The Study of History: A Lecture Delivered Before the Cornell University

WHEN Austria offered to recognize the French Republic, the victorious general of France replied that the Republic stood in no more need of recognition than the sun in heaven. Perhaps it is equally needless to vindicate the claim of the study of history to a place in a course of education.

To some of those who have come to be educated here, the study may be professionally useful. I refer to those destined for the profession of journalism. some of whom are pretty sure to be included in any large assemblage of the youth of so journalistic a country as this. It is quite possible that, as society advances, it may call for some political guidance more responsible and more philosophical than that of the anonymous journalist. But at present the journalist reigns. His pen has superseded not only the sceptre of kings, but the tongue of the parliamentary or congressional debater, whose speeches, predetermined and forestalled as they are by the discussions of the press, are read with a languid interest; a result which the enemies of rhetorical government, considering that the pen is usually somewhat more under control and more accurate than the tongue, may regard with a pensive satisfaction. The right education of the journalist is a matter of as much importance to the public, in a country like this, as the right education of princes is in a monarchical country. But if it is so Important to the public, it is equally important to the journalist himself. A calling which society sanctions or demands, and which morality does not proscribe, must be pursued ; and any inherent evils which there may be in it must be laid to the account of society, not to that of the individual writer. But those who have seen anything of anonymous journalism will, I believe, generally be of opinion that all the safeguards which high training can afford are necessary to protect the anonymous journalist against the peril of falling into great degradation, — to save him from becoming an organ of narrow and malignant passions, possibly even of something worse. It is more difficult, to say the least, to sin against light. A man who has been raised by the study of history and its cognate subjects to the point of view where the eye and the heart take in humanity, will not find it quite so congenial to him to wallow in the mire of party fanaticism or of scurrilous personalities.

Another calling seems likely to be opened, for which the studies of a school of political science, such as the plan of our institution contemplates, would form a qualification. A movement is being made in favor of the institution of a permanent civil service. I do not wish to express an opinion on any political question relating to this country, at least from this chair. But I am so sensible of the advantages which we derive in England from the existence of such a service, by which the whole of the ordinary administration of the country is not only placed in well-trained hands, but taken almost entirely out of the influence of party and out of the category of party spoils, that I cannot help thinking that the measure will commend itself to the national mind, and that the movement will be crowned with success. In that case, our school of Political Science will become a school of preparation for the civil service. The subjects of the school will be history, studied from the political point of view ; jurisprudence, including what is called, rather by anticipation than with reference to the existing state of things, international law ; and political economy, embracing not only the general laws of wealth as demonstrated and illustrated by Adam Smith and his successors, but the most useful facts relating to commerce and production, especially with reference to this country.

To the mass of the students, however, the study of history must commend itself, not as one of professional utility, but as part of a course of self-culture. To the mass of students the study even of physical science can commend itself on no other ground, since the number of those who will ever make a professional use of geology, chemistry, or anatomy must be limited. And if a knowledge of physical science is necessary to self-culture, as unquestionably it is, equally necessary is a knowledge of historyIf it is essential to our intellectual development, to our moral wellbeing, to our due discharge of the part assigned to us in life, that we should be placed in our right relations to the material world and the lower orders of animals, it is surely at least as essential that we should be placed in our right relations to humanity. If our powers of observation require to be cultivated by scientific pursuits, so do our powers of moral reasoning and our moral sympathies require to be cultivated by their appropriate training, which is the study of history. In a country like this,—with republican institutions which assume the active cooperation of all citizens in the work of government, and which, without that co-operation, lose their vitality and degenerate into a cover for wire-pullers and jobbers, — political studies, and the study of humanity generally, have an especial claim on the attention of the citizen, both as a matter of interest and of duty.

