kind.” He will find the same critic equally impressed by “the spectacle of the half-naked ascetic sitting under his banyan, and giving out to brown men, ignorant as fishes, thoughts which today form the only antiseptic in the minds of a third of the human race;” and not less by that of “the epileptic camel driver, who wandered for months among the mountains of Arabia, to descend with thoughts which, bad or good, were so powerful that they bound the very tribes of the desert into an indissoluble brotherhood, and hurled them out, a nation of warriors, to tread down the highest existing organizations of the world.” But he will find no explanation. It is all part of “the romance of history” the critic tells us. That is the formula of the writer, who, however, evidently is moved by the conviction that there must be some law underlying it all. But he has nothing better to send us to work with in this last decade of our scientific century.
Even if the impartial observer turns to that party to which his sympathies naturally go out,—the party which is opposed to the romance rendering of history, and which is at present devoting itself to the exhaustive study of periods,—he does not find, on the whole, anything much more satisfying. The efforts of this party seem to be directed towards founding a school of classifiers and abstractors. The limit of its aim seems to be to publish all available material that exists and to vouch for the authenticity of our sources of knowledge. Far be it from any one loyal to the spirit of science to say a single word in disparagement of work so useful and so necessary. But it would also be wrong to pretend to hope that we can ever construct a science of history merely in this frame of mind, or that the remnants of unpublished manuscripts, or the sweepings of sources of information still left unexploited—however precious—can so broaden the foundations of historical knowledge as to enable us thereupon to raise history to its proper dignity as a science.
It is not merely for the classifiers and abstractors that history is waiting now; it is for the workers who, trained in the methods of comparative science, will add to the present outfit of the historian the equipment necessary to enable him to regard history as the last complex but orderly phase in the evolution of life. It is only such a worker that can expect to utilize in the elucidation of our human and historical problems that vast store of knowledge which the sciences upon which history rests are now ready to contribute.
Nor is it easy to see how any fair-minded person, not committed
