Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/596

596 is a strong foreshadowing of the unity of history, but very slight practical recognition of the differences between one stage of civilization and another, and the philosophy of the book is quite too much that of a sermon on the evils of priestcraft. In the colossal work of Gibbon there is a dramatic unity of design and a sense of historical perspective that from an artistic point of view can not be praised too highly. It is, no doubt, an immortal book, one of the classics for all ages; but as an interpretation of events it goes but little way. The period of twelve hundred years which it covers was crowded with facts of decisive import for all future time which failed to arrest the author's attention. There is no consciousness that this period, which witnessed the decline and overthrow of a certain phase of political organization, was in the main a period of lusty growth and wholesome progress rather than a period of stagnation or decline. Nor, indeed, is there any explanation of the great conspicuous fact of the decline and fall of the Roman imperial organization; we are told what events happened, and often how they happened, but we are seldom made to understand why they happened. The grasp upon the underlying causes is extremely feeble, as one can not but feel in a moment if, after laying down Gibbon, one picks up a volume of Mommsen, or Freeman, or Sir Henry Maine.

Most of the shortcomings of the old method of historical writing resulted from the fact that the world was looked at from a statical point of view, or as if a picture of the world were a series of detached pictures of things at rest. The human race and its terrestrial habitat were tacitly assumed to have been always very much the same as at present. One age was treated much like another, and when comparisons were made it was after a manner as different from the modern comparative method as alchemy was different from chemistry. As men's studies had not yet been turned in such a direction as to enable them to appreciate the immensity of the results that are wrought by the cumulative action of minute causes, they were disposed to attach too much importance to the catastrophic and marvelous; and the agency of powerful individuals—which upon any sound theory must be' regarded as of great importance—they not only magnified unduly but rendered it unintelligible when they sought to transform human heroes into demi-gods.

It thus appears that the way in which our forefathers treated history was part and parcel of the way in which they regarded the world. Whether in history or in the physical sciences, they found themselves confronted by a seemingly chaotic mass of facts with which they could deal only in a vague and groping manner and in small detached groups. Until geology had made some headway, men had no means of knowing that the state of