I have tried to indicate the application of the principles accepted in philosophy and theology to moral and political questions, and their reflection in the imaginative literature of the time. In the chapter upon political theories, I have tried to keep as far as possible from the province of political or social history; and the last chapter is of necessity little more than a collection of hints, which could not have been worked out in detail without expanding the book beyond all permissible limits and trespassing upon the province of literary criticism. The book, as it is, has assumed such dimensions that I have been unable to describe it satisfactorily by any other than the perhaps too ambitious title which it bears. (1876 Putnam, volume 1, vii)
He seems interested in writing this history—at least, in what I've read so far—as a story of improvement. Very Victorian. Old ideas get replaced by new, better ones, because the purpose of thinking is to get to better and more complete Truths. (He then complicates this idea, though, by talking about the intense cultural nostalgia he keeps finding in the period for older forms of thinking, and how new forms tend to be actually quite conservative: the idea "hell doesn't exist," for example, prompts the actually conservative 'new' conclusion, "so morality doesn't exist either," because that conclusion is still working in a framework in which morality is dependent on the threat of hell.) One quaint passage:
Old conceptions are preserved to us in the very structure of language; the mass of mankind still preserves its childish imaginations; and every one of us has repeated on a small scale the history of the race. We start as infants with fetish worship; we consider our nursery to be the center of the universe; and learn but slowly and with difficulty to conform our imaginative constructions to scientific truths. It is no wonder, then, if the belief, even of cultivated minds, is often a heterogeneous mixture of elements representing various stages of thought; whilst in different social strata we may find specimens of opinions derived from every age of mankind. (Vol 1, I.6, page 5)
Then he marches though some backgrounds on eighteenth-century philosophy: there's a short bit on Descartes, then what Locke quarreled with in Descartes, then Hume and Berkeley and Reid and crazy Lord Monboddo, who "tries to show that all the higher knowledge originated in Egypt; and, most of all, he believes in the humanity of the Ouran-Outang—that interesting animal being, in his eyes, the representative of man in a state of nature when he possessed an intellect in capacity, but not in energy or actuality" (1.IV.68, p.69). Whatever.
