of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism.  He first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between ethical right and men’s opinion of what ought to be.  He brings to an end what Coleridge happily called the “metapolitical school.”  After him we are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense of historical method.  He put an end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong independent of all positive law.  He took the facts as phenomena to be explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be maintained in part defiance of them.  Conventional Whiggism has no foothold after he has done with its analysis.  His utilitarianism was the first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract school; and even if he was not the first to see through its pretensions—­that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury—­he was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness.  He saw that history and psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.  So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least were there.

[Footnote 17:  There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer’s Institutes of Nations (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the midstream of European thought.]

His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion.  The metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume.  The place of habit and of social instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort, the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained, the deep respect for order—­all these are, after all, the fabric from which the thought of Burke was woven.  Nor is there in Bentham’s defence of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.  Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim superiority to Hume’s.  So that on either side of his work he foreshadows the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought.  His utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found means of acceptance.  His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method.  If there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is not more.  If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system from them?  The answer seems twofold.  In part