It is for this reason that
Montesquieu observed very justly that in their classification of the
citizens the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest
display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is
here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative
series, and sunk even below their own nothing. As the first sort of
legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens and combined
them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and
alchemistical legislators, have taken the direct contrary course. They
have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they
could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this their
amalgama into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to
loose counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to
figures whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The
elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better
lessons. The troll of their categorical table might have informed them
that there was something else in the intellectual world besides
substance and quantity. They might learn from the catechism of
metaphysics that there were eight heads more* in every complex
deliberation which they have never thought of, though these, of all
the ten, are the subjects on which the skill of man can operate
anything at all.
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