H PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 63 



believe in dogmatic Christianity as it was formu- 

 lated by the Roman Church. They did not give 

 a mere dull assent to anything the Church told 

 them on Sundays, and ignore her teachings for 

 the rest of the week ; but they lived and moved 

 and had their being in that supersensible theo- 

 logical world which was created, or rather grew 

 up, during the first four centuries of our reckoning, 

 and which occupied their thoughts far more than 

 the sensible world in which their earthly lot was 

 cast. 



For the most part, we learn history from the 

 colourless compendiums or partisan briefs of mere 

 scholars, who have too little acquaintance with 

 practical life, and too little insight into specula- 

 tive problems, to understand that about which 

 they write. In historical science, as in all 

 sciences which have to do with concrete pheno- 

 mena, laboratory practice is indispensable ; and 

 the laboratory practice of historical science 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 theologi- 

 cal systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come 

 nearer our own time, Hume and Grote, were men 

 of affairs, and had acquired, by direct contact with 

 social and political history in the making, the 

 secret of understanding how such history is made. 

 Our notions of the intellectual history of the 



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