32 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



older historians, that the progress of culture and civilisa- 

 tion, that laws, art, science, and industry and the life of 

 the people form by far the most interesting side of 

 history, has been realised in some of the later historical 

 works which the nineteenth century has produced. We 

 have now, at least, the beginnings of a history of the 

 popular masses, 1 of their occupations, habits, and in- 

 terests. The result of this has been that historians 

 now deal more with the continuous, not so much with 

 the discontinuous, forces of historical life ; with the pro- 

 perties of the masses, rather than with the characters of 

 individuals. One of the principal properties of masses 

 is this, that they possess inertia and move slowly. Like 

 the changes in Nature, their changes are gradual and 

 imperceptible, not sudden and catastrophic. Accordingly 

 historians deal now more with those phenomena which 

 are analogous to the slow-moving processes of Nature, 

 and the term Evolution has come in appropriately to 

 define the nature of the things and changes which they 



1 It is needless to refer English 

 readers to the constitutional histor- 

 ies of Hallam, Stubbs, and others, 

 or to J. R. Green's ' History of the 

 English People.' In countries like 

 France and Germany, where, within 

 recent times, constitutional history 

 hardly existed before the French 

 Revolution, the transition from poli- 

 tical history to the social history 

 of the people did not take place 

 through the writing of constitutional 

 histories ; but in the course of 

 the nineteenth century important 

 works, dealing with popular inter- 

 ests, have appeared, such as H. 

 Taine's ' Origines de la France 

 Contemporaine.' In Germany Gus- 

 tav Freitag in his ' Bilder aus der 

 Deutschen Vergangenheit ' (1859- 



62), and notably W. H. Riehl, 

 ' Naturgeschichte des Volkes ' 

 (1853-69), 'Die Deutsche Arbeit' 

 (1861), 'Land und Leute,' and 

 many other books, made a beginning 

 of a history of the German people, 

 and at the end of the century we 

 have Karl Lamprecht's ' Deutsche 

 Geschichte,' in twelve volumes 

 (1891, Ac.), written mainly from 

 an economic point of view. The 

 real historians of the people are, 

 however, the great novelists, and 

 it is interesting to note that the 

 modern social and historical novel 

 made its first appearance simul- 

 taneously with the rise of modern 

 historiography, and this in all the 

 three countries alike. 