It is useless, of course, for the advocates of any particular kind of culture to address themselves to those writers on education, or, as I should rather say, against education, who, if they mean what they sometimes say, would cast all culture aside, and, under color of making education practical (as though everything that did us good were not practical), would reduce all your universities and colleges to mere organs of industrial and commercial instruction ; one result of which would be that, as the intellectual tastes and appetites of a great nation could not really be confined within a circle traced by its least cultivated members, America would have to import all the products of the higher intellect and the imagination, and would thus remain intellectually the slave of Europe, to the great detriment of Europe as well as to her own. One of the organs of this extreme utilitarianism proclaimed, the other day, as a proof of the uselessness or worse than uselessness of high culture, that there were thousands of college graduates who were unable to earn their own bread. It was meant, I suppose, that they were unable to earn their bread by manual labor ; a Statement scarcely true in itself, — since, if they were not crippled in any of their limbs by their knowledge of classics and mathematics, they might still take up a spade, list as soldiers, or go into service as porters, — and which, if true, would not be of much significance, since, whatever may be the case among tribes in a state of nature, in civilized countries men are able to earn their bread, and their butter too, with their brains as well as with their hands. Even a being so helpless and useless, to the merely bucolic eye, as Sir Isaac Newton, provided for himself pretty well in a less intellectual age than the present. The development of the mental faculties therefore pays just as well as that of the muscular powers. It is as the means of self-support for those who are undergoing a course of high education, not as a substitute for high education, that manual labor is encouraged in this institution. If classics have been rated too highly as instruments of mental training, if they have been studied in an irrational way and with too much attention to philological or paleographical details, if they have been allowed to take up too much time, or even if, upon a deliberate review of the question, apart from the blind violence of iconoclasts, we should be led to the conclusion that their day is past, it does not follow that high culture altogether is to be discarded as folly, and that all our places of high education are to be turned into technological institutes, model farms, and workshops. Certainly, if any voice in the matter is to be allowed to public policy, and if public policy points to anything beyond the mere accumulation of wealth, there will be some hesitation and reflection before the preponderance of material objects, already great enough, is increased by throwing the whole weight of public education into the material scale.

Wealth is a proper object of individual pursuit so long as it is pursued honorably. which, when pursued very passionately and exclusively, it is apt, as every newspaper you take up shows you, not to be. I have no ascetic fancies on that subject, nor do I deprecate the frank avowal of the attainment of wealth as an object of education. Only let it be borne in mind that we need not alone the art of making wealth, but the art of enjoying it ; and that, as the capacity of the stomach is so limited, if that is the only organ of enjoyment, wealth will be but poorly enjoyed, but the individual pursuit of wealth is a matter in which the state has little interest. The only thing in which the state has an interest, and which makes it worth the while of the state to found and endow universities, is the improvement of the students as members of the community, with due reference, of course, to its industrial objects, but also with due reference to those other objects without which a community of men would be no higher, and enjoy no more happiness, than a community of beavers or bees. The common welfare is not promoted by enabling A to rise over B’s head, and to wrench the prize of life out of his hands. Perhaps some day a doubt may arise whether even individual welfare is promoted by stimulating cupidity and ambition in the breast of youth ; and the world, though it refuses to accept from theology, may accept from biological and social science, the doctrine that contentment is happiness. However this may be, the mere satisfaction of personal desires is not a public object; and when our charter tells us that this institution is founded to promote the “ liberal and practical education " of those for whom it is intended, if the term “ practical ” points to the industrial and commercial objects of the individual student, the term “ liberal " points to the object of the state. Knowledge which is directly convertible into money stands in little need of artificial encouragement.

An objection has been sometimes taken to history, on the ground of its uncertainty. This objection comes from physical science, the extreme devotees of which sometimes affect to cast doubt on ail human testimony, and to maintain that nothing is worthy of belief but that which can be reproduced by experiment, — forgetting that they have no better ground than human testimony for believing that the experiment has been made before with the same result. It is true our historical judgments are continually being modified ; our conceptions of history as a whole are changing; some supposed facts are being eliminated, while others are coming to light in the course of historical research. But may not something analogous be said of physical science? Are not her theories also continually undergoing change ? Where are the astronomical conceptions of yesterday ? They have given way to the nebular hypothesis, which, in its turn, may possibly be overthrown or absorbed by some other hypothesis,— leaving, no doubt, a residuum of truth, just as successive theories of history leave, some more, some less, of a residuum of truth, though no one of them can be said to be final. History is the scene of controversy ; but is not science also ? Ask Darwin and Agassiz, and the other combatants on either side of the controversy as to the origin of species. I remember a passage in a letter written by the late Sir G. C. Lewis, a philosopher certainly not wanting in scepticism as to historical facts and the testimony on which they rest. He then held the office of Home Secretary, one of the duties of which is to advise the sovereign in the exercise of the prerogative of mercy, and he had been going into the case of Swethurst, a man convicted of poisoning on evidence of doubtful validity. Sir George Lewis remarked that the professors of moral philosophy showed more forbearance than policy in not retorting on the professors of physical science the charge of uncertainty, inasmuch as he had been consulting all the highest scientific authorities on the scientific parts of the case, and they had contradicted each other all round. Absolute and final certainty is the prerogative of no study, except the formal sciences at logic and mathematics. It has been truly said that the most important facts in history are the best ascertained. It is not about the great steps in the progress of humanity, or about their connection with each other, that we are in doubt. It is about personal details, which, though not devoid of moral interest, are of secondary importance, and the discussion of which would be trivial if it did not exercise the judicial faculties of the historian. History may safely permit Scotchmen to maintain forever the innocence of Mary, Queen of Scots, though it might not be so safe to concede the general principle, on which the defence rests, that a pretty Scotchwoman cannot do wrong. Nor ought we to overrate the proportion borne by the controverted to the uncontroverted facts. Mr. Lowe, in one of those mob orations against mental culture by which he endeavored to atone to the masses for his oligarchical opposition to the extension of the suffrage, scoffed at history, because, as he said, everything was unsettled in it, and if you asked two men for an account of Cromwell, their accounts would be so different, that you would not know that they were speaking of the same man. But this is a great exaggeration. The two accounts would coincide as to all the leading facts : they would differ as to the moral quality or political expediency of certain actions ; just as the judgments of a Republican and a Democrat would differ as to the moral quality and political expediency of certain actions of General Grant, whose existence and history are nevertheless substantial facts. And these divergences of opinion are being diminished by the gradual prevalence of more comprehensive views of history and of a sounder morality. The most extreme judgments on Cromwell’s character would not be so wide apart now as were those of the Cavaliers and Roundheads in his own day.

