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 directly
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,[123] in every complex deliberation, which
they have never thought of; though these, of all the ten, are the
subject on which the skill of man can operate anything at all.
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