SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM. 791 



understand that about which they write. In historical science, as in 

 all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory- 

 practice is indispensable, and the laboratory practice of historical sci- 

 ence is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political life, 

 and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and operations of 

 the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and theological 

 systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our own time, 

 Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by direct con- 

 tact with social and political history in the making, the secret of un- 

 derstanding how such history is made. Our notions of the intellectual 

 history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often derived from 

 writers who have never seriously grappled with philosophical and the- 

 ological problems : and hence that strange myth of a millennium of 

 moonshine to which I have adverted. 



However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary 

 writers who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or 

 philosophy, were learned and enlightened — such men, for example, as 

 Eginhard or Dante — is necessary to convince one's self that, for them, 

 the world of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. 

 From the center of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a 

 hierarchy of angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insig- 

 nificant sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened 

 with the debasement of their material embodiment and continually 

 solicited to their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as power- 

 ful hierarchy of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the 

 pit of everlasting damnation.* 



The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, 

 the traditions of the fathers, and the authority of the Church, they 



* There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view of the Catholic cosmos. 

 But it would be unfair to leave it be supposed that the Reformation made any essential 

 alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology which called itself " Christian.'' 

 The protagonist of the Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects are 

 lineally descended, states the case with that plainness of speech, not to say brutality? 

 which characterized him. Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as 

 his rider orders ; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes Satan. " Sic voluntas humana 

 in medio posita est, ceu jumentum ; si insederit Deus, vult et vadit, quo vnlt Deus. . . . 

 Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan ; nee est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum scsso- 

 rem currere, aut eum quaerere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et possi- 

 dendum " (Thus the human will is put in the middle, like a beast of burden ; if God sits 

 upon it, it wills and goes where God wills ; ... if Satan sits upon it, it wills and goes 

 where Satan wills. Nor is it within its discretion to run to either rider or to seek after 

 him, but the riders themselves contend which shall get and possess it). — (De Servo Arbi- 

 trio, M. Lutheri Opera, edition 1546, tomus ii, p. 468.) One may hear substantially the 

 same doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by zealous volunteer missiona- 

 ries of Evangelicism any Sunday in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are 

 conspicuous by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to themselves the title 

 of Evangelical, in contradistinction to Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impar- 

 tial inquirer, who, if he were obliged to choose between the two, might naturally prefer 

 that which leaves the poor beast of burden a little freedom of choice. 



