necessarily affect his treatment of political science, helping his insight in some directions, hindering it, as we may think, in others—not because philosophy and politics have nothing to do with one another, but because his metaphysics have their defects. A philosophical treatment of a subject attempts something more than merely putting facts and stray judgments on them alongside of one another; but, of course, it carries with it the necessary imperfection of all human systems.

The great distinction which Aristotle inherits from the Platonic school and from older Greek thought the distinction between 'Being' and 'Becoming'-underlies his treatment of the relation between the question of the origin of the state and the question of its nature and functions. The city-state comes into existence for the sake of life (i.e. to satisfy physical needs), but its being is for the sake of the good life.' This philosophical distinction between historical origin and ethical validity saves him from the one-sidedness of so much later speculation about the state. Those, like Sir Robert Filmer, who in the seventeenth century maintained the origin of the state in the patriarchal household, thought they had thereby proved that the only legitimate form of government must be paternal despotism; on the other side John Locke, in order to defend constitutional government, felt it necessary to suppose society originating in a contract for the protection of person and property. Aristotle, as a man of science, has an interest in purely historical questions of origin; but he never assumes that the history of how an institution came to be decides the question what is its proper function now. In adopting a genetic or historical method, Aristotle does not discard the use of an analytic method also, nor escape the question of teleology. The true nature of a thing, he holds, is determined by its end or complete realisation (Pol. I, 2).

Mr Newman, who in his Introduction approaches Aristotle's Politics' first on its metaphysical side, has noticed how the distinctions of Form and Matter, of Actuality and Potentiality, affect his whole treatment of the state. His metaphysical conception that matter' is the potentiality of form,' and his recognition that the actual concrete whole must consist of a certain matter which conditions the form it can take, save him from the

delusion that any given constitution can be imposed from without on any given race or country.

Other ways, however, in which Aristotle's political theories seem to be affected by his metaphysics do not appear to be noticed in Mr Newman's commentary. When the identity of the state is made to depend on identity of constitution rather than on identity of race (Pol. III, 3), this may indeed be due in part to the smallness of the Greek state, which made the form of government count for so much more in determining the lives and the thoughts of its citizens than it does under the complex arrangements of a large modern nation; but it is probably in part also a consequence of the tendency which, in spite of his criticisms of Plato, Aristotle inherits from the Platonic school-the tendency to identify the essence of a thing exclusively with its form: a thing's kind or species (eidos) is its form, so far as the Greek words go. Again, in the interesting discussion of the causes of revolutions (V, 2, 1302 a 20, seq.), there can be little doubt that Aristotle is guided by his distinction of material, final and efficient cause. The condition of the people is the material cause, the ends for which men revolt' the final cause, and the occasion of the outbreak is the 'beginning of movement' or efficient cause. The formal cause is not mentioned, for it is supposed to be already known: it is the revolution, e.g. the change from an oligarchy to a tyranny, which has to be explained. It is in connexion with this subject of revolutions that Aristotle makes the profound reflection that political disturbances may arise out of small matters but are not therefore about small matters' (V, 4, 1303 b 17).* It is simply one application of his distinction between the efficient cause or occasion and the nature or final cause. His metaphysics and, we should add, his common-sense and his wide acquaintance with affairs, save him from the narrowness of anecdotal historians and journalists who treat great movements such as revolutions and wars as if they could be properly explained by small personal motives.

It is not of course meant that Aristotle's logical and metaphysical theories of themselves endowed him with

Mr E. T. Cook has appropriately chosen this saying of Aristotle's as the motto for his 'Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War,'

political insight; it is the combination of philosophical grasp with minute attention to concrete historical details that constitutes the distinctive excellence of his method, and that makes the 'Politics,' incomplete, unfinished and scrappy as the work is, a model for all time. Where the actual institutions of his age gave him no material or no sufficient material, it is unreasonable to expect that we should find prophetic insight into tendencies as yet undeveloped. The nature of a thing, as he says, is to be found in its complete realisation; and so he was quite right in taking the city-state as the highest form of political organisation, for it was the highest form yet attained. We might have wished, indeed, that the philosopher who clearly accepted the idea of progressive growth in philosophical speculation and regarded his own system as the outcome of all that had gone before, could have made some effort to apply the same idea to human history generally. Had he taken a wider range of human experience and compared the few centuries of Greek political development with the long ages of barbarism and of despotic government, he might have admitted that the future had new political possibilities as yet existing only in germ. But his attention was concentrated mainly on the perpetual fluctuation of progress and decay in a multitude of separate Greek states and their immediate barbaric neighbours; and so, in his philosophy of history, he was content with the semi-mythical notion of a recurring cycle.

