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APPENDIX: THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE AS APPLIED TO HISTORY.
It is with a feeling of awe, I had almost said of fear, that I find
myself in this place, upon this errand. The responsibility of a
teacher of History in Cambridge is in itself very heavy: but doubly
heavy in the case of one who sees among his audience many men as fit,
it may be some more fit, to fill this Chair: and again, more heavy
still, when one succeeds to a man whose learning, like his virtues,
one can never hope to equal.
But a Professor, I trust, is like other men, capable of improvement;
and the great law, 'docendo disces,' may be fulfilled in him, as in
other men. Meanwhile, I can only promise that such small powers as I
possess will be honestly devoted to this Professorate; and that I
shall endeavour to teach Modern History after a method which shall
give satisfaction to the Rulers of this University.
I shall do that best, I believe, by keeping in mind the lessons which
I, in common with thousands more, have learnt from my wise and good
predecessor. I do not mean merely patience in research, and accuracy
in fact. They are required of all men: and they may be learnt from
many men. But what Sir James Stephen's life and writings should
especially teach us, is the beauty and the value of charity; of that
large-hearted humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, generous,
earnest thought and endeavour, in whatsoever shape they may have
appeared; a charity which, without weakly or lazily confounding the
eternal laws of right and wrong, can make allowances for human
frailty; can separate the good from the evil in men and in theories;
can understand, and can forgive, because it loves. Who can read Sir
James Stephen's works without feeling more kindly toward many a man,
and many a form of thought, against which he has been more or less
prejudiced; without a more genial view of human nature, a more
hopeful view of human destiny, a more full belief in the great
saying, that 'Wisdom is justified of all her children'? Who, too,
can read those works without seeing how charity enlightens the
intellect, just as bigotry darkens it; how events, which to the
theorist and the pedant are merely monstrous and unmeaning, may
explain themselves easily enough to the man who will put himself in
his fellow-creatures' place; who will give them credit for being men
of like passions with himself; who will see with their eyes, feel
with their hearts, and take for his motto, 'Homo sum, nil humani a me
alienum puto'?
I entreat gentlemen who may hereafter attend my lectures to bear in
mind this last saying. If they wish to understand History, they must
first try to understand men and women. For History is the history of
men and women, and of nothing else; and he who knows men and women
thoroughly will best understand the past work of the world, and be
best able to carry on its work now. The men who, in the long run,
have governed the world, have been those who understood the human
heart; and therefore it is to this day the statesman who keeps the
reins in his hand, and not the mere student. He is a man of the
world; he knows how to manage his fellow-men; and therefore he can
get work done which the mere student (it may be) has taught him ought
to be done; but which the mere student, much less the mere trader or
economist, could not get done; simply because his fellow-men would
probably not listen to him, and certainly outwit him. Of course, in
proportion to the depth, width, soundness, of his conception of human
nature, will be the greatness and wholesomeness of his power. He may
appeal to the meanest, or to the loftiest motives. He may be a fox
or an eagle; a Borgia, or a Hildebrand; a Talleyrand, or a Napoleon;
a Mary Stuart, or an Elizabeth: but however base, however noble, the
power which he exercises is the same in essence. He makes History,
because he understands men. And you, if you would understand
History, must understand men.
If, therefore, any of you should ask me how to study history, I
should answer--Take by all means biographies: wheresoever possible,
autobiographies; and study them. Fill your minds with live human
figures; men of like passions with yourselves; see how each lived and
worked in the time and place in which God put him. Believe me, that
when you have thus made a friend of the dead, and brought him to life
again, and let him teach you to see with his eyes, and feel with his
heart, you will begin to understand more of his generation and his
circumstances, than all the mere history-books of the period would
teach you. In proportion as you understand the man, and only so,
will you begin to understand the elements in which he worked. And
not only to understand, but to remember. Names, dates, genealogies,
geographical details, costumes, fashions, manners, crabbed scraps of
old law, which you used, perhaps, to read up and forget again,
because they were not rooted, but stuck into your brain, as pins are
into a pincushion, to fall out at the first shake--all these you will
remember; because they will arrange and organize themselves around
the central human figure: just as, if you have studied a portrait by
some great artist, you cannot think of the face in it, without
recollecting also the light and shadow, the tone of colouring, the
dress, the very details of the background, and all the accessories
which the painter's art has grouped around; each with a purpose, and
therefore each fixing itself duly in your mind. Who, for instance,
has not found that he can learn more French history from French
memoirs, than even from all the truly learned and admirable histories
of France which have been written of late years? There are those,
too, who will say of good old Plutarch's lives (now-a-days, I think,
too much neglected), what some great man used to say of Shakspeare
and English history--that all the ancient history which they really
knew, they had got from Plutarch. I am free to confess that I have
learnt what little I know of the middle-ages, what they were like,
how they came to be what they were, and how they issued in the
Reformation, not so much from the study of the books about them (many
and wise though they are), as from the thumbing over, for years, the
semi-mythical saints' lives of Surius and the Bollandists.
Without doubt History obeys, and always has obeyed, in the long run,
certain laws. But those laws assert themselves, and are to be
discovered, not in things, but in persons; in the actions of human
beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings, shall
we understand the laws which they have obeyed, or which have avenged
themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism: if it be
such, it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just
now, when the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at
human beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions
(under the name of laws) rather as persons than as things.
Discovering, to our just delight, order and law all around us, in a
thousand events which seemed to our fathers fortuitous and arbitrary,
we are dazzled just now by the magnificent prospect opening before
us, and fall, too often, into more than one serious mistake.
First; students try to explain too often all the facts which they
meet by the very few laws which they know; and especially moral
phaenomena by physical, or at least economic laws. There is an
excuse for this last error. Much which was thought, a few centuries
since, to belong to the spiritual world, is now found to belong to
the material; and the physician is consulted, where the exorcist used
to be called in. But it is a somewhat hasty corollary therefrom, and
one not likely to find favour in this University, that moral laws and
spiritual agencies have nothing at all to do with the history of the
human race. We shall not be inclined here, I trust, to explain (as
some one tried to do lately) the Crusades by a hypothesis of over-
stocked labour-markets on the Continent.
Neither, again, shall we be inclined to class those same Crusades
among 'popular delusions,' and mere outbursts of folly and madness.