The position that man is to be studied historically, if it be taken to mean that man is to be studied only in history, is untrue. A simple inspection of historical phenomena could never enable us to discern good from evil in human action, or furnish any standard of progress : we could never have attained the idea of progress itself in that way. But taken in the sense that a knowledge of the history of humanity is essential to a right view of any question respecting man, the position is a most momentous and pregnant truth, and one the perception of which has already begun profoundly to modify moral and political philosophy, and may further modify them to an almost indefinite extent. This prevalence of the historical method in the study of man is clearly connected with the prevalence of the Darwinian theory respecting the formation of species in natural science, as well as with our new views of geology and cosmogony, and with the discovery of those sidereal motions which indicate that progress is the law not only of the earth but of the heavens. The whole amounts to a great reconstitution of the sum of our knowledge, and of our conceptions of the universe both material and moral, on which, as I believe, a rational theology will in time be based. We have hitherto formed arbitrary notions of the Deity, and deduced theological systems from them. We shall now begin to form our notions of the Deity from his manifestations of himself in the universe and in man. Ethics will probably undergo an analogous change, and, instead of being deduced from arbitrary principles, will be based on a real examination of human nature ; and when so reformed the study will become fruitful, and enable us to frame practical rules for the formation of character, and effective cures for the maladies of our moral nature, in place of general precepts and barren denunciations.

Whatever may be the special results, to moral science, of the study of man by the historical method, it has already had the general effect of binding us more closely to humanity as a whole, of causing the monastic idea of separate salvation to give way to the idea of salvation with and in humanity, and of making us feel more distinctly that the service of humanity is the service of God. It has at the same time taught us a more grateful appreciation of the past, and repressed the self-conceit which exaggerates the powers and the importance of the generation of workers to which we happen to belong. In new countries especially, where there are no monuments to plead for the past, the study of history is eminently needed, to repress this collective egotism to which each generation is liable, and which leads not only to errors of taste and sentiment, but to more serious mischief. At the head of one of your leading organs of public opinion, I see a woodcut representing the past and the future. The past is symbolized by temples, pyramids, and the ancient implements of husbandry; the future by railroads, steam-vessels, factories, and improved agricultural machines. The two are divided from each other by a timepiece, on which the American Eagle is triumphantly perched, with his tail to the past and his head to the future. A figure representing, I presume, Young America, in an attitude of enthusiasm, is rushing into the future with the star-spangled banner in his hand. This symbolism is false, even in the case of the most advanced nation, inasmuch as it contravenes the fact that the history of man is a continuous development, to which no one generation or epoch contributes much more than another; each transmitting to the future, with but little addition, the accumulated heritage which it has received from the past; so that, when we have done all, we are but unprofitable servants of humanity. The symbolism is also doubtful, as I venture to think, inasmuch as it assumes, in accordance with the popular impression, that an acceleration of our material progress is to be the characteristic of the coming age. Owing to the marvellous expansion of material wealth, and of the knowledge which produces it, on the one hand, and to the perplexity into which the spiritual world has been cast by the decay of ancient creeds and the collapse of ancient authorities on the other, men are at present neglecting or abandoning in despair the questions and interests symbolized by the temples, and turning to those symbolized by the railroads and the reaping-machines. But the higher nature will not in the end be satisfied with that which appeals only to the lower nature; and problems touching the estate and destiny of man may soon present themselves, no longer under the veil of Byzantine or mediæval mysticism, but in a rational and practical form, which would make the coming age one of spiritual inquiry rather than of material invention. To those who keep the experience of history in view, the predominance of material interests in this generation itself suggests their probable subordination in the next.

