The American Historical Review MANY HISTORY AND DEMOCRACY ANY careful students of modern life assert that they discern in society a widespread discontent with the results of historical study as pursued to-day. Assuming this feeling to be well founded, they attribute the supposed feebleness of contemporary historical writing to these causes an unscientific method, the necessary complexity of the subject, and the incapacity of democracies to develop the imagination, either scientific or literary. The truth or untruth of this charge may well engage the attention, both of those who have devoted their lives to historical study and of those who scan the past either for a better understanding of present conditions or for guidance in the future. It may be impossible to refute it absolutely, for we shall be known as we are only after a lapse of time sufficient to secure historical perspective, but there are many weighty considerations which seem to make its validity very doubtful. The real merit of the evolutionary philosophy which has captured the thought of our day lies in the fact that it has made possible a science of the humanities. Claiming to distinguish sharply between the knowable and the unknowable, the physical and the metaphysical, the natural and the supernatural, it set to work on the inductive method to examine knowable, physical, and natural phenomena by the senses, and to generalize about them by the reason. As is usually the case, it was the unexpected which happened. The so-called laws of nature demanded for their apprehension not merely a notion of uniformity, but a conception of unity so far-reaching that its limits have not yet been found, while at the same time the fundamental ideas of the physical philosopher, without which his theories are vain and his reason misleading, turn out to be metaphysical in the highest degree, as, for example, the vortex theory in physics, the stereometric chemistry, the reversing dimension in mathematics, and most of the very recent foundation concepts of biology. On the other hand, identical methods of investigation concerning man, both the race and the individual, began to display possibilities in the orderly arrangement of our knowledge concerning his motives and conduct of which we had hitherto not dreamed. The chance element in human affairs dependent upon the supposed fickleness of the personal will seemed to grow less and less important; and finally the antinomy between liberty and necessity, freedom of choice and the fixity of scientific fact, has ceased to engage the attention of moralists and historians to the exclusion of other important considerations. In the study of the race as a whole, and even of the individual, they have found a broad field within which. to work unhampered by undue regard for metaphysics. Paradoxical as it appears, the sciences of man's nature have for a generation past been growing more and more physical, just in proportion as the other sciences have been growing metaphysical; until while the former do not as yet claim to be exact, and do not venture the test of prediction, they nevertheless assert that they are sciences real and practical. While this is true in a very high degree of jurisprudence, of political science, and of sociology, it is especially true of history. The doctrine of the unity of history has not merely been rehabilitated, but it has been so emphasized that the consequences are simply revolutionary, scientific methods having by its means been introduced into a discipline hitherto venerated as the highest department of prose literature, to be sure, but esteemed by the great critics, and by mankind generally, as on the whole vague and imaginative, as being a picture of the writer's own mind rather than a presentation of facts in an external world, and of reliable deductions from them. Most of us have read with profound sympathy Kant's plaintive call, in view of "the circumstantiality of history as now written," for a "philosophical head deeply versed in history," to point out for posterity "what nations or governments may have performed or spoiled in a cosmopolitical view." The efforts made by such heads to prove and display the unity of history have resulted in just what he longed for, short treatises on general history which fix with sufficient accuracy the real landmarks of all time, and exhibit them in their proper proportions as to the ascent of man "in a cosmopolitical view." This has not been done very successfully in Kant's own country; for the general histories undertaken or completed in Germany are either laid out on a scale proportionate to the German mind and no other, or else, like Hegel's, they exhibit nature as having been solely concerned throughout the ages with a plan to bring forth in the fulness of time the Prussian monarchy and the German Empire. But the task of generalization has been done, and that successfully, both in England and in the United States; and, with some brilliancy, even in France, where a concept of that great nation as being, after all, but a single factor in the advance of civilization has finally been accepted. Doubtless the patriotism of any general historian will cause him vigorously to emphasize the importance of his own land in the comprehensive scheme, but to accept the doctrine of the unity of history is already to admit that no country is more than one wheel in the series which moves the hands on the dial-plate of human progress. The croakers have been saying that indulgence in generalizations must necessarily destroy thoroughness in detail; and the effort is constantly making to discredit the new turn of historical studies by the prophecy that it must result in superficiality. Thus far, at least, the facts all point the other way. Thoroughness has increased in direct ratio with the expansion of the historical horizon. All the sciences of man, whether physical or ethical, have been advanced with a passionate zeal, equal to, if not greater than, that of investigators in the material world, and by the same methods. as theirs. Anthropology, mythology, archæology, physical geography, philology, psychology, and all their sisters, each in its own subdivisions, have been attacking and pursuing their various problems by the inductive and comparative method, and with vastly inferior money resources have outstripped in the