This is a very easy, and I am sorry to say, a very common method of
disposing of facts which will not fit into the theory, too common of
late, that need and greed have been always, and always ought to be,
the chief motives of mankind. Need and greed, heaven knows, are
powerful enough: but I think that he who has something nobler in
himself than need and greed, will have eyes to discern something
nobler than them, in the most fantastic superstitions, in the most
ferocious outbursts, of the most untutored masses. Thank God, that
those who preach the opposite doctrine belie it so often by a happy
inconsistency; that he who declares self-interest to be the
mainspring of the world, can live a life of virtuous self-sacrifice;
that he who denies, with Spinoza, the existence of free-will, can
disprove his own theory, by willing, like Spinoza, amid all the
temptations of the world, to live a life worthy of a Roman Stoic; and
that he who represents men as the puppets of material circumstance,
and who therefore has no logical right either to praise virtue, or to
blame vice, can shew, by a healthy admiration of the former, a
healthy scorn of the latter, how little his heart has been corrupted
by the eidola specus, the phantoms of the study, which have oppressed
his brain. But though men are often, thank heaven, better than their
doctrines, yet the goodness of the man does not make his doctrine
good; and it is immoral as well as unphilosophical to call a thing
hard names simply because it cannot be fitted into our theory of the
universe. Immoral, because all harsh and hasty wholesale judgments
are immoral; unphilosophical, because the only philosophical method
of looking at the strangest of phaenomena is to believe that it too
is the result of law, perhaps a healthy result; that it is not to be
condemned as a product of disease before it is proven to be such; and
that if it be a product of disease, disease has its laws, as much as
health; and is a subject, not for cursing, but for induction; so that
(to return to my example) if every man who ever took part in the
Crusades were proved to have been simply mad, our sole business would
be to discover why he went mad upon that special matter, and at that
special time. And to do that, we must begin by recollecting that in
every man who went forth to the Crusades, or to any other strange
adventure of humanity, was a whole human heart and brain, of like
strength and weakness, like hopes, like temptations, with our own;
and find out what may have driven him mad, by considering what would
have driven us mad in his place.
May I be permitted to enlarge somewhat on this topic? There is, as
you are aware, a demand just now for philosophies of History. The
general spread of Inductive Science has awakened this appetite; the
admirable contemporary French historians have quickened it by feeding
it; till, the more order and sequence we find in the facts of the
past, the more we wish to find. So it should be (or why was man
created a rational being?) and so it is; and the requirements of the
more educated are becoming so peremptory, that many thinking men
would be ready to say (I should be sorry to endorse their opinion),
that if History is not studied according to exact scientific method,
it need not be studied at all.
A very able anonymous writer has lately expressed this general
tendency of modern thought in language so clear and forcible that I
must beg leave to quote it: -
'Step by step,' he says, 'the notion of evolution by law is
transforming the whole field of our knowledge and opinion. It is not
one order of conception which comes under its influence: but it is
the whole sphere of our ideas, and with them the whole system of our
action and conduct. Not the physical world alone is now the domain
of inductive science, but the moral, the intellectual, and the
spiritual are being added to its empire. Two co-ordinate ideas
pervade the vision of every thinker, physicist or moralist,
philosopher or priest. In the physical and the moral world, in the
natural and the human, are ever seen two forces--invariable rule, and
continual advance; law and action; order and progress; these two
powers working harmoniously together, and the result, inevitable
sequence, orderly movement, irresistible growth. In the physical
world indeed, order is most prominent to our eyes; in the moral world
it is progress, but both exist as truly in the one as in the other.
In the scale of nature, as we rise from the inorganic to the organic,
the idea of change becomes even more distinct; just as when we rise
through the gradations of the moral world, the idea of order becomes
more difficult to grasp. It was the last task of the astronomer to
show eternal change even in the grand order of our Solar System. It
is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law even in the complex
action of human life. In the latter, indeed, it is but the first
germs which are clear. No rational thinker hopes to discover more
than some few primary actions of law, and some approximative theory
of growth. Much is dark and contradictory. Numerous theories
differing in method and degree are offered; nor do we decide between
them. We insist now only upon this, that the principle of
development in the moral, as in the physical, has been definitely
admitted; and something like a conception of one grand analogy
through the whole sphere of knowledge, has almost become a part of
popular opinion. Most men shrink from any broad statement of the
principle, though all in some special instances adopt it. It
surrounds every idea of our life, and is diffused in every branch of
study. The press, the platform, the lecture-room, and the pulpit
ring with it in every variety of form. Unconscious pedants are
proving it. It flashes on the statistician through his registers; it
guides the hand of simple philanthropy; it is obeyed by the instinct
of the statesman. There is not an act of our public life which does
not acknowledge it. No man denies that there are certain, and even
practical laws of political economy. They are nothing but laws of
society. The conferences of social reformers, the congresses for
international statistics and for social science bear witness of its
force. Everywhere we hear of the development of the constitution, of
public law, of public opinion, of institutions, of forms of society,
of theories of history. In a word, whatever views of history may be
inculcated on the Universities by novelists or epigrammatists, it is
certain that the best intellects and spirits of our day are labouring
to see more of that invariable order, and of that principle of growth
in the life of human societies and of the great society of mankind
which nearly all men, more or less, acknowledge, and partially and
unconsciously confirm.'
This passage expresses admirably, I think, the tendencies of modern
thought for good and evil.
For good. For surely it is good, and a thing to thank God for, that
men should be more and more expecting order, searching for order,
welcoming order. But for evil also. For young sciences, like young
men, have their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion
too, and haste, and bigotry. Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the
beauty of the few laws they may have discovered, they are too apt to
erect them into gods, and to explain by them all matters in heaven
and earth; and apt, too, as I think this author does, to patch them
where they are weakest, by that most dangerous succedaneum of vague
and grand epithets, which very often contain, each of them, an
assumption far more important than the law to which they are tacked.
Such surely are the words which so often occur in this passage--
'Invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible.' There
is an ambiguity in these words, which may lead--which I believe does
lead--to most unphilosophical conclusions. They are used very much
as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men.
Are you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the
world-old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be
the rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a
passing epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that
an inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral
as well as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly
identical statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see
immutable law, even in the complex action of human life?
The crown of philosophy? Doubtless it is so. But not a crown, I
should have thought, which has been reserved as the special glory of
these latter days. Very early, at least in the known history of
mankind, did Philosophy (under the humble names of Religion and
Common Sense) see most immutable, and even eternal, laws, in the
complex action of human life, even the laws of right and wrong; and
called them The Everlasting Judgments of God, to which a confused and
hard-worked man was to look; and take comfort, for all would be well
at last. By fair induction (as I believe) did man discover, more or
less clearly, those eternal laws: by repeated verifications of them
in every age, man has been rising, and will yet rise, to clearer
insight into their essence, their limits, their practical results.
And if it be these, the old laws of right and wrong, which this
author and his school call invariable and immutable, we shall, I
trust, most heartily agree with them; only wondering why a moral
government of the world seems to them so very recent a discovery.
