228 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
the moral and anecdotical historian who is more concerned with human 
nature than with constitutions or economics. Men have been in- 
spired to take up classics for their vocation by Rollin’s history: but 
Rollin was first inspired by Herodotus. We do not learn from him, 
we have to wait for twenty centuries to learn from Mr. Leaf, that the 
Trojan War was akin in spirit to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, 
that it was a battle for the economic control of the waterways of the 
Black Sea and the Aegaean and of the grain trade which issues through 
those waterways. But his own special and picturesque theory of the 
cause of the Trojan War and of other great wars between East and 
West, though it wholly overlooks the play of economic forces, cannot 
be said to overlook the play of other true causes, and other real forces 
in human history, underlying life in all ages and modifying it here, 
there and everywhere, and far more likely to-day to be under-rated 
and under-stated than exaggerated: cherchez la femme is no mere 
flippancy or cynicism as an explanation of events, and is not antiquated 
and out-of-date because our historians have learned also to take 
more account to-day, of the impersonal and less picturesque factor of 
economics. 
When we turn from Herodotus to Thucydides we are already 
opening the preface of the volume of scientific history: we are passing 
from the expansive and personal historian who parades—like Byron— 
before his readers the pageant of his heart and mind, to the reserve 
and the silence and the mauvaise honte of the modern scientific 
historian, of the man who counts it beneath him, or above him, to 
have moral judgments, who counts it still more unworthy of his func- 
tions to write emotionally, whose good taste or mauvaise honte 
rejects as egotism all reference to himself, whose aesthetic sense or 
mauvaise honte leaves his story always to speak for itself and suggest 
its own morals. 
I was speaking of the doctrine of necessity which underlies the 
work of the scientific historian. It certainly underlies the work of 
Thucydides. He assumes in one of the best known passages of his 
introduction (Book I. 22) that human nature is the same in all 
ages, that—as Aristotle puts it—davra oxédov eüpnrai—‘‘pretty well 
everything is known’”’ which is to be known; and that accordingly the 
history of the future will follow the lines of the past as similar conditions 
geographical, climatic and economic recur. His book will therefore 
be no mere picture of local and ephemeral conditions—to which 
Aristotle condemns the historian—but like the work of the poet, a 
book of reference for all times and lands. 
If his work is not as baldly scientific and dry as that of his modern 
admirers, it is only because even with him as with Herodotus, the dra- 
