Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/102

 rules of exact science lies in the fact I have already stated, that generalisations become obscurer and more useless as they grow wider, and, as they grow narrower and more special, cease to have any value as generalisations at all. Is not a historical science liable, if it can be elaborated at all, to become on the one hand a mere table of political formulae and on the other a case-book of political casuistry? And, in either case, is it not as a mere political weapon that it is sought for, not as an increase of knowledge, not as an investigation of truth, nor as a study of History for its own sake? And is not the fact that the idea of a science of History finds acceptation, not among practical historians, but among high-paced theorists, a proof that such a possibility belongs to theory and not to practice; that it is aimed at as a new grace for the all-accomplished doctrinaire, rather than as an object to be sought by those who seek after wisdom?

There were days, centuries ago, when the schoolmen fancied that they could bring into class and line all human knowledge, and encroach to some extent upon the divine, by syllogisms and conversions and oppositions. Much precious knowledge those men handed down to us, with much verbiage and false logic; but even they for the most part left History alone. They ticketed every portion of man's moral anatomy, found a rule for every possible case of choice, a reason and a reward for every virtue, and a punishment for every conceivable crime; they turned generalisations into laws, and deduced from them as laws the very facts from which they had generalised. They benefited mankind by exercising and training subtle wits, and they reduced dialectics, almost, we might say, logic itself, to absurdity. I do not undervalue them, because the great men among them were so great that even such a method did not destroy them: in reading Thomas Aquinas, for instance, one is constantly provoked to say. What could not such a mind

have done if it had not been fettered by such a method? Such, I imagine, must be the result of every attempt to substitute abstract reasonings for minute examination of facts in the study of History. History repeats itself we know, parallels and cycles recur, the speculative mind can