Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/148

 144 was generally defended on theological and metaphysical grounds, or was presented as the fruit of the work of great men, with the result that it seemed to be outside the realm of reason altogether and not subject to a law of evolution. Suddenly a new scientific idea exploded the whole of this, as Guy Fawkes proposed to explode James I and his Parliament. History became a record of social evolution; society had an orderly process of change as well as man or a grain of sand. Kings and nobles were functionaries; reigns were mere commas in the story—sometimes not even so much—and not the beginnings and endings of paragraphs and chapters. One epoch produced the next, the explanation being that economic adjustments were taking place, and that these adjustments were constantly marshalling and re-marshalling the armies of reaction and progress, which for ever were coming into conflict with each other and changing the balance of power within nations and also the methods by which that power was used and expressed. To no active propaganda of the time did the secularisation of historical theory yield more immediate or more abundant fruit than it did to the propaganda of Socialism.

But the materialist conception of history is after all one-sided and inadequate. The service it rendered was the establishment of the science of history by the setting up of a deductive method as well as an inductive one. Having rendered that service the toy