Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/103

 evaluate the curve in which political progress moves, trace the contortions of the unruly spiral, and eschew a cusp as a historic anomaly. But the dealings of human wills, in countless combinations, and circumstances which no theory can ever exhaustively calculate, are not the field for dogmatic assumption or for speculative classification. Perhaps you may think that I am talking at random, that no people ever were so foolish as to suppose that even an exhaustive knowledge of past history could enable a man to prophesy; for such should be the result of a scientific treatment, even if the subject-matter be akin rather to the subject-matter of meteorology than to that of astronomy. It may be so; but the idea is not strange. Experience of life, it is argued, qualifies us for dealing with men; knowledge of human history must qualify us for calculating on the results of even historical contingencies; the practical politician can arrange the factors of his problem so as to work out the solution beforehand; the theoretic explorer of History may so manipulate his factors as to provide for every conceivable combination. Again, I say, it may be so; but not in the regions of life that are worthy of real study; vague generalisations may form the stock-in-trade of the political empiric, but he is an empiric notwithstanding; readiness of observation and fertility of expedient, political genius, the power that interprets events and realises character and motive, are not the result of abstraction even from universal reading.

I grant that genius may do great things with poor instruments and out of small materials. But the scientific triumphs of genius all imply minute knowledge as well as the power of grasping the idea. Owen, from a single bone, could reproduce an entire archaic animal, the real existence of which later discovery vindicated: in that great exploit of scientific genius, there was not only consummate grasp of the idea but enormous knowledge of mechanical anatomy: he did not elaborate the beast out of his own consciousness, nor make a lucky guess; but he looked at his bone all round, and saw its mechanical capabilities, and realised the idea which only could explain the possession of such