importance of their results the richly and even lavishly endowed natural sciences. If we remember that our grandfathers had no other general history than that of Rollin, written before the middle of the eighteenth century, and consequently knew the whole field of secular history as divided into Ancient or Græco-Roman, Medieval, and Modern, each period separated from the other by a great chasm, we shall at once recollect that, thanks to the spade and the science of comparative philology, we have now in Prehistoric Archæology and in Ancient Oriental History two entirely new epochs in the story of man from which the most precious information as to his origin and early advances has been derived. At the same time we have laid the contemporary savage under contribution, and from him we have wrenched details for comparison with early institutions in regard to custom, myth, and social organization which seem likely to be of the first importance. The notion of chasms has disappeared, and the continuity of history has been established. But this is not all. Within the strictly limited field of history proper we have revolutionized the whole method of investigation. in that we no longer study nations, but epochs. Middle-aged and older men will remember with some amusement the amazing historical charts which used to adorn the walls of schoolrooms, and resembled nothing so much as rainbow-colored rivers vaguely rising at the top, and wandering in viscid streams more or less vertically, according to the law of gravitation or the resistance of the medium, until absorbed one by the other, or lost in the ferule at the bottom. We rule our charts differently now; by straight horizontal lines, nearer or farther apart according to the period of general history with which we are concerned. The great stream is monotone, though not monotonous; and if it be but a single year that we study, we investigate it clear across, from where it scours the channel toward both shores, including even the annals of semi-civilized and barbarous peoples, so far as they seem to affect the current or the eddies. We have found the movement of the race more majestic than that of nations or individuals, the interest in man more intense than that in men or persons, and the development of civilization more instructive than the achievements of heroes. This is true, of course, not so much for the general reader as for students of history. The latter, speaking from their personal experiences, will probably agree that the tremendous revival of interest in history is not so much a revival of interest in historical narrative as in historical study. No university class-rooms are more thronged than those where instruction in history is given; and this is equally as true of those which are concerned with the minute, painstaking study of details in a short epoch as it is of those which seek to impart philosophical or general ideas of method, and stimulate to investigation by laying down broad principles of procedure. Confessedly, the greatest master of history, equally great as investigator, critic, and writer, was Thucydides. And yet it has frequently and justly been remarked that his narrative has steadily lost in general importance and interest until now he is comprehensible and entertaining only for the scholar. This means that to be appreciated he must be read and considered from his own standpoint and in regard to his own times. None but the scholar can transfer himself to an epoch so remote. It would be an insoluble puzzle to the most intelligent modern reader to find in the pages of so renowned an historical work no mention of the great con temporary poets, architects, sculptors, or philosophers, but to have the entire artistic, philosophical, and literary movement of the time -a movement unique in the history of the world-summed up in the passing phrase that the works of men's hands seen by the Athenian were such that "the daily delight of them banishes gloom." It would be equally surprising to the same reader to learn that the speeches which constitute between a fifth part and a quarter of the whole text were never spoken by their reputed authors, but were the composition of the historian himself. These paradoxes the classical scholar can perfectly explain, but the historical scholar, and still more the reader of history, must recognize in them the immense change which has come over the character of history. The student of Thucydides as a craftsman will, however, find in him the whole of modern historical science. The idea of the permanency of his results contained in his famous phrase тμa ès deì is carefully founded on four claims: the strict truth of his facts as determined either by personal observation or by the searching criticism of statements made by eye-witnesses; his theme as sufficiently important to affect all nations whether city states or barbaric empires; the fact that his book was composed and not compiled; the persistent identity of human nature in all ages. Put in another way, these ideas are: scrupulous attention to truth; in an epoch of general history; with a unity of spirit and purpose; and with regard to the human spirit as being always the same, or substantially so. -- If, then, every one of our vaunted positions was forestalled twenty-three centuries ago, what is new in the modern science of history? The answer is plain, the application of them to new knowledge under changed conditions. History will not stay written. Every age demands a history written from its own standpoint, with reference to its own social condition, its thought, its beliefs, and its acquisitions, and therefore comprehensible to the men who live in it. Truth, justice, honor, the great principles of human association, have not changed, but man's apprehension of them has steadily grown clearer as his determination to live up to them has grown stronger, and as the individual has become ever more conscious of his powers, both physical and intellectual. For this reason, the seat of sovereign power is never the same in two successive states of society. At the dawn of history, man was the bond-slave of a vague but extensive kinship, -the gens or clan or tribe or city-community; his story has been one of slow and steady approach to an emancipation from the despotism of all kinship except that of the normal monogamous fam |