It is with a feeling of awe, I had almost said of fear, that I find
myself in this place, upon this errand. The responsibility of a teacher
of History in Cambridge is in itself very heavy: but doubly heavy in the
case of one who sees among his audience many men as fit, it may be some
more fit, to fill this Chair: and again, more heavy still, when one
succeeds to a man whose learning, like his virtues, one can never hope to
equal.
But a Professor, I trust, is like other men, capable of improvement; and
the great law, 'docendo disces,' may be fulfilled in him, as in other
men. Meanwhile, I can only promise that such small powers as I possess
will be honestly devoted to this Professorate; and that I shall endeavour
to teach Modern History after a method which shall give satisfaction to
the Rulers of this University.
I shall do that best, I believe, by keeping in mind the lessons which I,
in common with thousands more, have learnt from my wise and good
predecessor. I do not mean merely patience in research, and accuracy in
fact. They are required of all men: and they may be learnt from many
men. But what Sir James Stephen's life and writings should especially
teach us, is the beauty and the value of charity; of that large-hearted
humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, generous, earnest thought and
endeavour, in whatsoever shape they may have appeared; a charity which,
without weakly or lazily confounding the eternal laws of right and wrong,
can make allowances for human frailty; can separate the good from the
evil in men and in theories; can understand, and can forgive, because it
loves. Who can read Sir James Stephen's works without feeling more
kindly toward many a man, and many a form of thought, against which he
has been more or less prejudiced; without a more genial view of human
nature, a more hopeful view of human destiny, a more full belief in the
great saying, that 'Wisdom is justified of all her children'? Who, too,
can read those works without seeing how charity enlightens the intellect,
just as bigotry darkens it; how events, which to the theorist and the
pedant are merely monstrous and unmeaning, may explain themselves easily
enough to the man who will put himself in his fellow-creatures' place;
who will give them credit for being men of like passions with himself;
who will see with their eyes, feel with their hearts, and take for his
motto, 'Homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto'?
I entreat gentlemen who may hereafter attend my lectures to bear in mind
this last saying. If they wish to understand History, they must first
try to understand men and women. For History is the history of men and
women, and of nothing else; and he who knows men and women thoroughly
will best understand the past work of the world, and be best able to
carry on its work now. The men who, in the long run, have governed the
world, have been those who understood the human heart; and therefore it
is to this day the statesman who keeps the reins in his hand, and not the
mere student. He is a man of the world; he knows how to manage his
fellow-men; and therefore he can get work done which the mere student (it
may be) has taught him ought to be done; but which the mere student, much
less the mere trader or economist, could not get done; simply because his
fellow-men would probably not listen to him, and certainly outwit him. Of
course, in proportion to the depth, width, soundness, of his conception
of human nature, will be the greatness and wholesomeness of his power. He
may appeal to the meanest, or to the loftiest motives. He may be a fox
or an eagle; a Borgia, or a Hildebrand; a Talleyrand, or a Napoleon; a
Mary Stuart, or an Elizabeth: but however base, however noble, the power
which he exercises is the same in essence. He makes History, because he
understands men. And you, if you would understand History, must
understand men.
If, therefore, any of you should ask me how to study history, I should
answer--Take by all means biographies: wheresoever possible,
autobiographies; and study them. Fill your minds with live human
figures; men of like passions with yourselves; see how each lived and
worked in the time and place in which God put him. Believe me, that when
you have thus made a friend of the dead, and brought him to life again,
and let him teach you to see with his eyes, and feel with his heart, you
will begin to understand more of his generation and his circumstances,
than all the mere history-books of the period would teach you. In
proportion as you understand the man, and only so, will you begin to
understand the elements in which he worked. And not only to understand,
but to remember. Names, dates, genealogies, geographical details,
costumes, fashions, manners, crabbed scraps of old law, which you used,
perhaps, to read up and forget again, because they were not rooted, but
stuck into your brain, as pins are into a pincushion, to fall out at the
first shake--all these you will remember; because they will arrange and
organize themselves around the central human figure: just as, if you have
studied a portrait by some great artist, you cannot think of the face in
it, without recollecting also the light and shadow, the tone of
colouring, the dress, the very details of the background, and all the
accessories which the painter's art has grouped around; each with a
purpose, and therefore each fixing itself duly in your mind. Who, for
instance, has not found that he can learn more French history from French
memoirs, than even from all the truly learned and admirable histories of
France which have been written of late years? There are those, too, who
will say of good old Plutarch's lives (now-a-days, I think, too much
neglected), what some great man used to say of Shakspeare and English
history--that all the ancient history which they really knew, they had
got from Plutarch. I am free to confess that I have learnt what little I
know of the middle-ages, what they were like, how they came to be what
they were, and how they issued in the Reformation, not so much from the
study of the books about them (many and wise though they are), as from
the thumbing over, for years, the semi-mythical saints' lives of Surius
and the Bollandists.
Without doubt History obeys, and always has obeyed, in the long run,
certain laws. But those laws assert themselves, and are to be
discovered, not in things, but in persons; in the actions of human
beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings, shall we
understand the laws which they have obeyed, or which have avenged
themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism: if it be such,
it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when
the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human beings
rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions (under the name of
laws) rather as persons than as things. Discovering, to our just
delight, order and law all around us, in a thousand events which seemed
to our fathers fortuitous and arbitrary, we are dazzled just now by the
magnificent prospect opening before us, and fall, too often, into more
than one serious mistake.
First; students try to explain too often all the facts which they meet by
the very few laws which they know; and especially moral phaenomena by
physical, or at least economic laws. There is an excuse for this last
error. Much which was thought, a few centuries since, to belong to the
spiritual world, is now found to belong to the material; and the
physician is consulted, where the exorcist used to be called in. But it
is a somewhat hasty corollary therefrom, and one not likely to find
favour in this University, that moral laws and spiritual agencies have
nothing at all to do with the history of the human race. We shall not be
inclined here, I trust, to explain (as some one tried to do lately) the
Crusades by a hypothesis of over-stocked labour-markets on the Continent.