But we shall not agree with them, I trust, when they represent these
invariable and immutable laws as resulting in any inevitable
sequence, or irresistible growth. We shall not deny a sequence--
Reason forbids that; or again, a growth--Experience forbids that:
but we shall be puzzled to see why a law, because it is immutable
itself, should produce inevitable results; and if they quote the
facts of material nature against us, we shall be ready to meet them
on that very ground, and ask: --You say that as the laws of matter
are inevitable, so probably are the laws of human life? Be it so:
but in what sense are the laws of matter inevitable? Potentially, or
actually? Even in the seemingly most uniform and universal law,
where do we find the inevitable or the irresistible? Is there not in
nature a perpetual competition of law against law, force against
force, producing the most endless and unexpected variety of results?
Cannot each law be interfered with at any moment by some other law,
so that the first law, though it may struggle for the mastery, shall
be for an indefinite time utterly defeated? The law of gravity is
immutable enough: but do all stones inevitably fall to the ground?
Certainly not, if I choose to catch one, and keep it in my hand. It
remains there by laws; and the law of gravity is there too, making it
feel heavy in my hand: but it has not fallen to the ground, and will
not, till I let it. So much for the inevitable action of the laws of
gravity, as of others. Potentially, it is immutable; but actually it
can be conquered by other laws.
I really beg your pardon for occupying you here with such truisms:
but I must put the students of this University in mind of them, as
long as too many modern thinkers shall choose to ignore them.
Even if then, as it seems to me, the history of mankind depended
merely on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of
nature, it would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable
sequence in History, even though we might suppose that such existed.
But as long as man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of
his own being, such a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it
cannot exist. For man can break the laws of his own being, whether
physical, intellectual, or moral. He breaks them every day, and has
always been breaking them.
The greater number of them he cannot obey till he knows them. And
too many of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken them; and
paid the penalty of his ignorance. He does not, like the brute or
the vegetable, thrive by laws of which he is not conscious: but by
laws of which he becomes gradually conscious; and which he can
disobey after all. And therefore it seems to me very like a juggle
of words to draw analogies from the physical and irrational world,
and apply them to the moral and rational world; and most unwise to
bridge over the gulf between the two by such adjectives as
'irresistible' or 'inevitable,' such nouns as 'order, sequence, law'-
-which must bear an utterly different meaning, according as they are
applied to physical beings or to moral ones.
Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that I cannot fancy that it has
escaped the author and his school; and am driven, by mere respect for
their logical powers, to suppose that they mean no ambiguity at all;
that they do not conceive of irrational beings as differing from
rational beings, or the physical from the moral, or the body of man
from his spirit, in kind and property; and that the immutable laws
which they represent as governing human life and history have nothing
at all to do with those laws of right and wrong, which I intend to
set forth to you, as the 'everlasting judgments of God.'
In which case, I fear, they must go their way; while we go ours;
confessing that there is an order, and there is a law, for man; and
that if he disturb that order, or break that law in anywise, they
will prove themselves too strong for him, and reassert themselves,
and go forward, grinding him to powder if he stubbornly try to stop
their way. But we must assert too, that his disobedience to them,
even for a moment, has disturbed the natural course of events, and
broken that inevitable sequence, which we may find indeed, in our own
imaginations, as long as we sit with a book in our studies: but
which vanishes the moment that we step outside into practical contact
with life; and, instead of talking cheerfully of a necessary and
orderly progress, find ourselves more inclined to cry with the
cynical man of the world:
'All the windy ways of men,
Are but dust that rises up;
And is lightly laid again.'
The usual rejoinder to this argument is to fall back upon man's
weakness and ignorance, and to take refuge in the infinite unknown.
Man, it is said, may of course interfere a little with some of the
less important laws of his being: but who is he, to grapple with the
more vast and remote ones? Because he can prevent a pebble from
falling, is he to suppose that he can alter the destiny of nations,
and grapple forsooth with 'the eternities and the immensities,' and
so forth? The argument is very powerful: but addrest rather to the
imagination than the reason. It is, after all, another form of the
old omne ignotum pro magnifico; and we may answer, I think fairly--
About the eternities and immensities we know nothing, not having been
there as yet; but it is a mere assumption to suppose, without proof,
that the more remote and impalpable laws are more vast, in the sense
of being more powerful (the only sense which really bears upon the
argument), than the laws which are palpably at work around us all day
long; and if we are capable of interfering with almost every law of
human life which we know of already, it is more philosophical to
believe (till disproved by actual failure) that we can interfere with
those laws of our life which we may know hereafter. Whether it will
pay us to interfere with them, is a different question. It is not
prudent to interfere with the laws of health, and it may not be with
other laws, hereafter to be discovered. I am only pleading that man
can disobey the laws of his being; that such power has always been a
disturbing force in the progress of the human race, which modern
theories too hastily overlook; and that the science of history
(unless the existence of the human will be denied) must belong rather
to the moral sciences, than to that 'positive science' which seems to
me inclined to reduce all human phaenomena under physical laws,
hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], to apply where there is no proof whatsoever that they do
or even can apply.
As for the question of the existence of the human will--I am not
here, I hope, to argue that. I shall only beg leave to assume its
existence, for practical purposes. I may be told (though I trust not
in this University), that it is, like the undulatory theory of light,
an unphilosophical 'hypothesis.' Be that as it may, it is very
convenient (and may be for a few centuries to come) to retain the
said 'hypothesis,' as one retains the undulatory theory; and for the
simple reason, that with it one can explain the phaenomena tolerably;
and without it cannot explain them at all.
A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of this last practical result,
seems to have crossed the mind of the author on whom I have been
commenting; for he confesses, honestly enough (and he writes
throughout like an honest man) that in human life 'no rational
thinker hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law,
and some approximative theory of growth.' I have higher hopes of a
possible science of history; because I fall back on those old moral
laws, which I think he wishes to ignore: but I can conceive that he
will not; because he cannot, on his own definitions of law and
growth. They are (if I understand him aright) to be irresistible and
inevitable. I say that they are not so, even in the case of trees
and stones; much more in the world of man. Facts, when he goes on to
verify his theories, will leave him with a very few primary actions
of law, a very faint approximative theory; because his theories, in
plain English, will not work. At the first step, at every step, they
are stopped short by those disturbing forces, or at least disturbed
phaenomena, which have been as yet, and probably will be hereafter,
attributed (as the only explanation of them) to the existence, for
good and evil, of a human will.
Let us look in detail at a few of these disturbances of anything like
inevitable or irresistible movement. Shall we not, at the very first
glance, confess--I am afraid only too soon--that there always have
been fools therein; fools of whom no man could guess, or can yet,
what they were going to do next or why they were going to do it? And
how, pray, can we talk of the inevitable, in the face of that one
miserable fact of human folly, whether of ignorance or of passion,
folly still? There may be laws of folly, as there are laws of
disease; and whether there are or not, we may learn much wisdom from
folly; we may see what the true laws of humanity are, by seeing the
penalties which come from breaking them: but as for laws which work
of themselves, by an irresistible movement,--how can we discover such
in a past in which every law which we know has been outraged again
and again? Take one of the highest instances--the progress of the
human intellect--I do not mean just now the spread of conscious
science, but of that unconscious science which we call common sense.
