368 president's address — section e. 



I am not yet converted to the belief that " evolution is the 

 lord of all our thought," unless it be admitted that in the develop- 

 ment of self-conscious beings the laws which are applicable to one 

 stage are inapplicable to another ; in other words, that development 

 is qualitative as well as quantitative. But with this reservation 

 I am very much alive indeed to the importance of evolution, not 

 only as a key to historical investigation, but also as a means to the 

 training of sane, well-balanced minds. 



It is much to be desired that students should undergo a process 

 of training in which they discover, without being told, that the 

 history of man is the recordof a development ; that there are streams 

 of tendency flowing through an age ; that revolutions come in- 

 volving mutations more or less sudden, with a new order of things; 

 that there is a logic of fact as well as of reason ; and that the great 

 facts of history may be like the great facts of human nature — 

 outward manifestations of great laws working in and through the 

 national mind. 



It is the recognition of such fundamental truths as these that 

 will make history a truly scientific study. " Let us lookinto events," 

 •Cromwell would say, " surely they mean somewhat." Mr. Seeley, 

 in his great and stirring lectures on the Expansion of England, did 

 look into events, and he found that they meant intensely and meant 

 well for the Empire. The result was an ordered, scientific treat- 

 ment of a great mass of facts with which the student is familiar in 

 the history of the 18th century. In ordinary textbooks the history 

 of that century is a record of barren, disconnected facts, dull beyond 

 description ; in the pages of Mr. Seeley's little book we get a most 

 illuminating chapter in the history of British Imperialism. Seeley's 

 method was scientific, and it furnishes one illustration of the change 

 that is coming over historical investigation. No student is qualified 

 to enter upon original reasearch until he has read and studied 

 enough in general history to believe in the possibility of a scientific 

 interpretation of history, or to give good reason why he does not. 

 It is also to be desired that before students settle down to the 

 more minute investigation of original research they should have 

 made the acquaintance of men like Francis of Assisi and Oliver 

 Cromwell. It would be all the better if they had read enough to 

 make friends of such men — better for them morally and spiritually ; 

 for as Edward Caird used to say, " Souls grow more by contact 

 with souls than by all other means," and no such great and lofty 

 souls will be met with in the history of the Commonwealth of 

 Australia or, so far as I know, of any of the colonies. 



And yet, great as are the advantages to be derived from the study 

 of general history, that study is, when viewed as part of an educa- 

 tional course, simply preparatory. Honor students and pass 

 students are alike in this — they are working under the immediate 

 direction of others, not only as regards method, but even in the 

 arrangement of the material for study ; and instead of making up 

 their own minds they are obliged by the necessities of the case to 