Neither, again, shall we be inclined to class those same Crusades among
'popular delusions,' and mere outbursts of folly and madness. This is a
very easy, and I am sorry to say, a very common method of disposing of
facts which will not fit into the theory, too common of late, that need
and greed have been always, and always ought to be, the chief motives of
mankind. Need and greed, heaven knows, are powerful enough: but I think
that he who has something nobler in himself than need and greed, will
have eyes to discern something nobler than them, in the most fantastic
superstitions, in the most ferocious outbursts, of the most untutored
masses. Thank God, that those who preach the opposite doctrine belie it
so often by a happy inconsistency; that he who declares self-interest to
be the mainspring of the world, can live a life of virtuous
self-sacrifice; that he who denies, with Spinoza, the existence of free-
will, can disprove his own theory, by willing, like Spinoza, amid all the
temptations of the world, to live a life worthy of a Roman Stoic; and
that he who represents men as the puppets of material circumstance, and
who therefore has no logical right either to praise virtue, or to blame
vice, can shew, by a healthy admiration of the former, a healthy scorn of
the latter, how little his heart has been corrupted by the eidola specus,
the phantoms of the study, which have oppressed his brain. But though
men are often, thank heaven, better than their doctrines, yet the
goodness of the man does not make his doctrine good; and it is immoral as
well as unphilosophical to call a thing hard names simply because it
cannot be fitted into our theory of the universe. Immoral, because all
harsh and hasty wholesale judgments are immoral; unphilosophical, because
the only philosophical method of looking at the strangest of phaenomena
is to believe that it too is the result of law, perhaps a healthy result;
that it is not to be condemned as a product of disease before it is
proven to be such; and that if it be a product of disease, disease has
its laws, as much as health; and is a subject, not for cursing, but for
induction; so that (to return to my example) if every man who ever took
part in the Crusades were proved to have been simply mad, our sole
business would be to discover why he went mad upon that special matter,
and at that special time. And to do that, we must begin by recollecting
that in every man who went forth to the Crusades, or to any other strange
adventure of humanity, was a whole human heart and brain, of like
strength and weakness, like hopes, like temptations, with our own; and
find out what may have driven him mad, by considering what would have
driven us mad in his place.
May I be permitted to enlarge somewhat on this topic? There is, as you
are aware, a demand just now for philosophies of History. The general
spread of Inductive Science has awakened this appetite; the admirable
contemporary French historians have quickened it by feeding it; till, the
more order and sequence we find in the facts of the past, the more we
wish to find. So it should be (or why was man created a rational being?)
and so it is; and the requirements of the more educated are becoming so
peremptory, that many thinking men would be ready to say (I should be
sorry to endorse their opinion), that if History is not studied according
to exact scientific method, it need not be studied at all.
A very able anonymous writer has lately expressed this general tendency
of modern thought in language so clear and forcible that I must beg leave
to quote it:--
'Step by step,' he says, 'the notion of evolution by law is transforming
the whole field of our knowledge and opinion. It is not one order of
conception which comes under its influence: but it is the whole sphere of
our ideas, and with them the whole system of our action and conduct. Not
the physical world alone is now the domain of inductive science, but the
moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual are being added to its empire.
Two co-ordinate ideas pervade the vision of every thinker, physicist or
moralist, philosopher or priest. In the physical and the moral world, in
the natural and the human, are ever seen two forces--invariable rule, and
continual advance; law and action; order and progress; these two powers
working harmoniously together, and the result, inevitable sequence,
orderly movement, irresistible growth. In the physical world indeed,
order is most prominent to our eyes; in the moral world it is progress,
but both exist as truly in the one as in the other. In the scale of
nature, as we rise from the inorganic to the organic, the idea of change
becomes even more distinct; just as when we rise through the gradations
of the moral world, the idea of order becomes more difficult to grasp. It
was the last task of the astronomer to show eternal change even in the
grand order of our Solar System. It is the crown of philosophy to see
immutable law even in the complex action of human life. In the latter,
indeed, it is but the first germs which are clear. No rational thinker
hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law, and some
approximative theory of growth. Much is dark and contradictory. Numerous
theories differing in method and degree are offered; nor do we decide
between them. We insist now only upon this, that the principle of
development in the moral, as in the physical, has been definitely
admitted; and something like a conception of one grand analogy through
the whole sphere of knowledge, has almost become a part of popular
opinion. Most men shrink from any broad statement of the principle,
though all in some special instances adopt it. It surrounds every idea
of our life, and is diffused in every branch of study. The press, the
platform, the lecture-room, and the pulpit ring with it in every variety
of form. Unconscious pedants are proving it. It flashes on the
statistician through his registers; it guides the hand of simple
philanthropy; it is obeyed by the instinct of the statesman. There is
not an act of our public life which does not acknowledge it. No man
denies that there are certain, and even practical laws of political
economy. They are nothing but laws of society. The conferences of
social reformers, the congresses for international statistics and for
social science bear witness of its force. Everywhere we hear of the
development of the constitution, of public law, of public opinion, of
institutions, of forms of society, of theories of history. In a word,
whatever views of history may be inculcated on the Universities by
novelists or epigrammatists, it is certain that the best intellects and
spirits of our day are labouring to see more of that invariable order,
and of that principle of growth in the life of human societies and of the
great society of mankind which nearly all men, more or less, acknowledge,
and partially and unconsciously confirm.'
This passage expresses admirably, I think, the tendencies of modern
thought for good and evil.
For good. For surely it is good, and a thing to thank God for, that men
should be more and more expecting order, searching for order, welcoming
order. But for evil also. For young sciences, like young men, have
their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion too, and haste,
and bigotry. Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the beauty of the few laws
they may have discovered, they are too apt to erect them into gods, and
to explain by them all matters in heaven and earth; and apt, too, as I
think this author does, to patch them where they are weakest, by that
most dangerous succedaneum of vague and grand epithets, which very often
contain, each of them, an assumption far more important than the law to
which they are tacked.
Such surely are the words which so often occur in this
passage--'Invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible.'
There is an ambiguity in these words, which may lead--which I believe
does lead--to most unphilosophical conclusions. They are used very much
as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men. Are
you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the world-
old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be the
rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a passing
epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that an
inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral as well
as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly identical
statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law, even
in the complex action of human life?
The crown of philosophy? Doubtless it is so. But not a crown, I should
have thought, which has been reserved as the special glory of these
latter days. Very early, at least in the known history of mankind, did
Philosophy (under the humble names of Religion and Common Sense) see most
immutable, and even eternal, laws, in the complex action of human life,
even the laws of right and wrong; and called them The Everlasting
Judgments of God, to which a confused and hard-worked man was to look;
and take comfort, for all would be well at last. By fair induction (as I
believe) did man discover, more or less clearly, those eternal laws: by
repeated verifications of them in every age, man has been rising, and
will yet rise, to clearer insight into their essence, their limits, their
practical results. And if it be these, the old laws of right and wrong,
which this author and his school call invariable and immutable, we shall,
I trust, most heartily agree with them; only wondering why a moral
government of the world seems to them so very recent a discovery.
But we shall not agree with them, I trust, when they represent these
invariable and immutable laws as resulting in any inevitable sequence, or
irresistible growth. We shall not deny a sequence--Reason forbids that;
or again, a growth--Experience forbids that: but we shall be puzzled to
see why a law, because it is immutable itself, should produce inevitable
results; and if they quote the facts of material nature against us, we
shall be ready to meet them on that very ground, and ask:--You say that
as the laws of matter are inevitable, so probably are the laws of human
life? Be it so: but in what sense are the laws of matter inevitable?
