Page:Christianity and Greek Philosophy.djvu/21

Rh we must not only study the events of history in their chronological order, but we must study the earth itself as the theatre of history. A knowledge of all the circumstances, both physical and moral, in the midst of which events take place, is absolutely necessary to a right judgment of the events themselves. And we can only elucidate properly the character of the actors by a careful study of all their geographical and ethological conditions.

It will be readily perceived that, in attempting to estimate the influence which exterior conditions exert in the determination of national character, we encounter peculiar difficulties. We can not in these studies expect the precision and accuracy which is attained in the mathematical, or the purely physical sciences. We possess no control over the "materiel" of our inquiry; we have no power of placing it in new conditions, and submitting it to the test of new experiments, as in the physical sciences. National character is a complex result—a product of the action and reaction of primary and secondary causes. It is a conjoint effect of the action of the primitive elements and laws originally implanted in humanity by the Creator, of the free causality and power of man, and of all the conditions, permanent and accidental, within which the national life has been developed. And in cases where physical and moral causes are blended, and reciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;—where primary results undergo endless modifications from the influence of surrounding circumstances, and the reaction of social and political institutions;—and where each individual of the great aggregate wields a causal power that obeys no specific law, and by his own inherent power sets in motion new trains of causes which can not be reduced to statistics, we grant that we are in possession of no instrument of exact analysis by which the complex phenomena of national character may be reduced to primitive elements. All that we can hope is, to ascertain, by psychological analysis, what are the fundamental ideas and laws of humanity; to grasp the exterior conditions which are, Rh