184 ROBINSON— THE NEW HISTORY. [April 22, 



less excellent and beautiful than those by which all the celestial 

 bodies move. Now as I am persuaded that man is capable of know- 

 ing, and destined to attain the knowledge of, everything that he ought 

 to know, I step freely and confidently from the tumultuous scenes 

 through which we have been wandering to inspect the beautiful and 

 sublime laws of nature by which they have been governed." Hu- 

 manity is the end of human nature, he held, and the human race 

 is destined to proceed through various degrees of civilization in var- 

 ious mutations; but the permanency of its welfare is founded solely 

 and essentially on reason and justice. But it is a natural law that 

 '* if a being or system of beings be forced out of the permanent 

 position of its truth, goodness and beauty it will again approach it 

 by its internal powers, either in vibrations or in an asymptote, as 

 out of this state it finds no stability."* Herder formulates from 

 time to time a considerable number of other *' laws " which he believes 

 emerge from the confusion of the past. Whatever we may think of 

 these " laws "" he constantly astonishes the modern reader not only 

 by his penetrating criticism of the prevailing philosophy of his time 

 but by flashes of deep historical insight. He is clearly enough the 

 forerunner of the "Romantic" tendency that culminated in Hegel's 

 celebrated " Philosophy of History " in which the successive migra- 

 tions and national incarnations of the JJ'cltgcist are traced to its 

 final and highest medium of expression, the German people. 



These genial speculations of the philosophers of history rested 

 usually upon no very careful study of historical sources and their 

 conclusions seem to us now very hazardous, even if we grant the cor- 

 rectness of the data upon which they relied. It was inevitable that 

 the historical students who, about the middle of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, commenced to feel the influence of the general scientific spirit 

 of the period, should begin to look very sourly upon the earlier 

 attempts to bring order and beauty out of a mass of historic asser- 

 tions which were so commonly either erroneous or unproved, and to 

 establish laws for events which one could not be sure had ever hap- 

 pened. The reaction against the dreams of the philosophers of his- 

 tory was, and is still, very clear. What may be called, for conveni- 

 ence, the "scientific" modern school of historians believe that history, 



* Opening sections of Book XV. 



