THE PLACE OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE PERSPECTIVE 

 OF KNOWLEDGE 



BY JOHN B. BURY 



[John B. Bury, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University, b. Oct. 16, 

 1861. B.A. Trinity College, Dublin, 1882; Fellow, ibid. 1885; M.A. ibid. 1885; 

 Professor of Modern History, Dublin University, 1893-98; Professor of Greek, 

 ibid. 1898-1902; Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University, 1902- 



. Author of History of the Later Roman Empire, from Arcadius to Irene; 



Student's History of the Roman Empire, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius ; 

 History of Greece to Death of Alexander the Great. Editor of Pindar's Isthmian 

 Odes; and Nemean Odes; Freeman's History of Federal Government in Greece; 

 Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.] 



To define the position which the history of the last four hundred 

 years occupies as an object of study, or to signalize its particular 

 importance as a field of intellectual activity, requires a preliminary 

 consideration of the place which history in general holds in the 

 domain of human knowledge. And this consideration cannot be 

 confined to purely political history. For political history is only an 

 abstraction, an abstraction which is useful and necessary both 

 practically and theoretically, but is unable to serve as the basis 

 of a philosophical theory. Political development in the chronicle of 

 a society, or set of societies, is correlated with other developments 

 which are not political; the concrete history of a society is the 

 collective history of all its various activities, all the manifestations 

 of its intellectual, emotional, and material life. We isolate these 

 manifestations for the purpose of analysis, as the physiologist can 

 concentrate his attention on a single organ apart from the rest of the 

 body; but we must not forget that political history out of relation 

 to the whole social development of which it is a part is not less 

 unmeaning than the heart detached from the body. 



The inevitable and perfectly justifiable habit of tracing political 

 development by itself, and making political events chronological 

 landmarks, led to an unfortunate restriction of the use of the word 

 history, which, when used without qualification, is commonly taken 

 to mean political history, and not history in the larger concrete 

 sense which I have just defined. This ambiguity furnishes an ex- 

 planation and excuse for the view that history is subservient to 

 political science, and that the only or main value of historical study 

 consists in its auxiliary services to the study of political science. 

 This doctrine was propagated, for instance, by Seeley, and gained 

 some adhesion in England. Now if we detach the growth of political 

 institutions and the sequence of political events from all the other 

 social phenomena, and call this abstraction history, then I think 



