Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/424

420 for example, deals with the manifestations of plant life. In neither ease can we determine the nature of the inner, the motive-essence. The difference in the two sciences, however, consists in the fact that the historian deals with the activities of men and peoples long since passed beyond the reach of his personal knowledge. He relies upon more or less accurately attested depositions given by contemporaries or by the persons themselves, while the botanist, having the object of his investigations before him in most instances, is relieved of the task of rehabilitating extinct existences or species. The historian reconstructs the social and political characters of the past, masters the different intellectual movements, and then places each in its proper relative position, according to the most exacting methods of judgments and interpretations. The rules of accepting and rejecting evidence, of interpreting and classifying great historic events and tendencies which guide the historian in his reconstruction of the past entitle him to the rank of a scientist. The naturalist places a given animal in a certain class because of certain outward manifestations—the expression of the inner unknown forces; the historian places the historic character, whether statesman or peasant, in a certain class, by reason of the same kind of manifestations. In both instances the scientist is dealing with unknown quantities; but in both the outward activities are observed, interpreted, classified and made the basis of future judgments.

Following such a method of investigation one is prepared to appreciate, if not to accept, the second claim Lamprecht has put forward, viz., that history has not so much to do with great personages of the past as with the currents of thought, feeling or passion which produced those personages. He looks upon social, political and industrial leaders as exponents of popular or economic movements and deals with them as such in his writing. This relegates the kings and ministers of the present and past to quite insignificant positions and places the masses of the people in the forefront—a method not a little distasteful to the crowned heads of Europe.

Our new historian goes still further in his readjustment of historical method. Every people has gone through a certain more or less well-defined series of stages of evolution, e. g., the Germans have passed through the following: symbolism, or the earlier and medieval history of the race; individualism, modern times to the French revolution; the age of the subjective soul-activity, or the nineteenth century to Wagner and Darwin, who introduce the present age of excitement and nervosity, if such a word may be used. It is the soul-life, das Seelenleben, of the people which determines the direction of national life, and this soul-activity is to be understood only as one fully comprehends the every-day life of the peasant, the artisan and the trader. This