Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/198

144 in their political establishments, and in their municipal regulations. On this point, indeed, an appeal may be made to the author himself. “I write not,” says he, “to censure anything established in any country whatsoever; every nation will here find the reasons on which its maxims are founded.” This plan, however, which, when understood with proper limitations, is highly philosophical, and which raises Jurisprudence, from the uninteresting and useless state in which we find it in Grotius and Puffendorff, to be one of the most agreeable and important branches of useful knowledge (although the execution of it occupies by far the greater part of his work), is prosecuted by Montesquieu in so very desultory a manner, that I am inclined to think he rather fell into it insensibly, in consequence of the occasional impulse of accidental curiosity, than from any regular design he had formed to himself when he began to collect materials for that celebrated performance. He seems, indeed, to confess this in the following passage of his preface: “Often have I begun, and as often laid aside, this undertaking. I have followed my observations without any fixed plan, and without thinking either of rules or exceptions. I have found the truth only to lose it again.”

But whatever opinion we may form on this point, Montesquieu enjoys an unquestionable claim to the grand idea of connecting Jurisprudence with History and Philosophy, in such a manner as to render them all subservient to their mutual illustration. Some occasional disquisitions of the same kind may, it is true, be traced in earlier writers, particularly in the works of Bodinus; but they are of a nature too trifling to detract from the glory of Montesquieu. When we compare the jurisprudential researches of the latter with the systems previously in possession of the schools, the step which he made appears to have been so vast as almost to justify the somewhat too ostentatious motto prefixed to them by the author; Prolem sine Matre creatam. Instead of confining himself, after the example of his predecessors, to an interpretation of one part of the Roman code by another, he studied the of these laws in the political views of their authors, and in the peculiar circumstances of that extraordinary race. He combined the science of law with the history of political society, employing the latter to account for the varying aims of the legislator; and the former, in its turn, to explain the nature of the government, and the manners of the people. Nor did he limit his inquiries to the Roman law, and to Roman history; but, convinced that the general principles of human nature are everywhere the same, he searched for new lights among the subjects of every government, and the inhabitants of every climate; and, while he thus opened inex- 11