirer _would_, must indeed 'pray in aid of _similes_.' And yet a very searching and critical inquiry into the claims of that institution, which the new philosophy found in possession of the human welfare, and asserting a divine right to it as a thing of private property and legitimate family inheritance,--such a criticism was, in fact, inevitably involved in that inquiry into the principles of a _human_ subjection which appeared to this philosopher to belong properly to the more chosen subjects of a scientific investigation.
And notwithstanding the delicacy of the subjects, and the extremely critical nature of the investigation, when it came to touch those particulars, with which the personal observations and experiments of the founders of this new school in philosophy had tended to enrich their collections in this department,--'and the aim is better,' says the principal spokesman of this school, who quietly proposes to introduce this method into _politics_, 'the aim is better _when the mark is alive_;' notwithstanding the difficulties which appeared to lie then in the way of such an investigation, the means of conducting it to the entire satisfaction, and, indeed, to the large entertainment of the persons chiefly concerned, were not wanting. For this was one of those 'secrets of policy,' which have always required the aid of fable, and the idea of _dramatising_ the fable for the sake of reaching in some sort those who are incapable of receiving any thing 'which does not directly fall under, and strike the senses,' as the philosopher has it; those who are capable of nothing but 'dumb shows and noise,' as Hamlet has it; this idea, though certainly a very happy, was not with these men an original one. Men, whose relations to the state were not so different as the difference in the forms of government would perhaps lead us to suppose,--men of the gravest learning and enriched with the choicest accomplishments of their time, had adopted that same method of influencing public opinion, some two thousand years earlier, and even as long before as that, there were 'secrets of morality and policy,' to which this form of writing appeared to offer the most fitting veil.