496 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



one believing in the uniformity of nature, but it is denied that the mind 

 is able to peer through the darkness of the past and see the hidden work- 

 ings of forces in the soul of humanity. 



Historians have been loath to acknowledge frankly this limitation, 

 and instead have promulgated various theories to account for human 

 phenomena without even a tacit assumption of ignorance. They would 

 prove that history has been caused by universal forces, cognizable by 

 man, and that man is an automaton, tossed hither and thither as the 

 forces of the cosmos have acted upon him. To this end social evolution 

 has often been likened to the life of a living organism and the re- 

 semblances are sufficiently remarkable. It is influenced by its environ- 

 ment; it has its separate parts with their functions; blood vessels and 

 nerves are not lacking; and the cells are the individuals of which so- 

 ciety is composed. The simile is a very happy one, but it remains a 

 simile. 



Misled by the resemblances, historians have often sought to carry 

 over into their field of inquiry the methods of the biologists, hoping 

 thus to silence forever the denunciations of inexactness and to estab- 

 lish causation in their science in the same way as it is done by the in- 

 vestigations of the life of the lower animals and plants. According to 

 this theory, the cosmic causes of the varying phenomena among people 

 are to be sought in their physical environment. In the ultimate analy- 

 sis, natural variations must be derived from the same source, for "we 

 can not regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. 

 Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such a di- 

 rection." Yet as far as the historian is concerned these national va- 

 rieties are the most important facts in his knowledge and the ultimate 

 explanation of many events in the world's history. As Mr. Symonds 

 says, 



Nothing is known for certain about the emergence from primitive barbar- 

 ism of the great races, or about the determination of national characteristics. 

 Analogues may be adduced from the material -world; but the mysteries of or- 

 ganized vitality remain impenetrable. What made the Jew a Jew, the Greek a 

 Greek, is as unexplained as what daily causes the germs of an oak and of an ash 

 to produce different trees. 



History has to accept this dissimilarity of peoples with all its re- 

 sults, for an unproved hypothesis should not form the foundation of its 

 method. 



Closely connected with the above is the still unsolved problem of 

 heredity. Is not heredity one of the great causes of variation among 

 men and hence an important factor in the production of historical move- 

 ment? This question, to which I shall return later, must be answered 

 in the affirmative by the historian, to whom the differences between in- 

 dividuals and between nations are conspicuous characteristics of his 

 phenomena, and a3 far as his information reaches are due to the acci- 

 dents of birth as well as to environment. 



