264 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



toning-down process which is necessary to bring a young Ameri- 

 can back to common sense, and I underrated the real services of 

 many Englishmen to the Bible as a religions book, exactly the 

 supplement which I then needed to my German education. Ull- 

 mann's ' Wesen des Christenthums/ which I had read at Gottin- 

 gen, had steadied my religious faith, and I devoted myself at 

 Oxford to the old Anglican divines and to the standard books of 

 the Anglican communion. The only one of these which gave me 

 any pleasure or profit was Hooker's ' Ecclesiastical Polity/ The 

 first part of this book I studied with the greatest care, making an 

 analysis of it and reviewing it repeatedly. It suited exactly those 

 notions of constitutional order, adjustment of rights, constitu- 

 tional authority, and historical continuity, in which I had been 

 brought up, and it presented those doctrines of liberty under law 

 applied both to church and state which commanded my enthusi- 

 astic acceptance. It also presented Anglicanism in exactly the 

 aspect in which it was attractive to me. It reawakened, however, 

 all my love for political science, which was intensified by reading 

 Buckle and also by another fact next to be mentioned. 



" The most singular contrast between Gottingen and Oxford 

 was this : At Gottingen everything one got came from the uni- 

 versity, nothing from one's fellow-students. At Oxford it was 

 not possible to get anything of great value from the university ; 

 but the education one could get from one's fellows was invaluable. 

 There was a set of young fellows, or men reading for fellowships, 

 there at that time, who were studying Hegel. I became intimate 

 with several of them. Two or three of them have since died at 

 an early age, disappointing hopes of useful careers. I never 

 caught the Hegelian fever. I had heard Lotze at Gottingen, and 

 found his suggestions very convenient to hold on by, at least for 

 the time. We used, however, in our conversations at Oxford, to 

 talk about Buckle and the ideas which he had then set afloat, and 

 the question which occupied us the most was whether there could 

 be a science of society, and, if so, where it should begin and how 

 it should be built. We had all been eager students of what was 

 then called the ' philosophy of history/ and I had also felt great 

 interest in the idea of God in history, with which my companions 

 did not sympathize. We agreed, however, that social science 

 must be an induction from history, that Buckle had started on 

 the right track, and that the thing to do was to study history. 

 The difficulty which arrested us was that we did not see how the 

 mass of matter to be collected and arranged could ever be so mas- 

 tered that the induction could actually be performed if the notion 

 of an 'induction from history' should be construed strictly. 

 Young as we were, we never took up this crude notion as a real 

 programme of work. I have often thought of it since when I 



