Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/183

 which have enabled other countries to achieve victories—our system of public schools is sinking into decrepitude and decay for want of a new stimulus. Give it this in the shape of lessons in modern science, in all its freedom and amplitude, and it will be infused with new life. Give it this, and the education of our youth will be something more and something higher than injecting into the mind several new languages, to the sad neglect of the mother tongue, and loading the memory with a useless mass of rules, and definitions, and other abstract forms, which are forgotten as soon as the student enters upon the stage of practical life.

But to return from what may seem a digression. The influence exerted by the march of modern science upon history and historical composition is even more direct and decided than its influence upon poetry. Dealing with the actions of man either in his individual or collective capacity, even the best historians have been in the habit, until within a few years past, of regarding them as the result either of self-directed will or of special providences. Consequently their pages are filled with the marvels wrought by heroes and conquerors, particularly those who were regarded as the especial favorites of Heaven. No margin has been left in these pages for the operation of general laws, guiding and controlling human conduct. And it is only within a recent period that the theory has been formulated that the progress of society is not to be attributed to the casual disturbances made by powerful individuals, or to the ascription of supernatural means, but wholly to the force of laws working out their results without the interference of either divine or human agency. This contribution, or rather new direction to history, constituting by far its most essential feature and element, we owe to science. A few great minds, chief among whom may be mentioned Comte in France and Herbert Spencer in Great Britain, taking their stand upon the recognized principles and harmonies prevailing in the material universe, have transferred this grand conception of law and order amid apparent discordances into the sphere of human societies. Here, as well as in the material universe, the relations existing between different communities, and between the individual members of each, are relations due to the interaction of natural forces; and here, as well as in the material universe, the changes that have been wrought out by these forces are changes analogous to those we see exhibited in the consolidation of the crust of the earth, and in the genesis and growth of the solar and stellar systems—changes, that is to say, from a state of homogeneity to greater and greater complexity and apparent elaboration of detail.

Now, this evident leaning of historians, in common with almost every other class of writers, at the present day, toward the theory of evolution, is so great, and so much is expected of them on account of this theory, that if they were practically to disregard it, in writing history, they would be almost left without readers. I might go further,