4 MAC Leod, The Place of Science in History. 



centuries, and which is ever recurring, no longer provokes 

 indignation. The historian is led to the searching of the 

 causes of each war and to the consideration of war as 

 something inevitable. He no longer condemns the states- 

 man who lets slip the dogs of war ; he tries to explain 

 how the statesman has succumbed to the influence of the 



environment in which he lived He is no longer 



enthusiastic at the sight of one of our fine Gothic cathe- 

 drals, but he coldly explains that the cathedral is the 

 expression of a state of conscience, dominated by a static 

 ideal, whilst our own architects no longer raise edifices 

 destined to endure the centuries, but work so as to fulfil 

 requirements which will cease to exist in a near future . . . 

 When one speaks to certain historians and their pupils 

 of accomplished progress, and of efforts to be made in 

 order further to progress, they answer that every period 

 of progress is followed by a period of decline, and this 

 discouraging answer has in it often something painfully 

 ironical. When one reproaches them with this, often 

 enervating, state of mind, they reply : " Such is truth." 



Is it really truth ? Are not these historians of the 

 actual school carried away by established theories resting 

 On a too fragile basis, which deface truth, and prevent 

 us from seeing it in all its aspects ? Yet there is real 

 reason for believing that it is thus. 



There is in fact a chapter of history of which his- 

 torians, properly so called, seem to have lost sight : the 

 history of the evolution of the exact and natural sciences 

 through the centuries. 



This evolution has been in progress from earliest 

 times to the present day ; new discoveries have been 

 added unceasingly to those already made. Always the 

 horizons of human knowledge have been widened, and 

 new truths have not only exercised an educational in- 



