There were two
Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic
Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him
derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;
but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive
antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.
As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.
The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on
improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere
accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too
strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in
its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can
never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he
did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the
soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of
experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;
birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their
own courses; these things are done by the soul of man.
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