What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its growth, in a
world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a thousand
times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by the
stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so,
yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the
mob? How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase
of population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the
abnormal and truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not
for food--for in a race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or
decrease might easily be calculated--but uselessly, from rage, hate,
fanaticism, or even mere wantonness? No man is less inclined than I
to undervalue vital statistics, and their already admirable results:
but how can they help us, and how can we help them, in looking at
such a past as that of three-fourths of the nations of the world?
Look--as a single instance among too many--at that most noble nation
of Germany, swept and stunned, by peasant wars, thirty years' wars,
French wars, and after each hurricane, blossoming up again into brave
industry and brave thought, to be in its turn cut off by a fresh
storm ere it could bear full fruit: doing nevertheless such work,
against such fearful disadvantages, as nation never did before; and
proving thereby what she might have done for humanity, had not she,
the mother of all European life, been devoured, generation after
generation, by her own unnatural children. Nevertheless, she is
their mother still; and her history, as I believe, the root-history
of Europe: but it is hard to read--the sibylline leaves are so
fantastically torn, the characters so blotted out by tears and blood.
And if such be the history of not one nation only, but of the
average, how, I ask, are we to make calculations about such a species
as man? Many modern men of science wish to draw the normal laws of
human life from the average of humanity: I question whether they can
do so; because I do not believe the average man to be the normal man,
exhibiting the normal laws: but a very abnormal man, diseased and
crippled, but even if their method were correct, it could work in
practice, only if the destinies of men were always decided by
majorities: and granting that the majority of men have common sense,
are the minority of fools to count for nothing? Are they powerless?
Have they had no influence on History? Have they even been always a
minority, and not at times a terrible majority, doing each that which
was right in the sight of his own eyes? You can surely answer that
question for yourselves. As far as my small knowledge of History
goes, I think it may be proved from facts, that any given people,
down to the lowest savages, has, at any period of its life, known far
more than it has done; known quite enough to have enabled it to have
got on comfortably, thriven, and developed; if it had only done, what
no man does, all that it knew it ought to do, and could do. St.
Paul's experience of himself is true of all mankind--'The good which
I would, I do not; and the evil which I would not, that I do.' The
discrepancy between the amount of knowledge and the amount of work,
is one of the most patent and most painful facts which strikes us in
the history of man; and one not certainly to be explained on any
theory of man's progress being the effect of inevitable laws, or one
which gives us much hope of ascertaining fixed laws for that
progress.
And bear in mind, that fools are not always merely imbecile and
obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There is
in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying
all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause,
as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can
calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of AEtna, with the lava
ready to boil up and overwhelm them at any and every moment. Let us
learn, in God's name, all we can, from the short intervals of average
peace and common sense: let us, or rather our grandchildren, get
precious lessons from them for the next period of sanity. But let us
not be surprised, much less disheartened, if after learning a very
little, some unexpected and truly demoniac factor, Anabaptist war,
French revolution, or other, should toss all our calculations to the
winds, and set us to begin afresh, sadder and wiser men. We may
learn, doubtless, even more of the real facts of human nature, the
real laws of human history, from these critical periods, when the
root-fibres of the human heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than
from any smooth and respectable periods of peace and plenty:
nevertheless their lessons are not statistical, but moral.
But if human folly has been a disturbing force for evil, surely human
reason has been a disturbing force for good. Man can not only
disobey the laws of his being, he can also choose between them, to an
extent which science widens every day, and so become, what he was
meant to be, an artificial being; artificial in his manufactures,
habits, society, polity--what not? All day long he has a free choice
between even physical laws, which mere things have not, and which
make the laws of mere things inapplicable to him. Take the simplest
case. If he falls into the water, he has his choice whether he will
obey the laws of gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to
him) artificial process of swimming, and get ashore. True, both
would happen by law: but he has his choice which law shall conquer,
sink or swim. We have yet to learn why whole nations, why all
mankind may not use the same prudential power as to which law they
shall obey,--which, without breaking it, they shall conquer and
repress, as long as seems good to them.
It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered:
but then she is to be CONQUERED. It has been too much the fashion of
late to travestie that great dictum of Bacon's into a very different
one, and say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered;
thus proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save
her own impotence--a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own
hopes of what science would do for the welfare of the human race.
For what is all human invention, but the transcending and conquering
one natural law by another? What is the practical answer which all
mankind has been making to nature and her pretensions, whenever it
has progressed one step since the foundation of the world: by which
all discoverers have discovered, all teachers taught: by which all
polities, kingdoms, civilizations, arts, manufactures, have
established themselves; all who have raised themselves above the mob
have faced the mob, and conquered the mob, crucified by them first
and worshipped by them afterwards: by which the first savage
conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the forest, by
killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat
wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds
grow at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead;
and won his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature,
proving thereby that he was a man, and not an ape? What but this?--
'Nature is strong, but I am stronger. I know her worth, but I know
my own. I trust her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall
be, and not my tyrant; and if she interfere with my ideal, even with
my personal comfort, then Nature and I will fight it out to the last
gasp, and Heaven defend the right!'
In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early,
or laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much
inclined to say to men: 'You are the puppets of certain natural
laws. Your own freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist
merely as a dangerous disease. All you can do is to submit to the
laws, and drift whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.'
But not less certainly was the same blame to be attached to the
French Socialist School. It, though based on a revolt from the
Philosophie du neant, philosophie de la misere, as it used to term
the laissez faire School, yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe,
namely, that man was the creature of circumstances; and denied him
just as much as its antagonist the possession of freewill, or at
least the right to use freewill on any large scale.
The laissez faire School was certainly the more logical of the two.
With them, if man was the creature of circumstances, those
circumstances were at least defined for him by external laws which he
had not created: while the Socialists, with Fourier at their head
(as it has always seemed to me), fell into the extraordinary paradox
of supposing that though man was the creature of circumstances, he
was to become happy by creating the very circumstances which were
afterwards to create him. But both of them erred, surely, in
ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which he can, for
good or for evil, rebel against and conquer circumstance.
I am not, surely, overstepping my province as Professor of History,
in alluding to this subject. Just notions of Political Economy are
absolutely necessary to just notions of History; and I should wish
those young gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go first, were
it possible, to my more learned brother, the Professor of Political
Economy, and get from him not merely exact habits of thought, but a
knowledge which I cannot give, and yet which they ought to possess.
For to take the very lowest ground, the first fact of history is,
Bouche va toujours; whatever men have or have not done, they have
always eaten, or tried to eat; and the laws which regulate the supply
of the first necessaries of life are, after all, the first which
should be learnt, and the last which should be ignored.
