THE VARIETY AND UNITY OF HISTORY 5 



We do not approach it as we approach the story of nature. The 

 records of geology, stupendous and venerable as they are, written 

 large and small, with infinite variety, upon the faces of great moun- 

 tains and of shadowed canons or in the fine shale of the valley , 

 buried deep in the frame of the globe or lying upon the surface, do 

 not hold us to the same vivid attention. Human history has no such 

 muniment towers, no such deep and ancient secrets, no such mighty 

 successions of events as those which the geologist explores; but the 

 geologist does not stir us as the narrator of even the most humble 

 dealings of our fellow men can stir us. And it is so with the rest of 

 the history of nature. Even the development of animal life, though 

 we deem its evolution part of ours, seems remote, impersonal, no 

 part of any affair that we can touch with controlling impulse or 

 fashion to our pleasure. It is the things which we determine which 

 most deeply concern us, our voluntary life and action, the release of 

 our spirits in thought and act. If the philosophers were to convince 

 us that there is in fact no will of our own in any matter, our interest 

 in the history of mankind would slacken and utterly change its face. 

 The ordered sequences of nature are outside of us, foreign to our 

 wills, but these things of our own touch us nearly. 



It is the honorable distinction of historical writing in our day 

 that it has become more broadly and intimately human. The instinct 

 of the time is social rather than political. We would know not merely 

 how law and government proceed but also how society breeds its 

 forces, how these play upon the individual, and how the individual 

 affects them. Law and government are but one expression of the 

 life of society. They are regulative rather than generative, and his- 

 torians of our day have felt that in writing political and legal history 

 they were upon the surface only, not at the heart of affairs. The 

 minute studies of the specialist have been brought about, not merely 

 by the natural exigencies of the German seminar method of instruc- 

 tion, not merely by the fact that the rising tide of doctors' theses 

 has driven w r ould-be candidates for degrees to the high and dry 

 places, after all the rich lowland had been covered, but also by a very 

 profound and genuine change of view on the part of the masters of 

 history themselves with regard to what should be the distinctive 

 material of their study. Before our modern day of specialization 

 there was virtually no history of religion, or of law, or of literature, or 

 of language, or of art. Fragments of these things were, of course, 

 caught in the web of the old narratives, but the great writers of the 

 older order looked at them with attention only when they emerged, 

 gross and obvious, upon the surface of affairs. Law was part of the 

 movement of politics or of the patent economic forces that lay near 

 the interests of government. Religion was not individual belief, but 

 as it were the politics of an institution, of the church, which was but 



