50 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



century. It emphasizes a wholly new group of factors in the life of 

 mankind, to which but the scantest attention was given before the 

 nineteenth century. It has brought out clearly the crudity and super- 

 ficiality of many ancient and long approved explanations of historical 

 phenomena and substituted new solutions which have become gen- 

 erally accepted. Without conceding the arrogant claims sometimes 

 made by political economy to be able to explain everything in 

 the past, few historical students will question its power to explain 

 more than any other branch of social science. Greatly as the modern 

 attention to institutions and to economic conditions has served to 

 enrich the field of historical research, it is clear that they leave out of 

 consideration matters far too important to be neglected, educational, 

 religious, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual. These will doubtless 

 continue to form the subject-matter of special disciplines, where they 

 may be developed with every attention to technical detail. Yet 

 experience has shown that things so intimately connected cannot 

 be artificially separated without the danger of grave loss. Both 

 psychology and the history of religion have successfully shown the 

 constant interconnection and interaction of all spiritual and intellect- 

 ual phenomena, for it is the same individual who is at once religious, 

 lesthetic, moral, and intellectual. May there not then be a new task 

 for the historian who, while taking advantage of all that has been 

 contributed by those who have devoted themselves to political, insti- 

 tutional, and economic history, understanding these in their broadest 

 sense, shall write a history of the inner man, his range of knowledge, 

 his tastes, his ideas of the world, and of himself? This would have little 

 in common on the one hand with the older narrative history, domi- 

 nated as it was by literary ideals and given to moral applications, or 

 on the other hand with technical departments of historical research, 

 of which there is an ever-increasing number. There are abundant 

 indications that the history of culture is now outgrowing its rather 

 ill-starred infancy and will some day dissipate the gloomy forebodings 

 with which certain distinguished prophets cast its horoscope. 



The foregoing brief sketch of the relations of history to litera- 

 ture, rude and incomplete as it is, enables us to foresee the probable 

 outcome of the tendencies which have been noted. Scientific history 

 is opposed in spirit and method to literature, which has its own 

 lofty ideals, but ideals which should never have been imposed on 

 history. History is emancipating itself from its long servitude, but 

 easily falls back into its former bondage. Yet the historian will more 

 and more boldly appeal to his own fellow scholars, as do the repre- 

 sentatives of other sciences; and so freed from the restraints imposed 

 by the tastes of the public and their want of special knowledge, 

 history will develop a technical literature, the prerequisite of pro- 

 gress. In time this will react upon popular history, which will slowly 



