Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/102

 Everything had to be explained and, in their opinion, an explanation could be found and had to be found, because unexplained things, bred as they were to studies of natural science, jurisprudence, economics and metaphysics, could not exist. The facts were ruled, for them as for Buckle, by the influence of the natural surroundings or, according to Xenopol, by laws similar to those of nature, but by ties of succession not of contemporaneity.

It was a matter of thought and large horizons continually opened before the searching mind. No seminary for preparing each student to anything in the domain of particular research existed at this time and, notwithstanding this, if the immense majority left the university without having made their universal discovery, preserved for eternity in the thesis of their doctorate, some distinguished searchers and thinkers were set loose, completely formed and trained on their own personal methods by influence of this generous mind, ever fond of new ideas and original interpolations.

All studies of history were presented in the same sense as by Xenopol. We learned that of the Romans, following the pages of Duruy, directed by the remembrance of the Gibbonian thought, and Greek history in the volumes of Grote and Curtius — a very different spirit from that of the later Belloch (Curtius I was to meet later in Berlin, accomplishing, like von Gizycki in ethics, his duties as a teacher in spite of age and infirmity, thus affording an object lesson to the new generation).

This school contributed valuable work to historiography in the first half of the 19th century. Seldom were such great and enduring works written as the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Philip the Second by Prescott, those dealing with the revolt in the Tow Countries