28 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



It will appear, 1 think, on dispassionate examination, that the 

 beginning of fruitfully scientific study in history, the initiation of 

 the modern method, is to be found in Heeren. Unlike Niebuhr, he 

 builded with new materials. Beginning as a philosopher, he applied 

 in ancient history the Socratic method, and discovered that the states 

 of antiquity could be understood only in the light of their institutions 

 and their politics. Entering on a profound investigation of these, he 

 found them so interlaced with their foreign relations that he exam- 

 ined under compulsion both Greece and Rome in their connection 

 alike with Egypt and with Carthage. Even with the imperfect in- 

 formation of the time, he brought to light the momentous principle of 

 mutation as dependent not merely on outward form but on internal 

 structure (morphology). His is the vital notion of comparing con- 

 temporary histories in short periods, as opposed to the elucidation of 

 single ones in long succeeding cycles of time. For this is essential to 

 our later doctrine of the unity of history, without which no true 

 science of the same, however rudimentary, is at all possible. With 

 a consciousness of this grand truth as probably applicable to every 

 period of history, he essayed it in the following epochs and evolved 

 the concept which, revolutionary then, is now the corner-stone of 

 modern history, that of the state-system of Europe, the basis upon 

 which Macaulay erected the great reputation which he deserves. 

 It may be asserted of Heeren now, as was hinted by a French 

 critic in his lifetime, that he avoided every pitfall into which 

 cumbrous thoroughness throws its German votaries, and escaped 

 every trap which over-confident logic sets for its acrobatic French 

 disciples. 



The fine sense of limit and proportion exhibited by Heeren were in 

 glaring contrast to the shoreless ocean of speculation on which both 

 Herder and Hegel were sailing almost simultaneously. Alike they 

 taught that the earthly realization of reason in history is a necessity, 

 that whether by men, or in spite of man, all obstacles are leveled 

 until humanity, freed from every hindrance, realizes the divine ideal. 

 Alike therefore they landed on the quicksands of what may be to 

 some a buoyant, but is to most a very gloomy fatalism, as the only 

 basis for progress, being alike unmindful of Kant's almost self- 

 evident but nevertheless glorious declaration that progress is a 

 moral product purely. From the position of these transcendentalists 

 the thought which has dominated the latter years of the nineteenth 

 century, that of the pure evolutionists, does not essentially budge one 

 jot: both are fatalistic. The latter, it is true, have a concept of pro- 

 gress antipodal to that of their predecessors. They likewise assume, 

 somewhat rashly it seems in the present state of physics, that the 

 laws of science are fixed and immutable; in particular, the taproot 

 of the system, the doctrine of the conservation of energy, seems to 



