There is a view of the history of mankind, by this time
familiarised to Englishmen, which detaches from the chaos
of events a connected series of ruling actions and beliefs —
the achievement of great men and great epochs, and assigns
to these in a special sense the term ‘historical.’ According
to this theory — which indeed, if there is to be a theory of
History at all, alone gives the needful simplification — the
mass of nations must be regarded as left in swamps and
shallows outside the main stream of human development. They
have either never come within the reach of the hopes and
institutions which make history a progress instead of a cycle,
or they have stiffened these into a dead body of ceremony
and caste, or at some great epoch they have failed to discern
the sign of the times and rejected the counsel of God against
themselves. Thus permanently or for generations, with no
principle of motion but unsatisfied want, without the assimilative
ideas which from the strife of passions elicit moral
results, they have trodden the old round of war, trade, and
faction, adding nothing to the spiritual heritage of man. It
would seem that the historian need not trouble himself with
them, except so far as relation to them determines the
activity of the progressive nations.
2. A corresponding theory may with some confidence be applied to simplify the history of philosophical opinion. The common plan of seeking this history in compendia of the systems of philosophical writers, taken in the gross or with no discrimination except in regard to time and popularity, is mainly to blame for the common notion that metaphysical enquiry is an endless process of threshing old straw. Such enquiry is really progressive, and has a real history, but it is a history represented by a few great names. At rare epochs there appear men, or sets of men, with the true speculative