The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving
due weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the
force which ought to determine all human life; and our greatest
living political economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a
plea unequalled since the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-
determining power of the individual, and for his right to use that
power.
But my business is not with rights, so much as with facts; and as a
fact, surely, one may say, that this inventive reason of man has
been, in all ages, interfering with any thing like an inevitable
sequence or orderly progress of humanity. Some of those writers,
indeed, who are most anxious to discover an exact order, are most
loud in their complaints that it has been interfered with by over-
legislation; and rejoice that mankind is returning to a healthier
frame of mind, and leaving nature alone to her own work in her own
way. I do not altogether agree with their complaints; but of that I
hope to speak in subsequent lectures. Meanwhile, I must ask, if (as
is said) most good legislation now-a-days consists in repealing old
laws which ought never to have been passed; if (as is said) the great
fault of our forefathers was that they were continually setting
things wrong, by intermeddling in matters political, economic,
religious, which should have been let alone, to develop themselves in
their own way, what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the
continuous progress, of the human mind?
Look again at the disturbing power, not merely of the general reason
of the many, but of the genius of the few. I am not sure, but that
the one fact, that genius is occasionally present in the world, is
not enough to prevent our ever discovering any regular sequence in
human progress, past or future.
Let me explain myself. In addition to the infinite variety of
individual characters continually born (in itself a cause of
perpetual disturbance), man alone of all species has the faculty of
producing, from time to time, individuals immeasurably superior to
the average in some point or other, whom we call men of genius. Like
Mr. Babbage's calculating machine, human nature gives millions of
orderly respectable common-place results, which any statistician can
classify, and enables hasty philosophers to say--It always has gone
on thus; it must go on thus always; when behold, after many millions
of orderly results, there turns up a seemingly disorderly, a
certainly unexpected, result, and the law seems broken (being really
superseded by some deeper law) for that once, and perhaps never again
for centuries. Even so it is with man, and the physiological laws
which determine the earthly appearance of men. Laws there are, doubt
it not; but they are beyond us: and let our induction be as wide as
it may, they will baffle it; and great nature, just as we fancy we
have found out her secret, will smile in our faces as she brings into
the world a man, the like of whom we have never seen, and cannot
explain, define, classify--in one word, a genius. Such do, as a
fact, become leaders of men into quite new and unexpected paths, and,
for good or evil, leave their stamp upon whole generations and races.
Notorious as this may be, it is just, I think, what most modern
theories of human progress ignore. They take the actions and the
tendencies of the average many, and from them construct their scheme:
a method not perhaps quite safe were they dealing with plants or
animals; but what if it be the very peculiarity of this fantastic and
altogether unique creature called man, not only that he develops,
from time to time, these exceptional individuals, but that they are
the most important individuals of all? that his course is decided for
him not by the average many, but by the extraordinary few; that one
Mahommed, one Luther, one Bacon, one Napoleon, shall change the
thoughts and habits of millions?--So that instead of saying that the
history of mankind is the history of the masses, it would be much
more true to say, that the history of mankind is the history of its
great men; and that a true philosophy of history ought to declare the
laws--call them physical, spiritual, biological, or what we choose--
by which great minds have been produced into the world, as necessary
results, each in his place and time.
That would be a science indeed; how far we are as yet from any such,
you know as well as I. As yet, the appearance of great minds is as
inexplicable to us as if they had dropped among us from another
planet. Who will tell us why they have arisen when they did, and why
they did what they did, and nothing else? I do not deny that such a
science is conceivable; because each mind, however great or strange,
may be the result of fixed and unerring laws of life: and it is
conceivable, too, that such a science may so perfectly explain the
past, as to be able to predict the future; and tell men when a fresh
genius is likely to arise and of what form his intellect will be.
Conceivable: but I fear only conceivable; if for no other reason, at
least for this one. We may grant safely that the mind of Luther was
the necessary result of a combination of natural laws. We may go
further, and grant, but by no means safely, that Luther, was the
creature of circumstances, that there was no self-moving originality
in him, but that his age made him what he was. To some modern minds
these concessions remove all difficulty and mystery: but not, I
trust, to our minds. For does not the very puzzle de quo agitur
remain equally real; namely, why the average of Augustine monks, the
average of German men, did not, by being exposed to the same average
circumstances as Luther, become what Luther was? But whether we
allow Luther to have been a person with an originally different
character from all others, or whether we hold him to have been the
mere puppet of outside influences, the first step towards discovering
how he became what he was, will be to find out what he was. It will
be more easy, and, I am sorry to say, more common to settle
beforehand our theory, and explain by it such parts of Luther as will
fit it; and call those which will not fit it hard names. History is
often so taught, and the method is popular and lucrative. But we
here shall be of opinion, I am sure, that we only can learn causes
through their effects; we can only learn the laws which produced
Luther, by learning Luther himself; by analyzing his whole character;
by gauging all his powers; and that--unless the less can comprehend
the greater--we cannot do till we are more than Luther himself. I
repeat it. None can comprehend a man, unless he be greater than that
man. He must be not merely equal to him, because none can see in
another elements of character which he has not already seen in
himself: he must be greater; because to comprehend him thoroughly,
he must be able to judge the man's failings as well as his
excellencies; to see not only why he did what he did, but why he did
not do more: in a word, he must be nearer than his object is to the
ideal man.
And if it be assumed that I am quibbling on the words 'comprehend'
and 'greater,' that the observer need be greater only potentially,
and not in act; that all the comprehension required of him, is to
have in himself the germs of other men's faculties, without having
developed those germs in life; I must still stand to my assertion.
For such a rejoinder ignores the most mysterious element of all
character, which we call strength: by virtue of which, of two
seemingly similar characters, while one does nothing, the other shall
do great things; while in one the germs of intellect and virtue
remain comparatively embryonic, passive, and weak, in the other these
same germs shall develop into manhood, action, success. And in what
that same strength consists, not even the dramatic imagination of a
Shakespeare could discover. What are those heart-rending sonnets of
his, but the confession that over and above all his powers he lacked
one thing, and knew not what it was, or where to find it--and that
was--to be strong?
And yet he who will give us a science of great men, must begin by
having a larger heart, a keener insight, a more varying human
experience, than Shakespeare's own; while those who offer us a
science of little men, and attempt to explain history and progress by
laws drawn from the average of mankind, are utterly at sea the moment
they come in contact with the very men whose actions make the
history, to whose thought the progress is due. And why? Because (so
at least I think) the new science of little men can be no science at
all: because the average man is not the normal man, and never yet
has been; because the great man is rather the normal man, as
approaching more nearly than his fellows to the true 'norma' and
standard of a complete human character; and therefore to pass him by
as a mere irregular sport of nature, an accidental giant with six
fingers and six toes, and to turn to the mob for your theory of
humanity, is (I think) about as wise as to ignore the Apollo and the
Theseus, and to determine the proportions of the human figure from a
crowd of dwarfs and cripples.