Potentially, or actually? Even in the seemingly most uniform and
universal law, where do we find the inevitable or the irresistible? Is
there not in nature a perpetual competition of law against law, force
against force, producing the most endless and unexpected variety of
results? Cannot each law be interfered with at any moment by some other
law, so that the first law, though it may struggle for the mastery, shall
be for an indefinite time utterly defeated? The law of gravity is
immutable enough: but do all stones inevitably fall to the ground?
Certainly not, if I choose to catch one, and keep it in my hand. It
remains there by laws; and the law of gravity is there too, making it
feel heavy in my hand: but it has not fallen to the ground, and will not,
till I let it. So much for the inevitable action of the laws of gravity,
as of others. Potentially, it is immutable; but actually it can be
conquered by other laws.
I really beg your pardon for occupying you here with such truisms: but I
must put the students of this University in mind of them, as long as too
many modern thinkers shall choose to ignore them.
Even if then, as it seems to me, the history of mankind depended merely
on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of nature, it
would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable sequence in
History, even though we might suppose that such existed. But as long as
man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being, such
a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it cannot exist. For man
can break the laws of his own being, whether physical, intellectual, or
moral. He breaks them every day, and has always been breaking them.
The greater number of them he cannot obey till he knows them. And too
many of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken them; and paid the
penalty of his ignorance. He does not, like the brute or the vegetable,
thrive by laws of which he is not conscious: but by laws of which he
becomes gradually conscious; and which he can disobey after all. And
therefore it seems to me very like a juggle of words to draw analogies
from the physical and irrational world, and apply them to the moral and
rational world; and most unwise to bridge over the gulf between the two
by such adjectives as 'irresistible' or 'inevitable,' such nouns as
'order, sequence, law'--which must bear an utterly different meaning,
according as they are applied to physical beings or to moral ones.
Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that I cannot fancy that it has
escaped the author and his school; and am driven, by mere respect for
their logical powers, to suppose that they mean no ambiguity at all; that
they do not conceive of irrational beings as differing from rational
beings, or the physical from the moral, or the body of man from his
spirit, in kind and property; and that the immutable laws which they
represent as governing human life and history have nothing at all to do
with those laws of right and wrong, which I intend to set forth to you,
as the 'everlasting judgments of God.'
In which case, I fear, they must go their way; while we go ours;
confessing that there is an order, and there is a law, for man; and that
if he disturb that order, or break that law in anywise, they will prove
themselves too strong for him, and reassert themselves, and go forward,
grinding him to powder if he stubbornly try to stop their way. But we
must assert too, that his disobedience to them, even for a moment, has
disturbed the natural course of events, and broken that inevitable
sequence, which we may find indeed, in our own imaginations, as long as
we sit with a book in our studies: but which vanishes the moment that we
step outside into practical contact with life; and, instead of talking
cheerfully of a necessary and orderly progress, find ourselves more
inclined to cry with the cynical man of the world:
'All the windy ways of men,
Are but dust that rises up;
And is lightly laid again.'
The usual rejoinder to this argument is to fall back upon man's weakness
and ignorance, and to take refuge in the infinite unknown. Man, it is
said, may of course interfere a little with some of the less important
laws of his being: but who is he, to grapple with the more vast and
remote ones? Because he can prevent a pebble from falling, is he to
suppose that he can alter the destiny of nations, and grapple forsooth
with 'the eternities and the immensities,' and so forth? The argument is
very powerful: but addrest rather to the imagination than the reason. It
is, after all, another form of the old omne ignotum pro magnifico; and we
may answer, I think fairly--About the eternities and immensities we know
nothing, not having been there as yet; but it is a mere assumption to
suppose, without proof, that the more remote and impalpable laws are more
vast, in the sense of being more powerful (the only sense which really
bears upon the argument), than the laws which are palpably at work around
us all day long; and if we are capable of interfering with almost every
law of human life which we know of already, it is more philosophical to
believe (till disproved by actual failure) that we can interfere with
those laws of our life which we may know hereafter. Whether it will pay
us to interfere with them, is a different question. It is not prudent to
interfere with the laws of health, and it may not be with other laws,
hereafter to be discovered. I am only pleading that man can disobey the
laws of his being; that such power has always been a disturbing force in
the progress of the human race, which modern theories too hastily
overlook; and that the science of history (unless the existence of the
human will be denied) must belong rather to the moral sciences, than to
that 'positive science' which seems to me inclined to reduce all human
phaenomena under physical laws, hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of
[Greek text], to apply where there is no proof whatsoever that they do or
even can apply.
As for the question of the existence of the human will--I am not here, I
hope, to argue that. I shall only beg leave to assume its existence, for
practical purposes. I may be told (though I trust not in this
University), that it is, like the undulatory theory of light, an
unphilosophical 'hypothesis.' Be that as it may, it is very convenient
(and may be for a few centuries to come) to retain the said 'hypothesis,'
as one retains the undulatory theory; and for the simple reason, that
with it one can explain the phaenomena tolerably; and without it cannot
explain them at all.
A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of this last practical result,
seems to have crossed the mind of the author on whom I have been
commenting; for he confesses, honestly enough (and he writes throughout
like an honest man) that in human life 'no rational thinker hopes to
discover more than some few primary actions of law, and some
approximative theory of growth.' I have higher hopes of a possible
science of history; because I fall back on those old moral laws, which I
think he wishes to ignore: but I can conceive that he will not; because
he cannot, on his own definitions of law and growth. They are (if I
understand him aright) to be irresistible and inevitable. I say that
they are not so, even in the case of trees and stones; much more in the
world of man. Facts, when he goes on to verify his theories, will leave
him with a very few primary actions of law, a very faint approximative
theory; because his theories, in plain English, will not work. At the
first step, at every step, they are stopped short by those disturbing
forces, or at least disturbed phaenomena, which have been as yet, and
probably will be hereafter, attributed (as the only explanation of them)
to the existence, for good and evil, of a human will.
Let us look in detail at a few of these disturbances of anything like
inevitable or irresistible movement. Shall we not, at the very first
glance, confess--I am afraid only too soon--that there always have been
fools therein; fools of whom no man could guess, or can yet, what they
were going to do next or why they were going to do it? And how, pray,
can we talk of the inevitable, in the face of that one miserable fact of
human folly, whether of ignorance or of passion, folly still? There may
be laws of folly, as there are laws of disease; and whether there are or
not, we may learn much wisdom from folly; we may see what the true laws
of humanity are, by seeing the penalties which come from breaking them:
but as for laws which work of themselves, by an irresistible
movement,--how can we discover such in a past in which every law which we
know has been outraged again and again? Take one of the highest
instances--the progress of the human intellect--I do not mean just now
the spread of conscious science, but of that unconscious science which we
call common sense. What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its
growth, in a world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a
thousand times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by
the stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so,
yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob?