To the statesman, and to all who take part in politics in a free country, history is useful, not only as a record of experience, — in which point of view indeed its value maybe overrated, since the same situation never exactly recurs, — but because, displaying the gradual and at the same time unceasing progress of humanity, it inspires at once hope and moderation ; at once condemns the conservatism, as chimerical as any Utopia, which strives to stereotype the institutions of the past, and the revolutionary fanaticism which, breaking altogether with the past and regardless of the conditions of the present, attempts to leap into the far-off future and makes wreck, for the time, of progress in that attempt. To adopt the terms of a more general philosophy, history teaches the politician to consider circumstance as well as will, though it does not teach him to leave will out of sight and take account of circumstance alone.

I here deal with history politically. Not that I deem politics the highest of all subjects, or the political part of history the deepest and the most vitally interesting. If the ultimate perfectibility of human nature which Christianity assumes and proclaims is to be accepted as a fact, as I think all rational inquiry into human nature tends to show that it is, the time will come, though it may be countless ages hence, when the political and legal union, which implies imperfection and is based upon force, will finally give place to a union of affection, and when politics and jurisprudence will fall into one happy grave. But for the purpose of these lectures I take the political portion of the complex movement of humanity apart from the rest, and subordinate to it the other portions, — intellectual, economical, and social, — touching on these merely as they affect political characters and events. One advantage of this course is that we shall escape the necessity of dealing with any religious question, and thus perhaps avoid collision with some good people, who, though they are thoroughly convinced that to burn men alive for their opinions is a mistake, are not yet thoroughly convinced that perfect freedom of thought and speech, unchecked by any penalties, legal or social, by fagots or by frowns, is the sole guaranty of truth, and the only hope of escape from the perplexity and distress into which all who do not bury their heads in the sand to escape danger must see that the religious world has unhappily fallen.

The nation of the political history of which I am to treat is England. English history is the subject of my professorship. But, apart from this, few would deny to England the foremost place, on the whole, in the history of political development, whatever they may think of her achievements in other spheres. The Constitution which she has worked out through so many ages of continuous effort will after all prove, I doubt not, merely transitional : it is simply the bridge over which society is passing from feudalism to democracy. But it has now been adopted in its main features by all the civilized nations of Europe, among which I do not include the half-Oriental as well as half-barbarous despotism of Russia. It was adopted by France in 1789. Since that time the Bonapartes have labored to establish in their own power a personal government after the model of the Roman Empire, the great historical antagonist of the Teutonic monarchy. But the present Emperor finds himself compelled by the spirit of the age and the force of example, as the condition of his son’s succession, to lay down his personal power and reduce his monarchy to the English form. The fundamental connection between the English and the American constitution cannot fail to be seen. If on the one hand the hereditary element has been left behind by society in its transition to the New World (as it has been dropped by the more recent framers of constitutions in Europe so far as the Upper Chamber is concerned), on the other hand the monarchical element has been here reinvested with a large portion of the power of which in England it has under decorous forms been entirely deprived ; and if the American form of government is compared with the English form in this respect, the American form may be said to be an elective and terminable monarchy, while the English form is a republic.

Treating merely of a segment of history, and from a special point of view, I am hardly called upon to discuss the universal theories of history which have been recently propounded : I will, however, just indicate my position with regard to them. They are theories ignoring the existence of spiritual life, — though some of them retain and even affect the name spiritual, without any real meaning,—and involving the assumption that the history of mankind is a necessary evolution, of which human volitions are merely the steps, just as physical occurrences are the steps of a necessary evolution or development in the material world ; and they seem to me to be the characteristic products of minds which, having been formed too exclusively under the influence of physical science, cannot conceive any limits to physical method, and at the same time are eager to complete, as they think, a great intellectual revolution, by extending it from the material world to humanity, and reorganizing moral and political philosophy in supposed accordance with physical science.

