436 The Doctrine of Evolution. 



colossal work of Gibbon there is a dramatic unity of design 

 and a sense of historical perspective that from an artistic 

 point of view can not be praised top highly. It is, no doubt, 

 an immortal book, one of the classics for all ages ; but as an 

 interpretation of events it goes but little way. The period 

 of twelve hundred years which it covers was crowded with 

 facts of decisive import for all future time which failed to 

 arrest the author's attention. There is no consciousness 

 that this period, which witnessed the decline and overthrow 

 of a certain phase of political organization, was in the main 

 a period of lusty growth and wholesome progress rather 

 than a period of stagnation or decline. Nor, indeed, is 

 there any explanation of the great conspicuous fact of the 

 decline and fall of the Eoman imperial organization; we 

 are told what events happened, and often how they hap- 

 pened, but we are seldom made to understand why they 

 happened. The grasp upon the underlying causes is ex- 

 tremely feeble, as one can not but feel in a moment if, after 

 laying down Gibbon, one picks up a volume of Mommsen, 

 or Freeman, or Sir Henry Maine. 



Most of the shortcomings of the old method of historical 

 writing resulted from the fact that the world was looked at 

 from a statical point of view, or as if a picture of the world 

 were a series of detached pictures of things at rest. The 

 human race and its terrestrial habitat were tacitly assumed 

 to have been always very much the same as at present. One 

 age was treated much like another, and when comparisons 

 were made it was after a manner as different from the 

 modern comparative method as alchemy was different from 

 chemistry. As men's studies had not yet been turned in 

 such a direction as to enable them to appreciate the immen- 

 sity of the results that are wrought by the cumulative action 

 of minute causes, they were disposed to attach too much 

 importance to the catastrophic and marvelous; and the 

 agency of powerful individuals which upon any sound 

 theory must be regarded as of great importance they not 

 only magnified unduly but rendered it unintelligible when 

 they sought to transform human heroes into demi-gods. 



It thus appears that the way in which our forefathers 

 treated history was part and parcel of the way in which they 

 regarded the world. Whether in history or in the physical 

 sciences, they found themselves confronted by a seemingly 

 chaotic mass of facts with which they could deal only in a 

 vague and groping manner and in small detached groups. 