No, let us not weary ourselves with narrow theories, with hasty
inductions, which will, a century hence, furnish mere matter for a
smile. Let us confine ourselves, at least in the present infantile
state of the anthropologic sciences, to facts; to ascertaining
honestly and patiently the thing which has been done; trusting that
if we make ourselves masters of them, some rays of inductive light
will be vouchsafed to us from Him who truly comprehends mankind, and
knows what is in man, because He is the Son of Man; who has His own
true theory of human progress, His own sound method of educating the
human race, perfectly good, and perfectly wise, and at last,
perfectly victorious; which nevertheless, were it revealed to us to-
morrow, we could not understand; for if he who would comprehend
Luther must be more than Luther, what must he be, who would
comprehend God?
Look again, as a result of the disturbing force of genius, at the
effects of great inventions--how unexpected, complex, subtle, all but
miraculous--throwing out alike the path of human history, and the
calculations of the student. If physical discoveries produced only
physical or economic results--if the invention of printing had only
produced more books, and more knowledge--if the invention of
gunpowder had only caused more or less men to be killed--if the
invention of the spinning-jenny had only produced more cotton-stuffs,
more employment, and therefore more human beings,--then their effects
would have been, however complex, more or less subjects of exact
computation.
But so strangely interwoven is the physical and spiritual history of
man, that material inventions produce continually the most unexpected
spiritual results. Printing becomes a religious agent, causes not
merely more books, but a Protestant Reformation; then again, through
the Jesuit literature, helps to a Romanist counter-reformation; and
by the clashing of the two, is one of the great causes of the Thirty
Years' War, one of the most disastrous checks which European progress
ever suffered. Gunpowder, again, not content with killing men,
becomes unexpectedly a political agent; 'the villanous saltpetre,' as
Ariosto and Shakespeare's fop complain, 'does to death many a goodly
gentleman,' and enables the masses to cope, for the first time, with
knights in armour; thus forming a most important agent in the rise of
the middle classes; while the spinning-jenny, not content with
furnishing facts for the political economist, and employment for
millions, helps to extend slavery in the United States, and gives
rise to moral and political questions, which may have, ere they be
solved, the most painful consequences to one of the greatest nations
on earth.
So far removed is the sequence of human history from any thing which
we can call irresistible or inevitable. Did one dare to deal in
epithets, crooked, wayward, mysterious, incalculable, would be those
which would rather suggest themselves to a man looking steadily not
at a few facts here and there, and not again at some hasty bird's-eye
sketch, which he chooses to call a whole, but at the actual whole,
fact by fact, step by step, and alas! failure by failure, and crime
by crime.
Understand me, I beg. I do not wish (Heaven forbid!) to discourage
inductive thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact science. I only
ask that the moral world, which is just as much the domain of
inductive science as the physical one, be not ignored; that the
tremendous difficulties of analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced;
and the hope given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact
science of history; and I wish to warn you off from the too common
mistake of trying to explain the mysteries of the spiritual world by
a few roughly defined physical laws (for too much of our modern
thought does little more than that); and of ignoring as old
fashioned, or even superstitious, those great moral laws of history,
which are sanctioned by the experience of ages.
Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and
perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of
Sir James Stephen: a law which man has been trying in all ages, as
now, to deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if
he had willed, working steadily in all times and nations. And that
is--that as the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength
and honour; the fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy,
weakness and shame. It is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever
young. The Hebrew prophets preached it long ago, in words which are
fulfilling themselves around us every day, and which no new
discoveries of science will abrogate, because they express the great
root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot get a hearing.
For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is
human welfare founded. The true subjective history of man is the
history not of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective
history of man is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and
his virtues. So far from morals depending upon thought, thought, I
believe, depends on morals. In proportion as a nation is righteous,-
-in proportion as common justice is done between man and man, will
thought grow rapidly, securely, triumphantly; will its discoveries be
cheerfully accepted, and faithfully obeyed, to the welfare of the
whole commonweal. But where a nation is corrupt, that is, where the
majority of individuals in it are bad, and justice is not done
between man and man, there thought will wither, and science will be
either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to the ends of
tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes, amid the
general ruin of all good things; as she had done in Greece, in Rome,
in Spain, in China, and many other lands. Laws of economy, of
polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be
ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for
the sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may
become, and will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as
it is not enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though,
thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which
Salvian describes among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the
Franks were thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt
corpses lay about the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in
doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing
the orphan and the widow, swindling the poor man out of his plot of
ground, and sending meanwhile to the tottering Caesar at Rome, to
ask, not for armies, but for Circensian games.
We cannot see how science could have bettered those poor Gauls. And
we can conceive, surely, a nation falling into the same madness, and
crying 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' in the midst of
railroads, spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, and crystal
palaces, with infinite blue-books and scientific treatises ready to
prove to them, what they knew perfectly well already, that they were
making a very unprofitable investment, both of money and of time.
For science indeed is great: but she is not the greatest. She is an
instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she
is wielded by the hand of virtue or of vice. But her lawful
mistress, the only one which can use her aright, the only one under
whom she can truly grow, and prosper, and prove her divine descent,
is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God. This, indeed, the Hebrew
Prophets, who knew no science in one sense of the word, do not
expressly say: but it is a corollary from their doctrine, which we
may discover for ourselves, if we will look at the nations round us
now, if we will look at all the nations which have been. Even
Voltaire himself acknowledged that; and when he pointed to the
Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their
prosperity uniformly to their virtue. We now know that he was wrong
in fact: for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not
of peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness. But that fact
only goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!)
was common to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he
scoffed, namely, that virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin. For we
have found that these Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least,
are an especially unrighteous people; rotting upon the rotting
remnants of the wisdom and virtue of their forefathers, which now
live only on their lips in flowery maxims about justice and mercy and
truth, as a cloak for practical hypocrisy and villany; and we have
discovered also, as a patent fact, just what the Hebrew Prophets
would have foretold us--that the miseries and horrors which are now
destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct and organic results of
the moral profligacy of its inhabitants.
I know no modern nation, moreover, which illustrates so forcibly as
China the great historic law which the Hebrew Prophets proclaim; and
that is this:- That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative
of their morals, so are their morals the correlative of their
theology. As a people behaves, so it thrives; as it believes, so it
behaves. Such as his Gods are, such will the man be; down to that
lowest point which too many of the Chinese seem to have reached,
where, having no Gods, he himself becomes no man; but (as I hear you
see him at the Australian diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even
by the scum of Europe.