How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase of
population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the abnormal and
truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not for food--for in a
race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or decrease might easily
be calculated--but uselessly, from rage, hate, fanaticism, or even mere
wantonness? No man is less inclined than I to undervalue vital
statistics, and their already admirable results: but how can they help
us, and how can we help them, in looking at such a past as that of three-
fourths of the nations of the world? Look--as a single instance among
too many--at that most noble nation of Germany, swept and stunned, by
peasant wars, thirty years' wars, French wars, and after each hurricane,
blossoming up again into brave industry and brave thought, to be in its
turn cut off by a fresh storm ere it could bear full fruit: doing
nevertheless such work, against such fearful disadvantages, as nation
never did before; and proving thereby what she might have done for
humanity, had not she, the mother of all European life, been devoured,
generation after generation, by her own unnatural children. Nevertheless,
she is their mother still; and her history, as I believe, the
root-history of Europe: but it is hard to read--the sibylline leaves are
so fantastically torn, the characters so blotted out by tears and blood.
And if such be the history of not one nation only, but of the average,
how, I ask, are we to make calculations about such a species as man? Many
modern men of science wish to draw the normal laws of human life from the
average of humanity: I question whether they can do so; because I do not
believe the average man to be the normal man, exhibiting the normal laws:
but a very abnormal man, diseased and crippled, but even if their method
were correct, it could work in practice, only if the destinies of men
were always decided by majorities: and granting that the majority of men
have common sense, are the minority of fools to count for nothing? Are
they powerless? Have they had no influence on History? Have they even
been always a minority, and not at times a terrible majority, doing each
that which was right in the sight of his own eyes? You can surely answer
that question for yourselves. As far as my small knowledge of History
goes, I think it may be proved from facts, that any given people, down to
the lowest savages, has, at any period of its life, known far more than
it has done; known quite enough to have enabled it to have got on
comfortably, thriven, and developed; if it had only done, what no man
does, all that it knew it ought to do, and could do. St. Paul's
experience of himself is true of all mankind--'The good which I would, I
do not; and the evil which I would not, that I do.' The discrepancy
between the amount of knowledge and the amount of work, is one of the
most patent and most painful facts which strikes us in the history of
man; and one not certainly to be explained on any theory of man's
progress being the effect of inevitable laws, or one which gives us much
hope of ascertaining fixed laws for that progress.
And bear in mind, that fools are not always merely imbecile and
obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There is in
human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying all
law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause, as
easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can calculate that
of the vines upon the slopes of AEtna, with the lava ready to boil up and
overwhelm them at any and every moment. Let us learn, in God's name, all
we can, from the short intervals of average peace and common sense: let
us, or rather our grandchildren, get precious lessons from them for the
next period of sanity. But let us not be surprised, much less
disheartened, if after learning a very little, some unexpected and truly
demoniac factor, Anabaptist war, French revolution, or other, should toss
all our calculations to the winds, and set us to begin afresh, sadder and
wiser men. We may learn, doubtless, even more of the real facts of human
nature, the real laws of human history, from these critical periods, when
the root-fibres of the human heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than
from any smooth and respectable periods of peace and plenty: nevertheless
their lessons are not statistical, but moral.
But if human folly has been a disturbing force for evil, surely human
reason has been a disturbing force for good. Man can not only disobey
the laws of his being, he can also choose between them, to an extent
which science widens every day, and so become, what he was meant to be,
an artificial being; artificial in his manufactures, habits, society,
polity--what not? All day long he has a free choice between even
physical laws, which mere things have not, and which make the laws of
mere things inapplicable to him. Take the simplest case. If he falls
into the water, he has his choice whether he will obey the laws of
gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to him) artificial
process of swimming, and get ashore. True, both would happen by law: but
he has his choice which law shall conquer, sink or swim. We have yet to
learn why whole nations, why all mankind may not use the same prudential
power as to which law they shall obey,--which, without breaking it, they
shall conquer and repress, as long as seems good to them.
It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered: but
then she is to be CONQUERED. It has been too much the fashion of late to
travestie that great dictum of Bacon's into a very different one, and
say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered; thus
proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save her own
impotence--a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own hopes of what
science would do for the welfare of the human race. For what is all
human invention, but the transcending and conquering one natural law by
another? What is the practical answer which all mankind has been making
to nature and her pretensions, whenever it has progressed one step since
the foundation of the world: by which all discoverers have discovered,
all teachers taught: by which all polities, kingdoms, civilizations,
arts, manufactures, have established themselves; all who have raised
themselves above the mob have faced the mob, and conquered the mob,
crucified by them first and worshipped by them afterwards: by which the
first savage conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the
forest, by killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat
wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds grow
at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead; and won
his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature, proving
thereby that he was a man, and not an ape? What but this?--'Nature is
strong, but I am stronger. I know her worth, but I know my own. I trust
her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall be, and not my tyrant;
and if she interfere with my ideal, even with my personal comfort, then
Nature and I will fight it out to the last gasp, and Heaven defend the
right!'
In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early, or
laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much inclined to
say to men: 'You are the puppets of certain natural laws. Your own
freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist merely as a dangerous
disease. All you can do is to submit to the laws, and drift
whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.' But not less
certainly was the same blame to be attached to the French Socialist
School. It, though based on a revolt from the Philosophie du neant,
philosophie de la misere, as it used to term the laissez faire School,
yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe, namely, that man was the
creature of circumstances; and denied him just as much as its antagonist
the possession of freewill, or at least the right to use freewill on any
large scale.
The laissez faire School was certainly the more logical of the two. With
them, if man was the creature of circumstances, those circumstances were
at least defined for him by external laws which he had not created: while
the Socialists, with Fourier at their head (as it has always seemed to
me), fell into the extraordinary paradox of supposing that though man was
the creature of circumstances, he was to become happy by creating the
very circumstances which were afterwards to create him. But both of them
erred, surely, in ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which
he can, for good or for evil, rebel against and conquer circumstance.
I am not, surely, overstepping my province as Professor of History, in
alluding to this subject. Just notions of Political Economy are
absolutely necessary to just notions of History; and I should wish those
young gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go first, were it
possible, to my more learned brother, the Professor of Political Economy,
and get from him not merely exact habits of thought, but a knowledge
which I cannot give, and yet which they ought to possess. For to take
the very lowest ground, the first fact of history is, Bouche va toujours;
whatever men have or have not done, they have always eaten, or tried to
eat; and the laws which regulate the supply of the first necessaries of
life are, after all, the first which should be learnt, and the last which
should be ignored.
