8 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



excellent food-stuffs. No doubt the work would have been better 

 done if it had been done in a more catholic spirit, with wider sym- 

 pathies, amidst horizons. The broader the comprehension the more 

 intelligent the insight. But we must not ask for all things in a gen- 

 eration or expect our own perfection by any other way than the 

 familiar processes of development. 



Perhaps we are near enough the time of synthesis and coordination 

 to see at least the organic order and relationship of the several special 

 branches of historical inquiry which have been grouped in this 

 Division of our Congress. All history has society as its subject-mat- 

 ter: what we ponder and explore is, not the history of men, but the 

 history of man. And yet our themes do not all lie equally close to 

 the organic processes of society. Those processes are, of course, most 

 prominent in political and economic history, least prominent, per- 

 haps, in the history of language. I venture to suggest that the 

 organic order is: Politics, economics, religion, law, literature, art, 

 language. So far as the question affects religion and law, I must 

 admit that I am not clear which of the two ought to take precedence, 

 in modern history, certainly law; but most history is not modern, 

 and in that greater part which is not modern clearly religion over- 

 crows law in the organic, social process. 



I know that the word religion, in this connection as in most others, 

 is of vague and mixed significance, covering a multitude of sins; but 

 so far as my present point is concerned, it is easy of clarification. 

 Religion, as the historian handles it, involves both a history of insti- 

 tutions, of the church, and a history of opinion. As a history of 

 opinion it perhaps lies no nearer the organic processes of society 

 than does the history of literature; but from the beginning of 

 recorded events until at any rate the breaking up of foundations 

 which accompanied and followed the French Revolution, it concerns 

 the church as an institution as definitely as the history of politics, 

 with its various records of shifting opinion, concerns the state, and 

 the organic life of the body politic. In such a view, religion must 

 take precedence of law in the organic order of our topics. From the 

 remotest times of classical history, when church and state, priest 

 and judge, were hardly distinguishable, through the confused Middle 

 Age, in which popes were oftentimes of more authority than kings 

 and emperors, down to the modern days, when priests and primates 

 were, by very virtue of their office, chief politicians in the plot of 

 public policy, the church has unquestionably played a part second 

 only to the state itself in the organization and government of society, 

 in the framing of the public life. 



Law occupies a place singular and apart. Its character is without 

 parallel in our list. It has no life of its own apart from the life of the 

 as religion has, or literature, or art, or language. Looked at 



