Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/86

 popular lectures may serve admirably to the third object, but be absolutely useless as regards the second; careful study of isolated periods may suffice for the second, but will not satisfy the instincts that axe aroused in the pursuit of the first. But I will not anticipate what ought to come later on.

In the distinction that I have drawn you will no doubt recognise your old friends, the professorial, the tutorial, and the popular view of history. I will so far admit the charge as to arrogate to myself the professorial right to make the first the largest half of my discussion, and devote this lecture to the first point, leaving- the other two for the second. But there is a prior question, prior even to the assumption that History should be studied for its own sake,—Is it worth studying at all? As I have said, the apologetic tone of many of its advocates renders it necessary that I should at once state why it needs no vindication. If man is not, as we believe, the greatest and most wonderful of God's works, he is at least the most wonderful that comes within our contemplation; if the human will, which is the motive cause of all historical events, is not the freest agent in the universe, it is at least the freest agency of which we have any knowledge; if its valuations are not absolutely innumerable and irreducible to classification, on the generalisations of which we may formulate laws and rules, and maxims and prophecies, they are far more diversified and less reducible than any other phenomena in those regions of the universe that we have power to penetrate. For one great insoluble problem of astronomy or geology there are a thousand insoluble problems in the life, in the character, in the face of every man that meets you in the street. Thus, whether we. look at the dignity of the subject-matter, or at the nature of the mental exercise which it requires, or at the inexhaustible I field over which the pursuit ranges. History, the knowledge of the adventures, the development, the changeful career, the varied growths, the ambitions, aspirations, and, if you like, the approximating destinies of mankind, claims a place second to none in the roll of sciences. Arising from one of the first and most anciently cultivated instincts, the desire to know how we come to be what we are, and how the world comes to