Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/106

 practical work of the subject may be better worth saying than what I said on the theory of it, a speculation on speculations.

The first point to be stated in relation with the second head of discussion has merely to be stated; supposing that the study of History is useful as an educational instrument, that is, not only as providing stores of knowledge or amassing tools for future use, but as having a disciplinary and formative virtue, what part of the mind is it on which the disciplinary process acts, and what power or virtue may it be supposed to develope by training? It is perhaps unnecessary for me to say more than this, that I regard the judicial faculty, 'judgment,' as in vulgar unphilosophical language we call it, as that on which historical study produces the most valuable results; I have so often said this from this desk that I feel shy of repeating it; but it does not appear to me to be less true than it did the first time I said it. The study of the early stages of that history in whose later stages we know ourselves to be personally interested, the study of the modern world of which we are parts, as distinguished from that of the ancient world which, except as a matter of culture, is dead to us, affords room for the development of an equitable as well as an unbiassed judgment, which is a great advantage in itself and may be of great practical use in the world. The exclusive study of the more modern phases of history has a tendency to make men partisans or advocates; but the study of the periods just a generation or two farther removed produces far more effect on the judgment; and the study of medieval History, that is, of the ages in which the things that are precious to us were rooted and sprang up, but had not yet entered into the phases in which controversy is most bitter, or in which the political questions of the day are most directly engaged, has always seemed to me to furnish very good training; to enable us to approach questions in which we are ourselves engaged, with moderate and cautious treatment, to allow some of them to wait for solution, to determine others by the evidence of fact rather than by prepossession, and to let others alone altogether. Ancient History exercises the critical faculty in a