530 Darwinism and History 



development. Such notions were excluded by the fundamental 

 doctrines of the dominant religion which bounded and bound men's 

 minds. As the course of history was held to be determined from 

 hour to hour by the arbitrary will of an extra-cosmic person, there 

 could be no self-contained causal development, only a dispensation 

 imposed from without. And as it was believed that the world was 

 within no great distance from the end of this dispensation, there 

 was no motive to take much interest in understanding the temporal, 

 which was to be only temporary. 



The intellectual movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge 

 immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted 

 to the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for 

 Thucydides and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction 

 in the art of politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of 

 a new culture, different from anything that had gone before ; but at 

 the time men were not conscious of this ; they saw clearly that the 

 traditions of classical antiquity had been lost for a long period, and 

 they were seeking to revive them, but otherwise they did not perceive 

 that the world had moved, and that their own spirit, culture, and 

 conditions were entirely unlike those of the thirteenth century. It 

 was hardly till the seventeenth century that the presence of a new 

 age, as different from the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and 

 Rome, was fully realised. It was then that the triple division of 

 ancient, medieval, and modern was first applied to the history of 

 western civilisation. Whatever objections may be urged against 

 this division, which has now become almost a category of thought, it 

 marks a most significant advance in man's view of his own past. 

 He has become conscious of the immense changes in civilisation 

 which have come about slowly in the course of time, and history 

 confronts him with a new aspect. He has to explain how those 

 changes have been produced, how the transformations were effected. 

 The appearance of this problem was almost simultaneous with the 

 rise of rationalism, and the great historians and thinkers of the 

 eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, attempted 

 to explain the movement of civilisation by purely natural causes. 

 These brilliant writers prepared the way for the genetic history of 

 the following century. But in the spirit of the Aufklanmg, that 

 eighteenth-century Enlightenment to which they belonged, they were 

 concerned to judge all phenomena before the tribunal of reason ; 

 and the apotheosis of " reason " tended to foster a certain superior 

 a priori attitude, which was not favourable to objective treatment 

 and was incompatible with a " historical sense." Moreover the tra- 

 ditions of pragmatical historiography had by no means disappeared. 