The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving due
weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the force which
ought to determine all human life; and our greatest living political
economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a plea unequalled since
the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-determining power of the
individual, and for his right to use that power.
But my business is not with rights, so much as with facts; and as a fact,
surely, one may say, that this inventive reason of man has been, in all
ages, interfering with any thing like an inevitable sequence or orderly
progress of humanity. Some of those writers, indeed, who are most
anxious to discover an exact order, are most loud in their complaints
that it has been interfered with by over-legislation; and rejoice that
mankind is returning to a healthier frame of mind, and leaving nature
alone to her own work in her own way. I do not altogether agree with
their complaints; but of that I hope to speak in subsequent lectures.
Meanwhile, I must ask, if (as is said) most good legislation now-a-days
consists in repealing old laws which ought never to have been passed; if
(as is said) the great fault of our forefathers was that they were
continually setting things wrong, by intermeddling in matters political,
economic, religious, which should have been let alone, to develop
themselves in their own way, what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the
continuous progress, of the human mind?
Look again at the disturbing power, not merely of the general reason of
the many, but of the genius of the few. I am not sure, but that the one
fact, that genius is occasionally present in the world, is not enough to
prevent our ever discovering any regular sequence in human progress, past
or future.
Let me explain myself. In addition to the infinite variety of individual
characters continually born (in itself a cause of perpetual disturbance),
man alone of all species has the faculty of producing, from time to time,
individuals immeasurably superior to the average in some point or other,
whom we call men of genius. Like Mr. Babbage's calculating machine,
human nature gives millions of orderly respectable common-place results,
which any statistician can classify, and enables hasty philosophers to
say--It always has gone on thus; it must go on thus always; when behold,
after many millions of orderly results, there turns up a seemingly
disorderly, a certainly unexpected, result, and the law seems broken
(being really superseded by some deeper law) for that once, and perhaps
never again for centuries. Even so it is with man, and the physiological
laws which determine the earthly appearance of men. Laws there are,
doubt it not; but they are beyond us: and let our induction be as wide as
it may, they will baffle it; and great nature, just as we fancy we have
found out her secret, will smile in our faces as she brings into the
world a man, the like of whom we have never seen, and cannot explain,
define, classify--in one word, a genius. Such do, as a fact, become
leaders of men into quite new and unexpected paths, and, for good or
evil, leave their stamp upon whole generations and races. Notorious as
this may be, it is just, I think, what most modern theories of human
progress ignore. They take the actions and the tendencies of the average
many, and from them construct their scheme: a method not perhaps quite
safe were they dealing with plants or animals; but what if it be the very
peculiarity of this fantastic and altogether unique creature called man,
not only that he develops, from time to time, these exceptional
individuals, but that they are the most important individuals of all?
that his course is decided for him not by the average many, but by the
extraordinary few; that one Mahommed, one Luther, one Bacon, one
Napoleon, shall change the thoughts and habits of millions?--So that
instead of saying that the history of mankind is the history of the
masses, it would be much more true to say, that the history of mankind is
the history of its great men; and that a true philosophy of history ought
to declare the laws--call them physical, spiritual, biological, or what
we choose--by which great minds have been produced into the world, as
necessary results, each in his place and time.
That would be a science indeed; how far we are as yet from any such, you
know as well as I. As yet, the appearance of great minds is as
inexplicable to us as if they had dropped among us from another planet.
Who will tell us why they have arisen when they did, and why they did
what they did, and nothing else? I do not deny that such a science is
conceivable; because each mind, however great or strange, may be the
result of fixed and unerring laws of life: and it is conceivable, too,
that such a science may so perfectly explain the past, as to be able to
predict the future; and tell men when a fresh genius is likely to arise
and of what form his intellect will be. Conceivable: but I fear only
conceivable; if for no other reason, at least for this one. We may grant
safely that the mind of Luther was the necessary result of a combination
of natural laws. We may go further, and grant, but by no means safely,
that Luther, was the creature of circumstances, that there was no self-
moving originality in him, but that his age made him what he was. To
some modern minds these concessions remove all difficulty and mystery:
but not, I trust, to our minds. For does not the very puzzle de quo
agitur remain equally real; namely, why the average of Augustine monks,
the average of German men, did not, by being exposed to the same average
circumstances as Luther, become what Luther was? But whether we allow
Luther to have been a person with an originally different character from
all others, or whether we hold him to have been the mere puppet of
outside influences, the first step towards discovering how he became what
he was, will be to find out what he was. It will be more easy, and, I am
sorry to say, more common to settle beforehand our theory, and explain by
it such parts of Luther as will fit it; and call those which will not fit
it hard names. History is often so taught, and the method is popular and
lucrative. But we here shall be of opinion, I am sure, that we only can
learn causes through their effects; we can only learn the laws which
produced Luther, by learning Luther himself; by analyzing his whole
character; by gauging all his powers; and that--unless the less can
comprehend the greater--we cannot do till we are more than Luther
himself. I repeat it. None can comprehend a man, unless he be greater
than that man. He must be not merely equal to him, because none can see
in another elements of character which he has not already seen in
himself: he must be greater; because to comprehend him thoroughly, he
must be able to judge the man's failings as well as his excellencies; to
see not only why he did what he did, but why he did not do more: in a
word, he must be nearer than his object is to the ideal man.
And if it be assumed that I am quibbling on the words 'comprehend' and
'greater,' that the observer need be greater only potentially, and not in
act; that all the comprehension required of him, is to have in himself
the germs of other men's faculties, without having developed those germs
in life; I must still stand to my assertion. For such a rejoinder
ignores the most mysterious element of all character, which we call
strength: by virtue of which, of two seemingly similar characters, while
one does nothing, the other shall do great things; while in one the germs
of intellect and virtue remain comparatively embryonic, passive, and
weak, in the other these same germs shall develop into manhood, action,
success. And in what that same strength consists, not even the dramatic
imagination of a Shakespeare could discover. What are those
heart-rending sonnets of his, but the confession that over and above all
his powers he lacked one thing, and knew not what it was, or where to
find it--and that was--to be strong?
And yet he who will give us a science of great men, must begin by having
a larger heart, a keener insight, a more varying human experience, than
Shakespeare's own; while those who offer us a science of little men, and
attempt to explain history and progress by laws drawn from the average of
mankind, are utterly at sea the moment they come in contact with the very
men whose actions make the history, to whose thought the progress is due.
And why? Because (so at least I think) the new science of little men can
be no science at all: because the average man is not the normal man, and
never yet has been; because the great man is rather the normal man, as
approaching more nearly than his fellows to the true 'norma' and standard
of a complete human character; and therefore to pass him by as a mere
irregular sport of nature, an accidental giant with six fingers and six
toes, and to turn to the mob for your theory of humanity, is (I think)
about as wise as to ignore the Apollo and the Theseus, and to determine
the proportions of the human figure from a crowd of dwarfs and cripples.
