HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 31 



a deformed monstrosity, so far has erudition spread its field and so 

 profound are the investigations of scholars. The comparative method, 

 without which modern science of any sort would be impossible, is 

 itself an invention of the humanists. And I have heard the greatest 

 devotees of pure science in our time yearn for a comparative historian 

 of their disciplines. The entire success of scientific history is due 

 to the achievements of the ancillary sciences; as revolutionary in 

 method and results as either physics, chemistry, or biology. In par- 

 ticular, history is the hopeless and grateful debtor of comparative 

 sociology, philology, and mythology, of comparative religions, folk- 

 lore and ethnology; and above all of comparative archaeology. One 

 winter spent on the Nile examining the unbroken and unfalsified 

 record of 10,000 years in human evolution under external influences 

 is worth to the student all the metaphysics of history, even when 

 indited by the genius of a Hegel. 



By this vast erudition the work of the historian has become such 

 that a division of labor is essential. There must be specialists in 

 each and all of these ancillary sciences, and the historian must use 

 their results as his matter. It has become the categorical imperative 

 of scientific history that it should avail itself of its own wherever 

 found. In this way we have reached what would otherwise have 

 been inaccessible, viz., certain definitions of the task. We have 

 defined the limits, we have fixed the basis, we have as was shown in 

 another connection proved the unity, and we have consequently 

 found the scientific method of history. This is neither the time nor 

 the place further to discuss these, but they are realities. Without these 

 definitions the advance of the nineteenth century would have been 

 as futile as that of the eighteenth. 



Let us turn and illustrate these contentions in considering four 

 great names of our epoch: perhaps not the greatest, but types at 

 least of the best in four great lands. The names are those of Macaulay , 

 Ranke, Taine, and Bancroft. Once and for all let us say of each and 

 every one of them that he was a man of immense erudition; of perfect 

 good faith; of enormous, tireless, patient industry; of trained and 

 chastened intellect; fully aware of the canons of historical science 

 and determined to use them in his work. Each of them, moreover, 

 marks a stage and a quality of advance, which are not merely note- 

 worthy, but essential to our purpose. 



The greatest German and the greatest French historians have paid 

 homage to Macaulay as certainly the foremost English historian, 

 as possibly the greatest of all historians since Thucydides, who, of 

 course, in other respects the peer of the modern, far surpasses him in. 

 philosophic insight. It is this weakness of Macaulay which is his 

 strength. He is distinctly, avowedly, a man of his time and place; 

 British of the British, and more than that a Victorian Englishman, 



