formed, even under discouraging circumstances, in many of the departments of knowledge in question. My meaning is different. It is of the isolation of these departments of work from each other and from the sciences upon which they rest, that complaint has to be made. That unity of life now everywhere visible throughout the lower sciences, which causes them to run into each other at every point, and which renders strict lines of demarcation between them almost impossible, is nowhere to be found in the higher branches of knowledge. The workers in many of them still live in an earlier world of ideas which has long since passed away elsewhere. Unconscious of how the world has been moving, some of them seem even anxious to tell us that they know nothing of any other science, and that they desire to know nothing.
We have been hearing now for many years of a science of history, and many earnest and learned workers have borne a part in the uphill effort to raise history to that dignity which is its legitimate destiny. Nevertheless no spectacle can be more profoundly depressing to the worker who, trained in the accurate methods and the truth-seeking spirit of the lower sciences, and with the sense of the reign of universal law which these sciences give strong upon him, endeavors to take up the tangled threads of knowledge in this department of learning. In our universities and centers of learning he will find the exponents of the science still discussing whether it can ever have any laws, and even whether it should be founded on fact or romance. Let him take down any volume of history from its shelf, and endeavor to find any scientific clue therein to the natural laws underlying and controlling the majestic process of life which has unfolded itself in our western civilization, or to the natural laws that have directed the development of other social systems contemporaneous with it, or anterior to it. He will in all probability find none. If there is any attempt to discuss the matter at all, in the light of cause and effect, it will not be suggestive of the methods which science has followed elsewhere. Let him take up a representative organ of educated opinion, like The Spectator, and he will find an historical critic in a recent number regarding with a kind of dim wonder the connection between a few ignorant men, “who started forth to purify a world of which they knew nothing, by ideas which that world held to be contemptible,” and the fact that they have nevertheless so transformed it that today the effect of their work and thought “is regulating the acts and the laws of the guides of all man-
