she presents the idea that a people can be understood only when we understand its history.  Society, she says, has developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many memories and associations.  To change it we must change its traditions.  Nothing can be done de novo; a fresh beginning cannot be had.  The dream of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality, was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is not in any sense to be realized.  Tradition forever asserts itself, the past is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made before a new life can be had for society.  These ideas are well expressed by George Eliot in her review of Riehl’s books.

He sees in European society incarnate history, and any attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destruction of social vitality.  What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws.  The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both.  As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and branch.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language.  It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the civilized world are only approximately intelligible to each other, and even that, only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty.  Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms “familiar with forgotten years,”—­a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs.  Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science.  With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will have parted with its music