XXVII 
DARWINISM AND HISTORY 
By J. B. Bury, Lirr.D., LL.D. 
Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. 
1. Evolution, and the principles associated with the Darwinian 
theory, could not fail to exert a considerable influence on the studies 
connected with the history of civilised man. The speculations which 
are known as “philosophy of history,’ as well as the sciences of 
anthropology, ethnography, and sociology (sciences which though 
they stand on their own feet are for the historian auxiliary), have 
been deeply affected by these principles. Historiographers, indeed, 
have with few exceptions made little attempt to apply them; but 
the growth of historical study in the nineteenth century has been 
determined and characterised by the same general principle which 
has underlain the simultaneous developments of the study of nature, 
namely the genetic idea. The “historical” conception of nature, 
which has produced the history of the solar system, the story of the 
earth, the genealogies of telluric organisms, and has revolutionised 
natural science, belongs to the same order of thought as the concep- 
tion of human history as a continuous, genetic, causal process—a, 
conception which has revolutionised historical research and made 
it scientific. Before proceeding to consider the application of 
evolutional principles, it will be pertinent to notice the rise of this 
new view. 
9. With the Greeks and Romans history had been either a 
descriptive record or had been written in practical interests. The 
most eminent of the ancient historians were pragmatical; that is, 
they regarded history as an instructress in statesmanship, or in the 
art of war, or in morals. Their records reached back such a short 
way, their experience was so brief, that they never attained to the 
conception of continuous process, or realised the significance of time ; 
and they never viewed the history of human societies as a phenomenon 
to be investigated for its own sake. In the middle ages there was 
still less chance of the emergence of the ideas of progress and 
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