I am ready to enter into the verification of any hypothesis, however novel, and from whatever quarter it may come, provided that it covers the facts. But the authors of these theories of historydo not attempt, so far as I am aware, to account for the phenomena of volition, for the distinction which we find ourselves compelled to make between voluntary and involuntary actions, or for morality generally, which implies that human will is free, — not free in the sense of being arbitrary, but free in the sense of being self-determined, not determined by antecedent circumstance, like the occurrences of the material world. Is the subversion of public right by a military usurper a necessary incident in an historic evolution? Is the commission of so many murders per annum the effect of an irreversible law denoted by criminal statistics ? Then why denounce the usurper and the murderer ? Why denounce them any more than the plague or the earthquake ? It is possible that a physical explanation of all these moral phenomena may be in store for us, and that our consciousness of self-determination in our actions, commonly denoted by the term “ free-will,”may prove to be an illusion; but I repeat that, so far as I am aware, no attempt to supply such an explanation has yet been made. Nor am I aware that any attempt has been made to give an account of the personality of man, and explain what this being is, which, being bound by necessary laws, yet rises to the contemplation and scrutiny of those laws, and can even, as the necessarian school admits, modify their action, though we are told he cannot change it, — as though modification were not change. The theory tacitly adopted is that of the Calvinist writers, who have labored to reconcile the moral justice of God in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked with the doctrine of predestination, but whose arguments have never, I believe, given real satisfaction even to their own minds, much less to minds which are not Calvinist, and the chief of whom has, it seems to me, recently received specific confutation at the hands of your fellow-countryman, Mr. Hazard, whose book “ On the Will ” I mention with pleasure as a work of vigorous and original thought, and so esteemed by judges whose opinion is of more value titan mine.

The theory of Comte is that the human mind collectively (and, if I understand him rightly, that of every individual man in like manner) is compelled, by its structure and by its relation to the circumstances in which, it is placed, to pass through three successive phases,— the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, — drawing with it society, which in corresponding succession is constituted, first on a theological, then on a metaphysical, and finally on a positive basis. The term “positive” will be found, on examination, to mean nothing more than scientific. The ascendency of science is, according to this theory, the extinction of religion; the metaphysical era in which, as Comte asserts, man attributes phenomena, not to God, but to nature and other metaphysical entities, being the twilight between the theological night and the scientific dawn. I mean, by religion, a religion with a God : for, to fill the void in the human breast, Comte invented a religion without a God, which will be found, saving this one omission, a close and even servile imitation of the Catholic Church (to which Comte was accustomed) with its sacraments and ceremonies, and above all with a priestly despotism as oppressive and as destructive of free inquiry as the Papacy itself.

I think I should be prepared to show that this hypothesis does not correspond with the facts of history in detail. But I again submit that this is unnecessary : tire hypothesis is untenable on the face of it, antecedently to any process of verification. The ascendency of science is not the extinction of religion, nor is there any incompatibility between the theological and the scientific view of the universe. Between Polytheism, which splits up the universe into the domains of a multitude of gods, and science, which demonstrates its unity, there is an incompatibility; but between monotheism and science there is none. The two propositions, that there is an intelligent Creator, and that his intelligence displays itself in a uniformity of law throughout his creation,— the first of which is the basis of religion, the second that of science, —are as far as possible from being inconsistent with each other. The most intense belief in God and the highest science dwelt together in the minds of Pascal and Newton. Therefore the two terms of the supposed series, “ theological,” and “positive” or scientific, do not bear to each other the relation which the hypothesis requires, — they are not mutually exclusive; and the hypothesis falls to the ground. So far is science from extinguishing theology, that its discoveries as to the order and motion of the universe seem likely, in conjunction with an improved philosophy of history and a more rational psychology, to render far more palpable to us than they have ever been before, the existence and the presence of God ; so that Byzantine theosophy and the mythology of the Middle Ages will clear away only to leave theology stronger, and society more firmly founded on a theological basis than ever. Comte, familiar with Catholic miracles and legends, asserts that all religion must be supernatural: prove that, instead of contravening nature, it results from nature, and his attacks lose all their force.

The want of a well-laid foundation for Comte’s theory is betrayed by his lamentations over the intellectual and social anarchy of his age, and by his denunciations of those who, as he thinks, prolong that anarchy and prevent his philosophy from regenerating the world. If law reigns absolutely, how can there be anarchy ? If the whole evolution of humanity is necessary, why is that part of the evolution with which Comte comes into angry collision, and which he styles anarchy, less necessary than the rest ? Anarchy implies a power in men of breaking through the law; in other words, it implies free-will.

