HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 37 



intended to strangle imagination, imagination takes extensive 

 flights; and, hovering everywhere, induces on the stiffest pages a 

 highly artistic treatment and an attractive style. Taine's very axioms 

 are paradoxes : in the French Revolution the orgasms of liberty 

 beget a despotism fiercer than that of the former days; the fear of 

 centralization getting on the national nerve created in the republic 

 an organism more unitary than that of the displaced monarchy; 

 the classical spirit was the sire of that abstract idealism which under- 

 lies all the maladies of modern French life. To this sort of inverted 

 deduction he is perfectly resigned. He is quite as hopeless in the 

 sphere of the individual man. It is the human beast which still con- 

 trols and turns the man into the "carnivorous, lascivious" brute we 

 see about us in such overwhelming numbers; or, at the- other pole, 

 into the foolish dreamer with a "diseased mind and disordered body." 

 His detestation for what is loose and disorderly explains what is 

 perhaps the most famous of his paradoxes, when he declared that 

 in art he thought the sonata was as beautiful as a syllogism. 



These three historians all agree that, admitting what one of- them 

 would have called the necessitarian, the others the providential 

 forces of history, that yet, upon the tissue which they weave, the 

 pattern is formed by the will of man in the exercise of the choice 

 which is offered to him and in accordance with his nature. Even so 

 extreme a freethinker as John Morley admits this. Discoursing of 

 Burke's analysis of historic forces, he says: ''History has strictly 

 only to do with individual men as the originals, the furtherers, the 

 opponents, or the representatives of some of those thousand diverse 

 forces which, uniting in one vast sweep, bear along the successive 

 generations of men, as upon the broad wings of sea winds, to new 

 and more fertile shores." To originate, to further, to oppose, to 

 represent, an historic force, is quite a sufficient moral responsibility 

 wherewith to burden even the greatest men. 



So far, what we seem to recognize as the basic considerations of 

 these men in regard to scientific history are the following: The field 

 must be considered as a unit; the human factors are no longer 

 heroes, kings, warriors, or diplomats, merely and alone, but the 

 people as well, in all their activities; in and from such complexity 

 of persons and operations it appears possible to disengage not relative 

 but absolute truths and by a suitable system of reasoning to elucidate 

 principles of action which are the ripe fruit amid the leafy perplexity 

 of the boughs; the material of history proves thus to be the results 

 of comparative study of politics above all, but likewise of law, 

 institutions, language, beliefs, race, and geography. The historian 

 must proceed with impartial mind, as far as his human limits permit, 

 to consider and use both the matter and manner of his science, re- 

 garding society as an organism growing from within under external 



