SCIENCE AND HISTORY 585 



occupations worthy of a gentleman are war and politics. But even 

 Voltaire believed that a state of war was more conformable to the nature 

 of man than one of peace. 



The belief that a history should appeal more to the feelings of the 

 reader than to his judgment is now held by few persons. As the drama 

 is the most moving of literary compositions history should be dramatic, 

 that is, it should be a work of art, not la collection of documents. Vol- 

 taire maintained that a history like a tragedy should have an exposition, 

 a development of the action, and a catastrophe. He maintained that 

 the historian should not only have an extensive acquaintance with the 

 affairs of the world, but should also be endowed with the capacity for 

 dramatic representation. He calls the citation of documents foolish- 

 ness, and appeals to the example of the ancients as proof of his conten- 

 tion. Documents he considered nothing more than the scaffolding which 

 is taken .away when a structure is completed. Frederic Schiller, who 

 was a skilful dramatist and a writer of the first rank, composed his- 

 tories without knowing much history. Moreover, he did not pretend 

 to know much. He once wrote to a friend that history was a sort of 

 storehouse for his imagination, the contents of which had to submit to 

 whatever use he wished to make of them, and that he would always be a 

 poor authority for any future writer who should be so unfortunate as to 

 turn to him. The belief that the value of a history depends more upon 

 the style in which it is written than upon the matter which it contains 

 prevailed almost universally until comparatively recent times. Oliver 

 Goldsmith wrote a " History of the Earth and Animated ISTiature," the 

 title of which he probably borrowed along with a great deal of the mat- 

 ter from Buffon's " Histoire Naturelle." Albeit, more than one of his 

 readers has ventured to doubt whether he could have told a duck from a 

 goose. Yet he produced an interesting work, as I can testify from the 

 impression it made upon me when I first (and last) read it many years 

 ago. Both the Irishman and the Frenchman looked at the world 

 through the medium of their imagination, and consequently saw many 

 things that had no objective existence. In 1877 Professor Du Bois- 

 Eeymond delivered an address in Cologne in which he endeavored to 

 prove that the history of mankind is virtually the history of the natural 

 sciences. Although he defended his position with much skill and elo- 

 quence, he probably carried conviction to the minds of but few of his 

 hearers and readers. Others have maintained that history is embodied 

 in the efforts of men to invent better tools. It is not easy to see how, 

 viewed from either of these positions, there could be any history for 

 more than a thousand years beginning with the Christian era. There is 

 a great deal of movement and at times a great deal of intellectual 

 activity, but the result was fruitless. In the penal system of former 

 days the treadmill was a common mode of punishment. The exercise 



VOL. LXXXVI. — 40. 