The theory of Mr. Buckle, though not clearly stated and still less clearly worked out, seems to me to be, in effect, a reproduction of that of Comte. He, too, supposes a necessary intellectual evolution which is, in fact, a gradual exodus of humanity from religion into science. Doubt, for which scepticism is only the Greek name, is with him the grand spring of progress, though it seems plain that doubt can never move any man or body of men to action or production. His attempts to deduce the character and history of nations from the physical circumstances of their origin are very unconnected, and often very unsuccessful. He ascribes, for instance, the superstitious tendencies of the Scotch to the influence of their mountain scenery and its attendant thunder-storms, confounding the Saxon-Scotch of the Lowlands, of whom he is throughout treating, with the Celts of the Highlands, who remained an entirely distinct people down to the middle, at least, of the last century, and whose characteristics are fundamentally the same as those of their kinsmen, the Irish, Welsh, and Britons, while the aspect of nature varies greatly in the four countries. He assigns the frequency and destructiveness of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Italy and in the Spanish and Portuguese peninsula as the explanation of what he assumes to be the fact that these are the two regions in which superstition is most rife and the superstitious classes most powerful. But we have no reason for believing that the ancient inhabitants of Italy were peculiarly superstitious : the Romans, though in the better period of their history a religious people, were never superstitious in the proper sense of the term, as compared with other ancient nations, and the more educated class became, in the end, decided freethinkers. In later times the Papacy, supported by the forces of the Catholic kingdoms, forced superstition on the people ; but we may safely say that Ætna and Vesuvius and the earthquakes of Calabria had very little to do with the growth of the Papal power. In the Spanish and Portuguese peninsula there are no volcanoes, and the only historic earthquakes are those of Lisbon and Malaga, both long subsequent to the culmination of superstition among the Spanish and Portuguese. The Celtiberians, the earliest inhabitants of the peninsula known to history, do not seem to have been more superstitious than the other Celts; and the influence of the bishops under the Visigothic monarchy, like that of the bishops in the empire of Charlemagne, was more political than religious, and denotes rather the strength of the Roman element in that monarchy than the prevalence of superstition. Spanish superstition and bigotry had their source in the long struggle against the Moors, the influence of which Mr. Buckle afterwards recognizes, though he fails to connect it with any physical cause, as well as to compare it with its historic analogue, the struggle of the Russians against the Tartars, which has left similar traces in the fanaticism of the Russian people. In the same passage to which I have just referred, Mr. Buckle adduces another circumstance, indicative, as he says, of the connection between the physical phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes and the predominance of the imaginaation. “ Speaking generally,” he says, “ the fine arts are addressed to the imagination, the sciences to the intellect : now it is remarkable that all the greatest painters and nearly all the greatest sculptors modern Europe has possessed have been produced by the Italian and Spanish peninsulas.” Here again he fails to notice that, though the action of the alleged cause — the awful character of the physical phenomena — has been constant, the supposed effect has been confined within very narrow limits of time. The ancient Romans were not great painters ; their excellence in any works of the imagination was small compared with that of the Greeks, whose country is remarkably free from physical phenomena of an overwhelming kind. Italian art sprang up with the wealth, taste, and intellectual activity of the great Italian cities of the Middle Ages ; it sprang up, not among the Calabrian peasantry, but among the most advanced portions of the population, and those least under the moral influence of physical phenomena ; it had its counterpart in the art which sprang up in the great cities of Germany and Flanders ; and it was accompanied by a scientific movement as vigorous as the resources of the age would permit, — the two meeting in the person of Leonardo Da Vinci. Spanish art was a concomitant of the splendor of the Spanish monarchy, and its rise was closely connected with the possession by Spain of part of Italy and the Netherlands, from which countries not a little of it was derived. Spanish and Italian art are now dead ; while England, which in those days had no painters, now, under the stimulus of wealth and culture, without any change in the physical circumstances, produces a school of painting, with the names of Turner, Millais, and Hunt at its head, which is the full equivalent in art of Tennyson’s poetry. To what influence of physical phenomena are we to trace the marvellous burst of Christian imagination in the cathedrals of the North, or the singular succession of great musical composers in Germany during the last century ?

The greater part of Mr. Buckle’s work is taken up with an analysis of certain portions of history,—erudite, acute, and sometimes instructive, but exhibiting no novelty in its method, assigning to persons great influence over events, bestowing praise and blame with a vehemence curiously at variance with the necessarian theory of character and action, and having, as it seems to me, no very clear thread of philosophical connection, unless it be a pervading hostility to the clergy, the consequence of Mr. Buckle’s antagonism to the State Church of England, and another proof of the effect of state churches in driving criticism to extremes and producing antipathy to religion.

