The Historic Method may be described as the comparison of the forms of an idea, or a usage, or a belief, at any given time, with the earlier forms from which they were evolved, or the later forms into which they were developed, and the establishment, from such a comparison, of an ascending and descending order among the facts.  It consists in the explanation of existing parts in the frame of society by connecting them with corresponding parts in some earlier frame; in the identification of present forms in the past, and past forms in the present.  Its main process is the detection of corresponding customs, opinions, laws, beliefs, among different communities, and a grouping of them into general classes with reference to some one common feature.  It is a certain way of seeking answers to various questions of origin, resting on the same general doctrine of evolution, applied to moral and social forms, as that which is being applied with so much ingenuity to the series of organic matter.  The historic conception is a reference of every state of society to a particular stage in the evolution of its general conditions.  Ideas of law, of virtue, of religion, of the physical universe, of history, of the social union itself, all march in a harmonious and inter-dependent order.

Curiosity with reference to origins is for various reasons the most marked element among modern scientific tendencies.  It covers the whole field, moral, intellectual, and physical, from the smile or the frown on a man’s face, up to the most complex of the ideas in his mind; from the expression of his emotions, to their root and relations with one another in his inmost organisation.  As an ingenious writer, too soon lost to our political literature, has put it:—­’If we wanted to describe one of the most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made an antiquity.  When in former times our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as occupied with coins and medals and Druids’ stones.  But now there are other relics; indeed all matter is become such.  Man himself has to the eye of science become an antiquity.  She tries to read, is beginning to read, knows she ought to read, in the frame of each man the result of a whole history of all his life, and what he is and what makes him so.’[3] Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals, inherited predispositions.  Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood.  Of usages, we are beginning first of all to think where they came from, and secondarily whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got to accept.  In the last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it true?  We now ask, How did men come to take it for true?  In short the relations among social phenomena which now engage most attention, are relations of original source, rather than those of actual consistency in theory and actual fitness in practice.  The devotees of the current method are more concerned with the pedigree and genealogical connections of a custom or an idea than with its own proper goodness or badness, its strength or its weakness.