The Philosophy of History. 17 



inherited barbarism, and the gradual growth of a hereditary 

 civilizition. 



Thus if we are to study the laws of history rightly, we shall 

 allow a greater relative power to geographical and to ethnological 

 causes in the earlier ages than in the later, and among barbarian 

 than among civilized men. For instance, the time was when civ- 

 ilization was limited to navigable waters, because commerce was 

 thus limited. And the teaching of Eitter that the proportionate 

 extent of coast line on the several continents determines the 

 amount of their civilization is true as far as it goes. But now 

 commerce no longer depends on coast lines, butboldly explores the 

 interior of great continents with its arms of iron, and civilization at 

 once finds a home in Wisconsin as congenial as in the British Isles. 

 The power of thought has conquered the resistance of nature, 

 and ideas have reconstructed geography. Again, in the early 

 ages of the world the first great nations were found in a sub- 

 tropical climate under the isothermal of 70°. As men gained in 

 skill in resisting the influences of cold on themselves and their 

 works, the yet greater nations of classical antiquity grew up under 

 the isothermal of 60°. And now the mental, and therefore the 

 material power of the world, is found at about the isothermal 

 of 50°. 



Or take the rude barbarians over whom Alfred ruled, or the 

 pagan savages, their ancestors of a few generations before, and 

 contrast them with the Englishmen and Americans of to-day, and 

 see what the combined forces of Christian faith, constitutional 

 government, and scholarly learning have wrought, and see how 

 the whole course of our history has been changed and ennobled 

 by these ideas. 



The ideal force in man is a greatly varying force and is capable 

 of almost infinite growth, while the forces of climate and of race 

 are nearly constant forces. While these are relatively more im- 

 portant factoi's of history at first, the force of ideas is a growing 

 force which comes to be in modern history by far the most im- 

 portant. The student of history will err if he regards these forces 

 as having a constant ratio to one another, and neglects to note the 

 growing power of ideas. 



