24 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



contemporary life. For such works the public has a passion, and no 

 wonder; with the delight of literature we seem to combine learning 

 and education. We savor and love the mixture of fact, philosophy, 

 and poetry; the invention, the charm, the power. Yet this is not 

 and never was history; something perhaps higher, but not history. 

 There may even be literary science; but for all that science is not 

 literature nor literature science. These twain cannot be made one 

 flesh. Each may modify the other, but there is no transmutation. 



For the scientific study of history we must have minds subtle, 

 conscientious, and accurate minds with a power and aptitude for 

 minutiae, with a patience and endurance which know no bounds, 

 honest minds incapable of even self-deception, and in particular 

 with the linguistic gift that makes no language impossible of acquisi- 

 tion or foreign to the learner's aptitudes. Only for the mind thus 

 equipped can history and philology be scientific. The generations of 

 men endowed with the imaginative faculty have seen and will ever 

 see, in the labors of such minds, the most splendid form of applied 

 art, the highest known form of prose literature possibly, but cer- 

 tainly the nearest approach to scientific history that can be made. 



In ours as in other disciplines there is trouble; and the trouble, 

 as elsewhere, arises among the men who are destitute, or nearly so, of 

 the imaginative power which is so well designated as the scientific 

 imagination. Honest men of this sort, proud of their devotion and 

 accuracy, become pedantic, claim infallibility, and despise all others: 

 in the presence of the most august of all terrestrial things, the 

 origins, rise, and evolution of a state, the supreme social unit, the 

 mere investigator secures no large view but becomes a stern, con- 

 temptuous materialist. Only worse than these are the ignorant and 

 impatient, who disdain the accuracy of truth, and are indifferent to 

 the orderly arrangement of facts: the chain of causation in human 

 affairs they can neither understand nor appreciate, being dazzled by 

 speculation, imagery, and rhetoric. Shallow and inaccurate, they 

 prate about history as literature, and deny the possibility of a science 

 of history. 



In the closing years of the nineteenth century there was much 

 strife about the question as to whether or not there could be science 

 in history. The question now is: How much science and of what kind 

 is there in history? As some help toward a reply, we are forced to an 

 historical retrospect of the efforts to secure and apply a method. 



The eighteenth century is by many regarded as the period when 

 history was born anew into the realm of science. The reason given is 

 that it coincided with the final overthrow of ecclesiasticism, and the 

 chief names adduced in proof are these of Vico (1668-1744), Gibbon 

 (1737-94), Voltaire (1694-1778), and Burke (1729-97). It was felt 

 that humanity was, if not its own first cause, at least its own demi- 



