HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 25 



urge, and men were determined to discover, if possible, what were 

 the processes by which mankind had formed itself and made its home. 

 Without a doubt there was for this reason a passionate study of 

 nature, and it may have been a necessary complement that both the 

 statics and dynamics of social phenomena were examined with a new 

 purpose and from a new angle. But in spite of all efforts to establish 

 this contention and to trace an historical continuity in the science of 

 "histories" from then until now, there lie athwart the argument 

 difficulties so portentous and so serious as almost if not entirely to 

 vitiate its conclusions. 



It is true that Vico was the first to ask why, if there be a science 

 of nature, we have no science of history? It is consequently true that 

 he was the first historical evolutionist. To him the story of a nation 

 was the record of an ever completer realization in fact of certain 

 remnants of a pre-natal revelation, of the primitive concrete notions 

 of justice, goodness, beauty, and truth: the development, as he 

 phrased it, of this poetic wisdom into the occult wisdom of law and 

 government, into the realization of abstract and impersonal justice, 

 was for him the subject-matter of history. This was a sublime idea, 

 pregnant with great possibilities. But its author could not see the 

 conclusions. Conceiving of three stages divine, heroic, and 

 human he announced three corresponding civilizations, ending in 

 an unstable democracy, whence society abandoned to license always 

 relapses into barbarism, only to emerge once more by a law of cycles 

 into a renewal of the process. This, of course, is a flat denial of pro- 

 gress. Moreover Vico never had a glimpse, much less a vision, of 

 scientific order in history beyond the record of a single folk, and never 

 conceived of general history in a scientific aspect. For these reasons 

 he was a prophet without honor, either contemporaneous or post- 

 humous, and left no influence behind to mould either his own or 

 succeeding ages. 



The method which Voltaire announced was alike more simple and 

 more scientific. It was based on the theory that most details of his- 

 tory are mere baggage, and that when the lumber of the antiquary, 

 as Bolingbroke called it, is disengaged from capital events, you may 

 study in these last the vital human power and its workings. Wars, 

 diplomacy, and the personal minutiae of the political hierarchy, he 

 relegated to the garret of the chronicler and collector: laws, arts, and 

 manners, he conceived to be the essentials of history. Equipped with 

 this doctrine, he turned to account such portions of his time as he 

 could spare from literature, politics, and attacks on ecclesiasticism 

 to the composition of philosophical history. By the sheer force of 

 historic doubt he destroyed many a myth, by the seductions of a 

 graceful style and the stings of a biting sarcasm he relegated the 

 millinery of human life to the rummage chambers where it belongs, 



