These studies were indeed essentially premature;a long development of the inorganic and vital sciences was necessarybefore sociology or morals could attain their normal constitution.But by their prosecution amongst the Greeks a nobleintellectual activity was kept alive,and many of those partial lights obtained for which mankind cannot afford to wait.
Economic inquiries,along with others,tended towards rationality;Plutus was dethroned,and terrestrial substituted forsupernatural agencies.But such inquiries,resting on no sufficiently large basis of practical life,could not attain anyconsiderable results.The military constitution of society,and the existence of slavery,which was related to it,leading,as wehave seen,to a low estimate of productive industry,turned away the habitual attention of thinkers from that domain.On theother hand,the absorption of citizens in the life of the state,and their pre-occupation with party struggles,brought questionsrelating to politics,properly so called,into special prominence.The principal writers on social subjects are therefore almostexclusively occupied with the examination and comparison of political constitutions,and with the search after the educationbest adapted to train the citizen for public functions.And we find,accordingly,in them no systematic or adequate handlingof economic questions only some happy ideas and striking partial anticipations of later research.
In their thinking on such questions,as on all sociological subjects,the following general features are observable.
1.The individual is conceived as subordinated to the state,through which alone his nature can be developed and completed,and to the maintenance and service of which all his efforts must be directed.The great aim of all political thought is theformation of good citizens;every social question is studied primarily from the ethical and educational point of view.Thecitizen is not regarded as a producer,but only as a possessor,of material wealth;and this wealth is not esteemed for its ownsake or for the enjoyments it procures,but for the higher moral and public aims to which it may be made subservient.
2.The state,therefore,claims and exercises a controlling and regulating authority over every sphere of social life,includingthe economic,in order to bring individual action into harmony with the good of the whole.
3.With these fundamental notions is combined a tendency to attribute to institutions and to legislation an unlimited efficacy,as if society had no spontaneous tendencies,but would obey any external impulse,if impressed upon it with sufficient forceand continuity.
Every eminent social speculator had his ideal state,which approximated to or diverged from the actual or possible,according to the degree in which a sense of reality and a positive habit of thinking characterised the author.