I do not say that the theology always produces the morals, any more
than that the morals always produce the theology. Each is, I think,
alternately cause and effect. Men make the Gods in their own
likeness; then they copy the likeness they have set up. But
whichever be cause, and whichever effect, the law, I believe, stands
true, that on the two together depends the physical welfare of a
people. History gives us many examples, in which superstition, many
again in which profligacy, have been the patent cause of a nation's
deoradation. It does not, as far as I am aware, give us a single
case of a nation's thriving and developing when deeply infected with
either of those two vices.
These, the broad and simple laws of moral retribution, we may see in
history; and (I hope) something more than them; something of a
general method, something of an upward progress, though any thing but
an irresistible or inevitable one. For I have not argued that there
is no order, no progress--God forbid. Were there no order to be
found, what could the student with a man's reason in him do, but in
due time go mad?--Were there no progress, what could the student with
a man's heart within him do, but in due time break his heart, over
the sight of a chaos of folly and misery irredeemable?--I only argue
that the order and the progress of human history cannot be similar to
those which govern irrational beings, and cannot (without extreme
danger) be described by metaphors (for they are nothing stronger)
drawn from physical science. If there be an order, a progress, they
must be moral; fit for the guidance of moral beings; limited by the
obedience which those moral beings pay to what they know.
And such an order, such a progress as that, I have good hope that we
shall find in history.
We shall find, as I believe, in all the ages, God educating man;
protecting him till he can go alone, furnishing him with the primary
necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, inspiring him, as we should
do to our children; bearing with him, and forgiving him too, again
and again, as we should do: but teaching him withal (as we shall do
if we be wise) in great part by his own experience, making him test
for himself, even by failure and pain, the truth of the laws which
have been given him; discover for himself, as much as possible, fresh
laws, or fresh applications of laws; and exercising his will and
faculties, by trusting him to himself wherever he can be trusted
without his final destruction. This is my conception of history,
especially of Modern History--of history since the Revelation of our
Lord Jesus Christ. I express myself feebly enough, I know. And even
could I express what I mean perfectly, it would still be but a
partial analogy, not to be pushed into details. As I said just now,
were the true law of human progress revealed to us to-morrow, we
could not understand it.
For suppose that the theory were true, which Dr. Temple of Rugby has
lately put into such noble words: suppose that, as he says, 'The
power whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the
past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life
reaches from the creation to the day of judgment. The successive
generations of men, are days in this man's life. The discoveries and
inventions which characterize the different epochs of the world, are
this man's works. The creeds and doctrines, the opinions and
principles of the successive ages, are his thoughts. The state of
society at different times, are his manners. He grows in knowledge,
in self-control, in visible size, just as we do.' Suppose all this;
and suppose too, that God is educating this his colossal child, as we
educate our own children; it will hardly follow from thence that his
education would be, as Dr. Temple says it is, precisely similar to
ours.
Analogous it may be, but not precisely similar; and for this reason:
That the collective man, in the theory, must be infinitely more
complex in his organization than the individuals of which he is
composed. While between the educator of the one and of the other,
there is simply the difference between a man and God. How much more
complex then must his education be! how all-inscrutable to human
minds much in it!--often as inscrutable as would our training of our
children seem to the bird brooding over her young ones in the nest.
The parental relations in all three cases may be--the Scriptures say
that they are--expansions of the same great law; the key to all
history may be contained in those great words--'How often would I
have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
wings.' Yet even there the analogy stops short--'but thou wouldest
not' expresses a new element, which has no place in the training of
the nestling by the dam, though it has place in our training of our
children; even that self-will, that power of disobedience, which is
the dark side of man's prerogative as a rational and self-cultivating
being. Here that analogy fails, as we should have expected it to do;
and in a hundred other points it fails, or rather transcends so
utterly its original type, that mankind seems, at moments, the mere
puppet of those laws of natural selection, and competition of
species, of which we have heard so much of late; and, to give a
single instance, the seeming waste, of human thought, of human agony,
of human power, seems but another instance of that inscrutable
prodigality of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns dropping to the
ground, but one shall become the thing it can become, and grow into a
builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the nearest swine.
Yet these dark passages of human life may be only necessary elements
of the complex education of our race; and as much mercy under a
fearful shape, as ours when we put the child we love under the
surgeon's knife. At least we may believe so; believe that they have
a moral end, though that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or
narrow prying into final causes (a trick as fatal to historic
research as Bacon said it was to science), we may justify God by
faith, where we cannot justify Him by experience.
Surely this will be the philosophic method. If we seem to ourselves
to have discovered a law, we do not throw it away the moment we find
phaenomena which will not be explained by it. We use those
phaenomena to correct and to expand our law. And this belief that
History is 'God educating man,' is no mere hypothesis; it results
from the observation of thousands of minds, throughout thousands of
years. It has long seemed--I trust it will seem still--the best
explanation of the strange deeds of that strange being, man: and
where we find in history facts which seem to contradict it, we shall
not cast away rashly or angrily either it or them: but if we be
Bacon's true disciples, we shall use them patiently and reverently to
correct and expand our notions of the law itself, and rise thereby to
more deep and just conceptions of education, of man, and--it may be--
of God Himself.
In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective,
rather than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere,
without impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we
shall study in a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on
the one hand, and necessitarianism on the other. We shall not be
afraid to confess natural agencies: but neither shall we be afraid
to confess those supernatural causes which underlie all existence,
save God's alone.
We shall talk of more than of an over-ruling Providence. That such
exists, will seem to us a patent fact. But it will seem to us
somewhat Manichaean to believe that the world is ill made, mankind a
failure, and that all God has to do with them, is to set them right
here and there, when they go intolerably wrong. We shall believe not
merely in an over-ruling Providence, but (if I may dare to coin a
word) in an under-ruling one, which has fixed for mankind eternal
laws of life, health, growth, both physical and spiritual; in an
around-ruling Providence, likewise, by which circumstances, that
which stands around a man, are perpetually arranged, it may be, are
fore-ordained, so that each law shall have at least an opportunity of
taking effect on the right person, in the right time and place; and
in an in-ruling Providence. too, from whose inspiration comes all
true thought, all right feeling; from whom, we must believe, man
alone of all living things known to us inherits that mysterious
faculty of perceiving the law beneath the phaenomena, by virtue of
which he is a MAN.
But we can hold all this, surely, and equally hold all which natural
science may teach us. Hold what natural science teaches? We shall
not dare not to hold it. It will be sacred in our eyes. All light
which science, political, economic, physiological, or other, can
throw upon the past, will be welcomed by us, as coming from the
Author of all light. To ignore it, even to receive it suspiciously
and grudgingly, we shall feel to be a sin against Him. We shall
dread no 'inroads of materialism;' because we shall be standing upon
that spiritual ground which underlies--ay, causes--the material. All
discoveries of science, whether political or economic, whether laws
of health or laws of climate, will be accepted trustfully and
cheerfully. And when we meet with such startling speculations as
those on the influence of climate, soil, scenery on national
character, which have lately excited so much controversy, we shall
welcome them at first sight, just because they give us hope of order
where we had seen only disorder, law where we fancied chance: we
shall verify them patiently; correct them if they need correction;
and if proven, believe that they have worked, and still work, [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], as factors in the great method of
Him who has appointed to all nations their times, and the bounds of
their habitation, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him:
though He be not far from any one of them; for in Him we live, and
move, and have our being, and are the offspring of God Himself.