No, let us not weary ourselves with narrow theories, with hasty
inductions, which will, a century hence, furnish mere matter for a smile.
Let us confine ourselves, at least in the present infantile state of the
anthropologic sciences, to facts; to ascertaining honestly and patiently
the thing which has been done; trusting that if we make ourselves masters
of them, some rays of inductive light will be vouchsafed to us from Him
who truly comprehends mankind, and knows what is in man, because He is
the Son of Man; who has His own true theory of human progress, His own
sound method of educating the human race, perfectly good, and perfectly
wise, and at last, perfectly victorious; which nevertheless, were it
revealed to us to-morrow, we could not understand; for if he who would
comprehend Luther must be more than Luther, what must he be, who would
comprehend God?
Look again, as a result of the disturbing force of genius, at the effects
of great inventions--how unexpected, complex, subtle, all but
miraculous--throwing out alike the path of human history, and the
calculations of the student. If physical discoveries produced only
physical or economic results--if the invention of printing had only
produced more books, and more knowledge--if the invention of gunpowder
had only caused more or less men to be killed--if the invention of the
spinning-jenny had only produced more cotton-stuffs, more employment, and
therefore more human beings,--then their effects would have been, however
complex, more or less subjects of exact computation.
But so strangely interwoven is the physical and spiritual history of man,
that material inventions produce continually the most unexpected
spiritual results. Printing becomes a religious agent, causes not merely
more books, but a Protestant Reformation; then again, through the Jesuit
literature, helps to a Romanist counter-reformation; and by the clashing
of the two, is one of the great causes of the Thirty Years' War, one of
the most disastrous checks which European progress ever suffered.
Gunpowder, again, not content with killing men, becomes unexpectedly a
political agent; 'the villanous saltpetre,' as Ariosto and Shakespeare's
fop complain, 'does to death many a goodly gentleman,' and enables the
masses to cope, for the first time, with knights in armour; thus forming
a most important agent in the rise of the middle classes; while the
spinning-jenny, not content with furnishing facts for the political
economist, and employment for millions, helps to extend slavery in the
United States, and gives rise to moral and political questions, which may
have, ere they be solved, the most painful consequences to one of the
greatest nations on earth.
So far removed is the sequence of human history from any thing which we
can call irresistible or inevitable. Did one dare to deal in epithets,
crooked, wayward, mysterious, incalculable, would be those which would
rather suggest themselves to a man looking steadily not at a few facts
here and there, and not again at some hasty bird's-eye sketch, which he
chooses to call a whole, but at the actual whole, fact by fact, step by
step, and alas! failure by failure, and crime by crime.
Understand me, I beg. I do not wish (Heaven forbid!) to discourage
inductive thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact science. I only ask
that the moral world, which is just as much the domain of inductive
science as the physical one, be not ignored; that the tremendous
difficulties of analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced; and the hope
given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact science of
history; and I wish to warn you off from the too common mistake of trying
to explain the mysteries of the spiritual world by a few roughly defined
physical laws (for too much of our modern thought does little more than
that); and of ignoring as old fashioned, or even superstitious, those
great moral laws of history, which are sanctioned by the experience of
ages.
Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and
perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of Sir
James Stephen: a law which man has been trying in all ages, as now, to
deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if he had
willed, working steadily in all times and nations. And that is--that as
the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength and honour; the
fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy, weakness and shame. It
is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever young. The Hebrew prophets
preached it long ago, in words which are fulfilling themselves around us
every day, and which no new discoveries of science will abrogate, because
they express the great root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot
get a hearing.
For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human
welfare founded. The true subjective history of man is the history not
of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective history of man
is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and his virtues. So far
from morals depending upon thought, thought, I believe, depends on
morals. In proportion as a nation is righteous,--in proportion as common
justice is done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely,
triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted, and faithfully
obeyed, to the welfare of the whole commonweal. But where a nation is
corrupt, that is, where the majority of individuals in it are bad, and
justice is not done between man and man, there thought will wither, and
science will be either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to
the ends of tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes,
amid the general ruin of all good things; as she had done in Greece, in
Rome, in Spain, in China, and many other lands. Laws of economy, of
polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be
ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for the
sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may become, and
will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as it is not
enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, thank God, but
seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which Salvian describes
among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the Franks were
thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about
the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in doomed Jerusalem of old,
were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the widow,
swindling the poor man out of his plot of ground, and sending meanwhile
to the tottering Caesar at Rome, to ask, not for armies, but for
Circensian games.
We cannot see how science could have bettered those poor Gauls. And we
can conceive, surely, a nation falling into the same madness, and crying
'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' in the midst of railroads,
spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, and crystal palaces, with infinite
blue-books and scientific treatises ready to prove to them, what they
knew perfectly well already, that they were making a very unprofitable
investment, both of money and of time.
For science indeed is great: but she is not the greatest. She is an
instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she is
wielded by the hand of virtue or of vice. But her lawful mistress, the
only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly
grow, and prosper, and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the likeness
of Almighty God. This, indeed, the Hebrew Prophets, who knew no science
in one sense of the word, do not expressly say: but it is a corollary
from their doctrine, which we may discover for ourselves, if we will look
at the nations round us now, if we will look at all the nations which
have been. Even Voltaire himself acknowledged that; and when he pointed
to the Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their
prosperity uniformly to their virtue. We now know that he was wrong in
fact: for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not of
peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness. But that fact only
goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!) was common
to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he scoffed, namely, that
virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin. For we have found that these
Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least, are an especially
unrighteous people; rotting upon the rotting remnants of the wisdom and
virtue of their forefathers, which now live only on their lips in flowery
maxims about justice and mercy and truth, as a cloak for practical
hypocrisy and villany; and we have discovered also, as a patent fact,
just what the Hebrew Prophets would have foretold us--that the miseries
and horrors which are now destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct
and organic results of the moral profligacy of its inhabitants.
I know no modern nation, moreover, which illustrates so forcibly as China
the great historic law which the Hebrew Prophets proclaim; and that is
this:--That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative of their
morals, so are their morals the correlative of their theology. As a
people behaves, so it thrives; as it believes, so it behaves. Such as
his Gods are, such will the man be; down to that lowest point which too
many of the Chinese seem to have reached, where, having no Gods, he
himself becomes no man; but (as I hear you see him at the Australian
diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even by the scum of Europe.
I do not say that the theology always produces the morals, any more than
that the morals always produce the theology. Each is, I think,
alternately cause and effect. Men make the Gods in their own likeness;
then they copy the likeness they have set up. But whichever be cause,
and whichever effect, the law, I believe, stands true, that on the two
together depends the physical welfare of a people. History gives us many
examples, in which superstition, many again in which profligacy, have
been the patent cause of a nation's deoradation. It does not, as far as
I am aware, give us a single case of a nation's thriving and developing
when deeply infected with either of those two vices.
