Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/15

 something more. We must draw the moral, whether we will or no: conscious that much nonsense has been talked under the name of 'the philosophy of history' that nothing is so cheap and so easy as to knock together ingenious theories from insufficient data, we yet hold that history has its lessons, and that they can be discovered and taught 'The experience of the past,' as Stubbs wrote, &apos;can be carried into the present: study gives us maxims as well as dry facts.' The teacher who contents himself with arraying the facts in due order has only accomplished half his task. He must take the risk and endeavour to deduce the inner meaning of the annals that he has set forth, content to err if err he must. The fear of being detected in a mistaken conclusion, which keeps some men from drawing any conclusions at all, is a craven fear. What matter if we are proved wrong, provided that truth is advanced? All men are liable to error: true greatness of spirit is shown not by the man who assumes the pose of infallibility, but by him who jo3rfully accepts correction, and turns it to immediate account

I did not hear Dr. Stubbs's Inaugural Lecture— being then a small schoolboy—but I did hear that of his successor Freeman, and those of the three professors who followed Freeman in the Regius chair. I retain a very clear remembrance of each of them, and have refreshed my recollections by looking up the records of them in contemporary periodicals. Freeman's address in October, 1884, was in the main an impassioned harangue in praise of what he called the 'Unity of History'. His thesis was that it is useless to draw a line at the year 476, and to call what goes before 'Ancient' and what comes after 'Modern': that every one who desires to study history must range freely