We are apt, however, to forget that the notion of progress is a very modern notion indeed, not universally accepted even now, and not very clearly conceived where it is accepted; and, apart from the absence of this notion in Aristotle, we may say that his political philosophy has more affinity with the distinctive ideas of our age than with those of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. That the state is made up by a contract between individuals for the protection of their natural rights, and that its function is limited to this aim-the theory of the sophist Lycophron (Pol. III, 9, 1280 b 10), as it was the theory of Jefferson-he puts aside as insufficient. The state exists in order to make the citizens good, i.e. (for we must not narrow the Greek conception of virtue') to give them the opportunities for realising their souls. What place each

individual is to have in a well-regulated state depends, of course, on what the capacities of his soul are, and on how far all kinds of people have them. It is on this question that Aristotle would differ from most modern theorists rather than in his conception of the end of the state.

Almost all the thoughtful and careful writers of recent years on politics and ethics, or on the relation between them, will be found to have more spiritual affinity with Aristotle's Ethics' and 'Politics' than with the theories of Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau; and this is not peculiar to those trained in any one school. It follows, of necessity, that those who have been influenced by Hegel should be influenced by Aristotle; for Hegel's way of thinking about the state and about ethics comes largely from his return to the Aristotelian point of view. But in writers like Bluntschli, like the late Professor Sidgwick, or like Sir F. Pollock, who, while differing widely from one another, can none of them be accused of any Hegelian bias, the influence of Aristotle's methods and conceptions may be strongly felt. Among our leading writers only Mr Herbert Spencer, in strange inconsistency with his conception of society as an organism, is to be found defending the theory of natural rights, the social contract, and what Huxley called 'administrative nihilism.' Even in practical politics the abstract belief in some particular form of government as the best or the only right form, and the consequent enthusiasm for constitution-making, have given way to the strenuous assertion of the moral function of the state-its duty to increase the happiness and to raise the character of the population-however much people may differ as to the means by which this is to be done.

Art. VIII.-PAN-GERMANISM.

1. Der Kampf um das Deutschtum: Die Weltstellung des Deutschtums: Die alldeutsche Bewegung und die Niederlande. By Fritz Bley. Munich: Lehmann, 1897 2. Deutsche Weltpolitik. By Prof. Dr Ernst Hasse, Member of the Reichstag. Munich: Lehmann, 1897. 3. Deutschlands Ansprüche an das türkische Erbe. Munich: Lehmann, 1896.

4. Die Deutsche Ostmark.

Aktenstücke und Beiträge zur

Polenfrage. Berlin: M. Priber, 1894.

(Nos. 1-4 are issued by the Pan-German League.)

5. Volks- und Seewirtschaft. Addresses and Essays by Prof. Dr Ernst von Halle. Two vols. Berlin: Mittler, 1902.

6. L'Allemagne, la France, et la Question d'Autriche. Deuxième Édition. By André Chéradame. Plon, 1902.

7. L'Impérialisme allemand. By Maurice Lair. A. Colin, 1902.

Paris :

Paris:

ONE might be tempted to regard Pan-Germanism as purely a phenomenon of to-day, or to date its rise from the end of the past century. To be sure, it is not much more than five years since it first began to attract the attention of Europe: before then, for Europe, it was as good as non-existent. It had not even a name-the plainest proof that it did not greatly occupy the public mind. It is only quite recently that the term Alldeutschtum was coined for it, or the foreign equivalent, Pan-Germanism (by analogy with Pan-Slavism), supplied. But however natural this assumption may be, it is far from being correct, for PanGermanism is by no means so new as it looks. Its origin may be traced back to the beginning of the nineteenth century; so that really it may boast of a very respectable antiquity.

Generally speaking, it is not easy to assign a fixed date to the beginning of any intellectual movement; but in this case we shall not go far wrong in taking 1813 as the birth-year of Pan-Germanism. For, as it happens, Pan-Germanism owes its existence to Germany's bitterest

Note. This article is by an Austrian writer.