These, the broad and simple laws of moral retribution, we may see in
history; and (I hope) something more than them; something of a general
method, something of an upward progress, though any thing but an
irresistible or inevitable one. For I have not argued that there is no
order, no progress--God forbid. Were there no order to be found, what
could the student with a man's reason in him do, but in due time go
mad?--Were there no progress, what could the student with a man's heart
within him do, but in due time break his heart, over the sight of a chaos
of folly and misery irredeemable?--I only argue that the order and the
progress of human history cannot be similar to those which govern
irrational beings, and cannot (without extreme danger) be described by
metaphors (for they are nothing stronger) drawn from physical science. If
there be an order, a progress, they must be moral; fit for the guidance
of moral beings; limited by the obedience which those moral beings pay to
what they know.
And such an order, such a progress as that, I have good hope that we
shall find in history.
We shall find, as I believe, in all the ages, God educating man;
protecting him till he can go alone, furnishing him with the primary
necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, inspiring him, as we should do to
our children; bearing with him, and forgiving him too, again and again,
as we should do: but teaching him withal (as we shall do if we be wise)
in great part by his own experience, making him test for himself, even by
failure and pain, the truth of the laws which have been given him;
discover for himself, as much as possible, fresh laws, or fresh
applications of laws; and exercising his will and faculties, by trusting
him to himself wherever he can be trusted without his final destruction.
This is my conception of history, especially of Modern History--of
history since the Revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. I express myself
feebly enough, I know. And even could I express what I mean perfectly,
it would still be but a partial analogy, not to be pushed into details.
As I said just now, were the true law of human progress revealed to us to-
morrow, we could not understand it.
For suppose that the theory were true, which Dr. Temple of Rugby has
lately put into such noble words: suppose that, as he says, 'The power
whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past,
transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from
the creation to the day of judgment. The successive generations of men,
are days in this man's life. The discoveries and inventions which
characterize the different epochs of the world, are this man's works. The
creeds and doctrines, the opinions and principles of the successive ages,
are his thoughts. The state of society at different times, are his
manners. He grows in knowledge, in self-control, in visible size, just
as we do.' Suppose all this; and suppose too, that God is educating this
his colossal child, as we educate our own children; it will hardly follow
from thence that his education would be, as Dr. Temple says it is,
precisely similar to ours.
Analogous it may be, but not precisely similar; and for this reason: That
the collective man, in the theory, must be infinitely more complex in his
organization than the individuals of which he is composed. While between
the educator of the one and of the other, there is simply the difference
between a man and God. How much more complex then must his education be!
how all-inscrutable to human minds much in it!--often as inscrutable as
would our training of our children seem to the bird brooding over her
young ones in the nest. The parental relations in all three cases may
be--the Scriptures say that they are--expansions of the same great law;
the key to all history may be contained in those great words--'How often
would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings.' Yet even there the analogy stops short--'but thou wouldest
not' expresses a new element, which has no place in the training of the
nestling by the dam, though it has place in our training of our children;
even that self-will, that power of disobedience, which is the dark side
of man's prerogative as a rational and self-cultivating being. Here that
analogy fails, as we should have expected it to do; and in a hundred
other points it fails, or rather transcends so utterly its original type,
that mankind seems, at moments, the mere puppet of those laws of natural
selection, and competition of species, of which we have heard so much of
late; and, to give a single instance, the seeming waste, of human
thought, of human agony, of human power, seems but another instance of
that inscrutable prodigality of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns
dropping to the ground, but one shall become the thing it can become, and
grow into a builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the nearest swine.
Yet these dark passages of human life may be only necessary elements of
the complex education of our race; and as much mercy under a fearful
shape, as ours when we put the child we love under the surgeon's knife.
At least we may believe so; believe that they have a moral end, though
that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or narrow prying into
final causes (a trick as fatal to historic research as Bacon said it was
to science), we may justify God by faith, where we cannot justify Him by
experience.
Surely this will be the philosophic method. If we seem to ourselves to
have discovered a law, we do not throw it away the moment we find
phaenomena which will not be explained by it. We use those phaenomena to
correct and to expand our law. And this belief that History is 'God
educating man,' is no mere hypothesis; it results from the observation of
thousands of minds, throughout thousands of years. It has long seemed--I
trust it will seem still--the best explanation of the strange deeds of
that strange being, man: and where we find in history facts which seem to
contradict it, we shall not cast away rashly or angrily either it or
them: but if we be Bacon's true disciples, we shall use them patiently
and reverently to correct and expand our notions of the law itself, and
rise thereby to more deep and just conceptions of education, of man,
and--it may be--of God Himself.
In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective, rather
than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere, without
impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we shall study in
a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on the one hand, and
necessitarianism on the other. We shall not be afraid to confess natural
agencies: but neither shall we be afraid to confess those supernatural
causes which underlie all existence, save God's alone.
We shall talk of more than of an over-ruling Providence. That such
exists, will seem to us a patent fact. But it will seem to us somewhat
Manichaean to believe that the world is ill made, mankind a failure, and
that all God has to do with them, is to set them right here and there,
when they go intolerably wrong. We shall believe not merely in an over-
ruling Providence, but (if I may dare to coin a word) in an under-ruling
one, which has fixed for mankind eternal laws of life, health, growth,
both physical and spiritual; in an around-ruling Providence, likewise, by
which circumstances, that which stands around a man, are perpetually
arranged, it may be, are fore-ordained, so that each law shall have at
least an opportunity of taking effect on the right person, in the right
time and place; and in an in-ruling Providence. too, from whose
inspiration comes all true thought, all right feeling; from whom, we must
believe, man alone of all living things known to us inherits that
mysterious faculty of perceiving the law beneath the phaenomena, by
virtue of which he is a _man_.
But we can hold all this, surely, and equally hold all which natural
science may teach us. Hold what natural science teaches? We shall not
dare not to hold it. It will be sacred in our eyes. All light which
science, political, economic, physiological, or other, can throw upon the
past, will be welcomed by us, as coming from the Author of all light. To
ignore it, even to receive it suspiciously and grudgingly, we shall feel
to be a sin against Him. We shall dread no 'inroads of materialism;'
because we shall be standing upon that spiritual ground which
underlies--ay, causes--the material. All discoveries of science, whether
political or economic, whether laws of health or laws of climate, will be
accepted trustfully and cheerfully. And when we meet with such startling
speculations as those on the influence of climate, soil, scenery on
national character, which have lately excited so much controversy, we
shall welcome them at first sight, just because they give us hope of
order where we had seen only disorder, law where we fancied chance: we
shall verify them patiently; correct them if they need correction; and if
proven, believe that they have worked, and still work, [Greek text], as
factors in the great method of Him who has appointed to all nations their
times, and the bounds of their habitation, if haply they might feel after
Him, and find Him: though He be not far from any one of them; for in Him
we live, and move, and have our being, and are the offspring of God
Himself.