I thus end what it seemed to me proper to say in this, my Inaugural
Lecture; thanking you much for the patience with which you have heard
me: and if I have in it too often spoken of myself, and my own
opinions, I can only answer that it is a fault which has been forced
on me by my position, and which will not occur again. It seemed to
me that some sort of statement of my belief was necessary, if only
from respect to a University from which I have been long separated,
and to return to which is to me a high honour and a deep pleasure;
and I cannot but be aware (it is best to be honest) that there exists
a prejudice against me in the minds of better men than I am, on
account of certain early writings of mine. That prejudice, I trust,
with God's help, I shall be able to dissipate. At least whatever I
shall fail in doing, this University will find that I shall do one
thing; and that is, obey the Apostolic precept, 'Study to be quiet,
and to do your own business.'
Footnotes:
{p1} Grimm, Grammatik, ii. p. 516.
{p2} See Grimm, Grammatik, (2nd edit.) vol. i. p. 108; vol. ii. p.
581.
{p3} Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 232.
{p4} Forstemann mentions a Latin inscription of the third century
found near Wiesbaden with the Dative Toutiorigi.
{p5} German classics, by M. M. p. 12.
{p6} Anonym. Valesian. ad calcem Ann. Marcellin. p. 722. Gibbon,
cap. xxxix; now known, through Mommsen, as the Annals of Ravenna.
{p7} Grimm thinks that Charle-maigne and Charlemagne were originally
corruptions of Karlo-man, and were interpreted later as Carolus
magnus. Grimm, Grammatik, ii. 462; iii. 320.
{p8} Weber, Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, s 245: 'Bei Verona von
Theoderich (daher Dietrich von Bern) besiegt, barg sich Odoaker
hinter die Mauern von Ravenna.' It is much more objectionable when
Simrock in his translation of the Edda renders Thjodrekr by Dietrich,
though he retains Theodolf and similar names. But it shows at the
same time the wide popularity of that name.
{p9} Grimm, Heldensage, p. 344.
{p10} Gibbon, chap. xxxix. sub fin.
{p11} Otto von Freising, in the first half of the twelfth century
(Chronicon 5, 3), takes the opposite view, and thinks the fable
derived from history: 'Ob ea non multis post diebus, xxx imperii sui
anno, subitanea morte rapitur ac juxta beati Gregorii dialogum (4,
-
a Joanne et Symmacho in Aetnam praecipitatus, a quodam homine Dei
cernitur. Hinc puto fabulam illam traductam, qua vulgo dicitur:
Theodoricus vivus equo sedens ad inferos descendit.
{p12} Grimm, Deutsche Heldensage, p. 36. Chronicon Urspergense,
85a: Haec Jordanis quidam grammaticus, ex eorundem stirpe Gothorum
progenitus, de Getarum origine et Amalorum nobilitate non omnia, quae
de eis scribuntur et referuntur, ut ipse dicit, complexus exaravit,
sed brevius pro rerum notitia huic opusculo inseruimus. His
perlectis diligenterque perspectis perpendat, qui discernere noverit,
quomodo illud ratum teneatur, quod non solum vulgarifabulatione et
cantilenarum modulatione usitatur, verum etiam in quibusdam chronicis
annotatur; scilicet quod Hermenricus tempore Martiani principis super
omnes Gothos regnaverit, et Theodoricum Dietmari filium, patruelem
suum, ut dicunt, instimulante Odoacre, item, ut ajunt, patruele suo
de Verona pulsum, apud Attilam Hunorum regem exulare coegerit, cum
historiographus narret, Ermenricum regem Gothorum multis regibus
dominantem tempore Valentiniani et Valentis fratrum regnasse et a
duobus fratribus Saro et Ammio, quos conjicimus eos fuisse, qui
vulgariter Sarelo et Hamidiecus dicuntur, vulneratum in primordio
egressionis Hunorum per Maeotidem paludem, quibus rex fuit Valamber,
tam vulneris quam Hunorum irruptionis dolore defunctum fuisse,
Attilam vero postea ultra LXX annos sub Martiano et Valentiniano cum
Romanis et Wisigothis Aetioque duce Romanorum pugnasse et sub eisdem
principibus regno vitaque decessisse. . . . Hinc rerum diligens
inspector perpendat, quomodo Ermenricus Theodoricum Dietmari filium
apud Attilam exulare coegerit, cum juxta hunc historiographum
contemporalis ejus non fuit. Igitur aut hic falsa conscripsit, aut
vulgaris opinio fallitur et fallit, aut alius Ermenricus et alms
Theodoricus dandi sunt Attilae contemporanei, in quibus hujus modi
rerum convenientia rata possit haberi. Hic enim Ermenricus longe
ante Attilam legitur defunctus.
{p13} Chronicon, 5, 3: Quod autem rursum narrant, eum Hermanarico
Attilaeque contemporaneum fuisse, omnino stare non potest, dum
Attilam longe post Hermanaricum constat exercuisse tyrannidem
istumque post mortem Attilae octennem a patre obsidem Leoni Augusto
traditum.
{p14} Chronicon, 16, 481: Quod autem quidam dicunt, ipsum
Theodoricum fuisse Hermenrico Veronensi et Attilae contemporaneum,
non est verum. Constat enim Attilam longe post Hermenricum fuisse
Theodoricum etiam longe post mortem Attilae, quum esset puer
octennis, Leoni imperatori in obsidem datum fuisse.
{p19} The early romancers, and especially Achilles Tatius, give
pictures of Roman praedial slavery too painful to quote. Roman
domestic slavery is not to be described by the pen of an Englishman.
And I must express my sorrow, that in the face of such notorious
facts, some have of late tried to prove American slavery to be as bad
as, or even worse than, that of Rome. God forbid! Whatsoever may
have been the sins of the Southern gentleman, he is at least a
Teuton, and not a Roman; a whole moral heaven above the effeminate
wretch, who in the 4th and 5th centuries called himself a senator and
a clarissimus.
{p101} Dr. Sheppard, p. 297.
{p109} Had he actually taken the name of Theodoric, Theuderic,
Dietrich, which signifies much the same thing as 'King of nations'?
{p158} With west-countrymen, to 'scrattle' still means to scramble,
or shuffle about.
{162} English Language, vol. i. p. 200.
{p214} Cf. Montalembert. 'Moines d'Occident.'
{p279} Sismondi Hist. de la Chute de l'Empire Romain, p. 187.
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