Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/427

Rh Dorf records, the very store accounts of the people. What could have been more revolutionary? In addition to this, history embraces, according to the new comer, all phases of intellectual and physical activity, and not, as the Rankianer believe, only the political side of things. This was not only a sharp reflection on the older school, but a second very practical, if unspoken, declaration that the aristocratic portion of the country should occupy relatively only a few of the pages of history.

Still another cause for complaint of Lamprecht's ‘history as a science’ is to be found in the latter 's approval of the work of the Rankianer as a basis for Kulturgeschichte, for a true Weltgeschichte which was declared to be a necessary result of the new method. The idea that Ranke and Mommsen had been preparing the way for still greater historians was distasteful enough to the Berlin professors—the wearers of the Ranke mantle. Another of Lamprecht's disagreeable claims is that a full and complete list of authorities may be omitted and that the historian's page need not always be securely underpinned with double columns of notes and references. The text itself should embrace the results of the works of individual scholars who have preceded him, should show that the author has compassed the whole field and garnered the fruits of others, but he is not necessarily required to give the names of all the sowers. ‘Too many compilations of this kind we have already,’ says the Leipzig professor.

Again, Lamprecht's history is based on Darwinism, i. e., it views every element of our present culture world as a result of evolution. Now every follower of Eanke believes in the correctness of Darwin's principal conclusions, and a history which applied these conclusions would have met with their approval but for the fact that it appeared as a sort of criticism of themselves. Emerson's saying that we distrust our own best thoughts until another gives them expression might fitly apply here if he had but added ‘but we are usually angered at the one who announces them if they prove popular.’ Schopenhauer's protest against idealism, his violent destructiveness, seriously affected the Weltanschauung of Ranke historians; then came the Englishman's revolutionary teaching completely superseding the traditional German philosophy, but all to no effect so far as history-writing was concerned. Lamprecht believes the theory of evolution has ceased to be a theory, that it is really the basis of modern thought, and consequently he holds that history must be rewritten, if it is to meet the demands of the time. His ‘Deutsche Geschichte’ reestablishes the connection between history and philosophy.

A work of such revolutionary character must necessarily meet violent opposition rather than fair criticism. The question which the unbiased student of history asks is: Does the book satisfy the demands of history while answering the requirements of philosophy?