I thus end what it seemed to me proper to say in this, my Inaugural
Lecture; thanking you much for the patience with which you have heard me:
and if I have in it too often spoken of myself, and my own opinions, I
can only answer that it is a fault which has been forced on me by my
position, and which will not occur again. It seemed to me that some sort
of statement of my belief was necessary, if only from respect to a
University from which I have been long separated, and to return to which
is to me a high honour and a deep pleasure; and I cannot but be aware (it
is best to be honest) that there exists a prejudice against me in the
minds of better men than I am, on account of certain early writings of
mine. That prejudice, I trust, with God's help, I shall be able to
dissipate. At least whatever I shall fail in doing, this University will
find that I shall do one thing; and that is, obey the Apostolic precept,
'Study to be quiet, and to do your own business.'
Footnotes:
{1} Grimm, Grammatik, ii. p. 516.
{2} See Grimm, Grammatik, (2nd edit.) vol. i. p. 108; vol. ii. p. 581.
{3} Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 232.
{4} Forstemann mentions a Latin inscription of the third century found
near Wiesbaden with the Dative Toutiorigi.
{5} German classics, by M. M. p. 12.
{6} Anonym. Valesian. ad calcem Ann. Marcellin. p. 722. Gibbon, cap.
xxxix; now known, through Mommsen, as the Annals of Ravenna.
{7} Grimm thinks that Charle-maigne and Charlemagne were originally
corruptions of Karlo-man, and were interpreted later as Carolus magnus.
Grimm, Grammatik, ii. 462; iii. 320.
{8} Weber, Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, section 245: 'Bei Verona von
Theoderich (daher Dietrich von Bern) besiegt, barg sich Odoaker hinter
die Mauern von Ravenna.' It is much more objectionable when Simrock in
his translation of the Edda renders Thjodrekr by Dietrich, though he
retains Theodolf and similar names. But it shows at the same time the
wide popularity of that name.
{9} Grimm, Heldensage, p. 344.
{10} Gibbon, chap. xxxix. sub fin.
{11} Otto von Freising, in the first half of the twelfth century
(Chronicon 5, 3), takes the opposite view, and thinks the fable derived
from history: 'Ob ea non multis post diebus, xxx imperii sui anno,
subitanea morte rapitur ac juxta beati Gregorii dialogum (4, 36) a Joanne
et Symmacho in Aetnam praecipitatus, a quodam homine Dei cernitur. Hinc
puto fabulam illam traductam, qua vulgo dicitur: _Theodoricus vivus equo
sedens ad inferos descendit_.
{12} Grimm, Deutsche Heldensage, p. 36. Chronicon Urspergense, 85a:
Haec Jordanis quidam grammaticus, ex eorundem stirpe Gothorum progenitus,
de Getarum origine et Amalorum nobilitate non omnia, quae de eis
scribuntur et referuntur, ut ipse dicit, complexus exaravit, sed brevius
pro rerum notitia huic opusculo inseruimus. His perlectis diligenterque
perspectis perpendat, qui discernere noverit, quomodo illud ratum
teneatur, quod non solum _vulgarifabulatione_ et _cantilenarum
modulatione_ usitatur, verum etiam in _quibusdam chronicis_ annotatur;
scilicet quod _Hermenricus_ tempore Martiani principis super omnes Gothos
regnaverit, et _Theodoricum Dietmari filium_, _patruelem_ suum, ut
dicunt, _instimulante Odoacre_, item, ut ajunt, _patruele suo de Verona
pulsum_, apud _Attilam Hunorum regem exulare coegerit_, cum
historiographus narret, Ermenricum regem Gothorum multis regibus
dominantem tempore Valentiniani et Valentis fratrum regnasse et a _duobus
fratribus Saro_ et _Ammio_, quos conjicimus eos fuisse, qui _vulgariter
Sarelo et Hamidiecus_ dicuntur, vulneratum in primordio egressionis
Hunorum per Maeotidem paludem, quibus rex fuit Valamber, tam vulneris
quam Hunorum irruptionis dolore defunctum fuisse, Attilam vero postea
ultra LXX annos sub Martiano et Valentiniano cum Romanis et Wisigothis
Aetioque duce Romanorum pugnasse et sub eisdem principibus regno vitaque
decessisse. . . . Hinc rerum diligens inspector perpendat, quomodo
_Ermenricus Theodoricum Dietmari filium apud Attilam exulare coegerit_,
cum juxta hunc historiographum contemporalis ejus non fuit. Igitur aut
hic falsa conscripsit, aut _vulgaris opinio fallitur_ et _fallit_, aut
alius Ermenricus et alms Theodoricus dandi sunt Attilae contemporanei, in
quibus hujus modi rerum convenientia rata possit haberi. Hic enim
Ermenricus longe ante Attilam legitur defunctus.
{13} Chronicon, 5, 3: Quod autem rursum narrant, eum Hermanarico
Attilaeque contemporaneum fuisse, omnino stare non potest, dum Attilam
longe post Hermanaricum constat exercuisse tyrannidem istumque post
mortem Attilae octennem a patre obsidem Leoni Augusto traditum.
{14} Chronicon, 16, 481: Quod autem quidam dicunt, ipsum Theodoricum
fuisse Hermenrico Veronensi et Attilae contemporaneum, non est verum.
Constat enim Attilam longe post Hermenricum fuisse Theodoricum etiam
longe post mortem Attilae, quum esset puer octennis, Leoni imperatori in
obsidem datum fuisse.
{19} The early romancers, and especially Achilles Tatius, give pictures
of Roman praedial slavery too painful to quote. Roman domestic slavery
is not to be described by the pen of an Englishman. And I must express
my sorrow, that in the face of such notorious facts, some have of late
tried to prove American slavery to be as bad as, or even worse than, that
of Rome. God forbid! Whatsoever may have been the sins of the Southern
gentleman, he is at least a Teuton, and not a Roman; a whole moral heaven
above the effeminate wretch, who in the 4th and 5th centuries called
himself a senator and a clarissimus.
{101} Dr. Sheppard, p. 297.
{109} Had he actually taken the name of Theodoric, Theuderic, Dietrich,
which signifies much the same thing as 'King of nations'?
{158} With west-countrymen, to 'scrattle' still means to scramble, or
shuffle about.
{162} English Language, vol. i. p. 200.
{214} Cf. Montalembert. 'Moines d'Occident.'
{279} Sismondi _Hist. de la Chute de l'Empire Romain_, p. 187.