578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is a strong foreshadowing of the unity of history, but very slight 

 practical recognition of the differences between one stage of civ- 

 ilization and another, and the philosophy of the book is quite too 

 much that of a sermon on the evils of priestcraft. In the colossal 

 work of Gibbon there is a dramatic unity of design and a sense of 

 historical perspective that from an artistic point of view can not 

 be praised too highly. It is, no doubt, an immortal book, one of 

 the classics for all ages ; but as an interpretation of events it goes 

 but little way. The period of twelve hundred years which it 

 covers was crowded with facts of decisive import for all future 

 time which failed to arrest the author's attention. There is no 

 consciousness that this period, which witnessed the decline and 

 overthrow of a certain phase of political organization, was in the 

 main a period of lusty growth and wholesome progress rather 

 than a period of stagnation or decline. Nor, indeed, is there any 

 explanation of the great conspicuous fact of the decline and fall 

 of the Roman imperial organization ; we are told what events hap- 

 pened, and often how they happened, but we are seldom made to 

 understand why they happened. The grasp upon the underlying 

 causes is extremely feeble, as one can not but feel in a moment if, 

 after laying down Gibbon, one picks up a volume of Mommsen, or 

 Freeman, or Sir Henry Maine. 



Most of the shortcomings of the old method of historical writ- 

 ing resulted from the fact that the world was looked at from a 

 statical point of view, or as if a picture of the world were a series 

 of detached pictures of things at rest. The human race and its 

 terrestrial habitat were tacitly assumed to have been always very 

 much the same as at present. One age was treated much like an- 

 other, and when comparisons were made it was after a manner as 

 different from the modern comparative method as alchemy was 

 different from chemistry. As men's studies had not yet been 

 turned in such a direction as to enable them to appreciate the im- 

 mensity of the results that are wrought by the cumulative action 

 of minute causes, they were disposed to attach too much impor- 

 tance to the catastrophic and marvelous ; and the agency of pow- 

 erful individuals which upon any sound theory must be' regarded 

 as of great importance they not only magnified unduly but ren- 

 dered it unintelligible when they sought to transform human he- 

 roes into demi-gods. 



It thus appears that the way in which our forefathers treated 

 history was part and parcel of the way in which they regarded 

 the world. Whether in history or in the physical sciences, they 

 found themselves confronted by a seemingly chaotic mass of 

 facts with which they could deal only in a vague and groping 

 manner and in small detached groups. Until geology had made 

 some headway, men had no means of knowing that the state of 