Mr. Buckle, while he generally coincides with Comte, has to himself the doctrine that morality does not advance, and that the progress of humanity is purely scientific. It is difficult to believe that he had ever turned his attention to the movement which followed the preaching of Christianity. Comte, on the contrary, maintains with great beauty and force that the progress of society depends on the prevalence of the unselfish over the selfish affections, though his disciples are mistaken in thinking that their master was the first author of the precept to love one another.

The force of those influences which Mr. Buckle, if he had carried out his theory consistently, would have traced everywhere is, of course, not denied. They form, as it were, the body of history ; but there is also, or appears to be, a living soul. Circumstances, however great their influence upon action may be, do not act; it is man that acts. If I walk from this building to the university, the relative positions of the two places, the curves of the road between them, and the structure of my body are conditions and limitations of my walking ; but they do not take the walk, nor would an account of them be a complete account of the matter. Without a thorough and rational investigation of human nature as the point of departure, all these theories are mere collections of remarks, more or less suggestive, more or less crude : the fundamental problem remains unsolved.

It is time that the minds of all who make humanity their study should be turned, in the light of reason, to that aggregate of phenomena, not dreamed of in the philosophy of the physicists, which is included in the term “spiritual life,” — the spiritual convictions, affections, aspirations of man, and his tendency to form a spiritual union or church with God for its head and bond, and to merge other unions gradually in this. Is all this to be explained away as mere illusion, with the mythology of the Middle Ages and other superstitions ; or are the superstitions only incrustations, from which the spiritual life will in the end work itself clear ? Supposing special prayers for physical miracles, and invocations of Divine help, where the duty is set before us of helping ourselves, to be irrational, — does it follow, as the physicists tacitly assume, that all communion of the spirit with God is a hallucination also ? Granting that the natural evidences of the immortality of the soul ordinarily adduced are unsatisfactory, as assuredly they are, — does spiritual life contain in itself no assurance of ultimate victory over the material or quasi-material laws by which the rest of our being is bound, and through which we are subject to death ? Supposing spiritual life to be a reality, it would obviously be necessary to construct the philosophy of history on a plan totally different from any which the physicists have proposed.

Pending this inquiry we may fairly require, in the name of science herself, that some caution shall be exercised by physicists in laying down the law as to the order of the universe, and the character and purposes of its maker. One of the most eminent of the number, and one from whom I should have least expected any rash excursions into the unknown, undertook to assure us the other day, on the strength of merely physical investigations, that the Author and Ruler of the universe was an inexorable Power, playing, as it were, a game of chess against his creatures, respecting and rewarding the strong, but ruthlessly checkmating the weak. In the physical world taken by itself, this may be true; but in the spiritual world it is contrary to all the phenomena or apparent phenomena, and therefore apparently not true. God there manifests himself not as a ruthless chess-player, but as a God of love, to whom the weak are as precious ns the strong. It is assumed naturally enough by those whose minds have been turned only to one kind of phenomena and one sphere of thought, that the appearance of man as an animal in the world was the consummation of the order of nature, and that our animal structure must therefore contain in itself a complete key to humanity. Yet physiology has up to this time made but little progress in tracing the connection between man’s animal structure and his spiritual aspirations, or even his larger and more unselfish affections. You see books professing to treat of mind physiologically; but the authors of those books, though they are always sneering at what they call metaphysics, that is, the evidence of consciousness, really draw their knowledge of the existence of mind and of the several mental functions from no other source. The physiological part of these works amounts to little more than a very general demonstration of the connection between mind and the brain and between mental aberration and cerebral disease, which may itself be said almost to be a part of consciousness.¹ It is reasonable to suppose that other and more fruitful discoveries will be made in these regions, as well as with regard to the connection between physical temperament and moral tendencies. But it is not reasonable to pronounce what the discoveries will be before they have been made. For my own part, I wait for further light.

It is certain, as a matter of historical fact, that with the advent of Christianity a new set of forces came upon the scene, and that under their operation commenced a gradual transmutation of the character and aims of humanity, both individual and collective. Faith, Hope, and Charity,_ the three great manifestations of spiritual life, were not merely modifications of existing moral virtues : they were new motive powers. The ancient world had no names for them : for I need hardly say that though the terms are found in classical Greek, their meaning in classical Greek is not their meaning in the New Testament. It is by these new motive powers that all Christian life, individual and collective, including a good deal of life which has ceased to call itself Christian, is pervaded and sustained, and of them all Christian institutions are embodiments. They have superseded the motives which formed the springs of the merely moral life, as described, for instance, in Aristotle’s Ethics. Before the arrival of Christianity, the fulcrum of those who moved humanity was in the seen, since that time it has been in the unseen world. The ideal of the ancient world was always, if anywhere, in the past; no hope of better things to come can be traced in any ancient philosopher; Plato’s Utopia is primitive Sparta ; that of Roman reformers was primitive Rome ; that of Voltaire is a fabulous China; that of Rousseau the state of nature ; but the ideal of Christianity has always been in the future. Ancient art embodied at the utmost conceptions of ideal beauty ; Christian art embodies spiritual aspirations. These remarks, and others which might be made in the same sense, if they are correct, are not priestly dogmas, but historical facts, such as must be taken into account by any one who is constructing a philosophy of history. And they stand independent of any controversies as to the authenticity or historical character of any particular Christian documents.

