CHAP, iv THE APPEAL TO HISTORY 39 



affirm ; he affirms merely the technical law, that the 

 curve which describes the course of history never returns 

 upon itself. This belief is one of the characteristic 

 differences between the east and the west and between 

 antiquity and the modern world. The whole of 

 oriental mankind, with all its sages and all its faiths, 

 believes in the doctrine that history repeats itself. 

 It is part of the burden of the bitter book of Ecclesi- 

 astes in Old Testament Scripture ; after immense labour, 

 we find ourselves again exactly where we stood long 

 ago. Even in the West, the same doctrine was largely 

 held in classical times. Perhaps in the modern West 

 in the Christian or semi-Christian West we too easily 

 make the transition from asserting progress in the 

 intellectual sense, as a continuous evolution of change r 

 from change, novelty from novelty, to asserting progress 

 in the moral sense, as continuous improvement. 

 Personally, no doubt, Mill himself believed in moral 

 progress as firmly as in continuous historical change. 

 And Comte believed both the intellectual no less than 

 the moral ; " as if," he cries, " history ever repeated 

 itself." But, if history does not repeat itself, the past 

 cannot furnish examples to the present. If we are to 

 learn from the past it must be mainly in some other 

 way. 



Shall we say then that we are to ascertain from 

 historical study which causes are gaining and which 

 declining? And thereafter are we to shout with the 

 biggest crowd ? Is the teaching of history to be a 

 grandiose contribution to our study of the question 

 which way the cat jumps ? Comte's Law of the Three 

 Stages an alleged continuous evolution in the history 

 of the past may be so interpreted ; it may be taken as 

 a warning not to commit ourselves to modes of belief 



