152 MODERN HISTORY OF EUROPE 



great role, is an end in itself or more than a phase in evolution. We 

 must acquiesce in our incompetence to form any scientific judgment 

 as to the value or position of this stage in the total development. 



To state briefly the main thesis of this paper. The answer to the 

 question, " What is the position of modern history in the domain of 

 universal knowledge? " depends in the first instance on our view of 

 the fundamental philosophical question at issue between idealism 

 and naturalism. If we are believers in naturalism, then all history, 

 including modern history, has its sole theoretical value in the function 

 of providing material for the investigation of sociological laws. It 

 must accept a position such as Comte assigns to it. But if we are 

 idealists, if we hold that thought is a presupposition of physical 

 existence and not a function of matter, then history as a disclosure of 

 the evolution of thought has an independent realm of its own and 

 demands a distinct interpretation, to prepare for which is the aim of 

 historical research. The segment of history which we call modern, 

 from the sixteenth century onward, occupies a peculiar place, be- 

 cause here, partly in consequence of the invention of printing, our 

 materials begin to be adequate for a complete analysis. This gives 

 us the theoretical significance of the modern period as an object of 

 study; it is the field in which we may hope to charm from human 

 history the secret of its rational movement, detect its logic, and win 

 a glimpse of a fragment of the pattern on a carpet, of which probably 

 much the greater part is still unwoven. 



This Congress is suggestive in many ways, suggestive especially of 

 the distance the world has traveled since 1804 or since 1854. There 

 will be many more of its kind; but this is unique as the first. It is 

 not very bold to predict that historians of the distant future, in tracing 

 the growth of cooperation and tendencies to a federation of human 

 effort, which are one of the transformative influences now affecting 

 mankind, will record this Congress in which we are here met together 

 as a significant point in this particular stage of man's progress 

 toward his unknown destiny. 