Science has revealed to us God as a being acting, not by mere fiat, but by way of progress and development in analogy with human effort, and conducting his work upwards through a succession of immeasurable periods from a mere nebulous mass to an ordered universe, and from inorganic matter to organic and ultimately to intellectual and moral life. There is nothing, therefore, contrary to nature, or, to use Comte’s phrase, supernatural, in the belief that, in the fulness of time, spiritual life also came into the world. There was a time when animal life made its appearance, — not abruptly, perhaps, but decisively, and so as to open a new order of things. The appearance of spiritual life was not abrupt. Apart from any question as to the Messianic character of prophecy, we see a line of hope, continually brightening amidst national calamity, along the course of Hebrew history. The Platonic doctrine of ideas and the transcendental motives for selfimprovement which were preached in some of the ancient schools of philosophy may be called a rudimentary faith. The brotherhoods of the philosophers, and perhaps even the sublimated patriotism of the Roman, were a rudimentary charity. But in the case of spiritual as well as in that of animal life, there was a critical moment when the appearance was complete.

The spring of human progress, as it seems to me, since the advent of Christianity, has been the desire to realize a certain ideal, — individual and social. And I have elsewhere (in Oxford lectures on the study of history).given reasons for regarding this ideal as still identical with that proposed by the Founder of Christianity and exemplified in his life and in his relations with his disciples. I believe that intellectual progress will be found to be a part of the same movement, and that the spring of intellectual as well as of social effort is really the love of mankind. Suppose a man entirely cut off from his kind; he would scarcely be sustained in intellectual effort by the mere desire of speculative truth.

If spiritual life is still weak in the world, and but little progress has yet been made in the transformation of humanity, this need not surprise us, knowing as we do that gradual progress is the law of the universe. Christianity is as yet young to the Pyramids. It has not been in the world half the time that it takes a ray of light to reach the earth from a star of the twelfth magnitude. Nor do the lateness of its advent, the lapse of generations previous to its coming, and its partial diffusion up to the present time, contradict the wisdom and beneficence of the Creator, unless it can be proved that the order of the universe is limited to a single evolution. The most recent discoveries of astronomy as to the motions and tendencies of the sidereal systems seem to indicate that this is not the fact, but that the phenomena point to an indefinite series of revolutions, each revolution a mere pulsation, as it were, in the being of God.

But, as I have said, with regard to these universal theories I have only to indicate my own position, which is that of one who believes the physical and necessarian hypothesis to be unproved, and the Christian view of humanity, taken in a rational sense, to be still in possession of the field. My limited theme is the political history of England, in dealing with which as one who has been connected with party politics, I will endeavor to do justice to the other party ; and as an Englishman, I will endeavor to show that, while I love England well, I love humanity better, and know that God is above all. History written in the old spirit of national pride and exclusiveness would be particularly out of place in this country, where the conditions which in Europe gave birth to the narrower type of civilization,— the divisions of race, language, and territory, — are absent, and the counsels of Providence seem to point to an ampler development of humanity in the form of a federated continent having many centres of intellectual and political life, the guaranties of a varied and well-balanced progress, but with security for perfect freedom of intercourse and uninterrupted peace. There is no reason for assuming that the nation, any more than the tribe or clan, which preceded it, is the final organization of human society, and that to which the ultimate allegiance of men will be due. But at all events, if we are Christians we ought to regard the nation as an organ of humanity, not of inhuman antipathies and selfishness. One may see histories, popular in civilized nations, and used in the education of the young, which seem to have no object but that of inflaming national vanity and malignity, and the spirit of which is really not above that of the red Indian who garnishes his wigwam with the scalps of his slain enemies. Compared with such histories, whatever may be their literary merits, the most wretched chronicle of a mediæval monk is a noble and elevating work. The monk at least recognizes a Christendom, and owes allegiance to a law of love.