THE PLACE OF MODERN HISTORY 149 



prehending. In this sense the study of what we call modern history 

 is the most pressing of all. 



But I have permitted myself to digress from the argument. I was 

 concerned to show that our only chance of tracing the movement 

 and grasping the principles of universal history is to start with the 

 study of the modern age where our material is relatively full, and 

 proceed regressively. One great mistake of those who have attempted 

 philosophies of history has been that they began at the other end, 

 not at the beginning, but at whatever point their knowledge happened 

 to reach back to, perhaps in China, perhaps in the Garden of Eden, - 

 and were consequently obliged to adopt a difficult and precarious 

 synthetic method. Precarious, because in passing on from one stage 

 to another there is no guarantee, owing to our fragmentary material, 

 that we have knowledge of all that is significant, and therefore the 

 synthesis which expresses the transition to a higher stage may be 

 vitiated by incompleteness. We may be acquainted only with some 

 of the forces which determine the sequel, and, if we proceed as 

 though we had all those forces in our hands, our conception of 

 the sequel will be inadequate. 



On the analytic method, on the contrary, we start from a definite 

 terminus, namely the present, contingent indeed, but not arbitrary, 

 since it is the only possible limit for the given investigator, and in 

 the first stage we have all the material, so that it is the fault of the 

 investigation and not the result of accident if the analysis is not 

 exhaustive. The problem then is, having grasped the movement of 

 the ideas and spiritual forces which have revealed themselves in the 

 modern period, to trace, regressively, the processes out of which they 

 evolved, with the help of our records. This, at least, is the ideal to 

 which the interpreter would try to approximate. That, with frag- 

 mentary records, the whole historical movement can ever be traced 

 by methods of inference, I do not indeed believe; but assuredly 

 it is only in the period where the records exist that we can first detect 

 the secret of the process or begin to discern the figure on the carpet. 



But the question will be asked: Can we define absolutely the 

 position of the modern period in the secular perspective of history? 

 The field of what we call "modern history" has a roughly marked 

 natural boundary at the point where it starts, towards the end of the 

 fifteenth century. We may say this without any prejudice to the 

 doctrine of continuity. But the phrase is used to cover all post- 

 medieval history, and therefore the hither limit is always shifting. 

 For while it is usual to mark off the last thirty or forty years as 

 "contemporary history," as years pass on the beginning of "con- 

 temporary history " moves forward, and the end of the modern as 

 distinguished from the contemporary period moves forward too. The 



