THE SPIRIT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH.

By JAMES SCHOULER.

What, let us ask, is history? And by what image may we present to the mind of the student a proper conception of that department of study? Emerson, our American Plato, pictures as a vast sea the universal mind to which all other minds have access. "Of the works of this mind," he adds, "history is the record." That idea is a leading one of this philosopher. Man he considers the encyclopædia, the epitome of facts; the thought, he observes, is always prior to the fact, and is wrought out in human action.

Such a conception may suit the philosophic mind; it may commend itself to men of thought, as contrasted with men of action. But it seems to me too vast if not too vague a definition for an appropriate basis to historical investigation. No one can project history upon such a plan, except man's Maker, the Universal Mind itself. Thought itself may precede the fact, but the two do not coincide nor form a perfect sequence. The empire of thought differs greatly from that of personal action; we each live but one life, while we may propose a hundred. The works of the mind involve all knowledge, all reasoning, all experience. Nor can we with accuracy picture the human mind as a tranquil sea tossing only in its own agitations, but rather as an onward force working through strong physical barriers. History, in truth, is the record of human thought in active motion, of thought which is wrought out into action, of events in their real and recorded sequence. The individual acts upon his external surroundings; those surroundings react upon him and upon his fellows. Men, tribes, nations, thus acting, mold one another's career and are molded in return.

* Read before the American Historical Association, at Washington, December 31, 1889.

History leaves the whole boundless empire of unfettered mental philosophy, of fiction, of imagination. It deals with facts; it notes and narrates what has actually transpired and by whose agency; and it draws where it may the moral. History, in short, is the record of consecutive events-of consecutive public events.

This broad truth should be kept in view, that the human mind (under which term we comprise volition, and not the intellectual process alone), that the individual character acts upon the circumstances surrounding it, upon external nature, upon external fellow-beings. These persons and things external not only modify and influence one's attempted action, but modify his thought and feeling; they react upon him, form and influence his character, his destiny. This makes human history, and it makes the forecast of that history forever uncertain.

The picture, then, that we should prefer to present to the imagination is not of one vast universal mind, calmly germinating, fermenting, conceiving; not of one mind at equilibrium, having various inlets-but of a torrent in motion. They did wisely and naturally who mapped out for us a stream of history flowing onward, and widening and branching in its flow. Downward and onward, this impetuous torrent of human life obeys its own law of gravitation. It advances like a river, with its feeders or its deltas; or like the march of an immense army, now re-enforced, now dividing into columns, now reuniting, but going forever on and never backward. Let us reject, therefore, the idea of an à priori history and whatever conception conjures up a human mind planning history in advance and then executing it. Buckle was oppressed to death by the burden of such an idea as that of reducing the whole history of this world's civilization to a law of natural selection. There is no rigid scientific development to the human race. The particle of divine essence which is in man formulates, creates, compels to its will, changes because of its desire for change; though, after all, it bends to the laws of natural necessity. The man of genius may invent; he may construct a wonderful motive engine which propels by steam or electricity; yet he may be battered to pieces by this same machine, if ignorant or careless of some latent physical cause. We speak, too, of prophecy; but prophecy is vague. "Westward," says Bishop Berkeley, "the course of empire takes its way;" and he looked through the

vista of a century. But who, of all our statesmen and philanthropists who flourished forty years ago-and wise and great, indeed, were many of them-foretold with accuracy how and through what agencies the problem of American slavery, which they so earnestly discussed, would reach its historical solution? To take, then, our simile of the onward torrent from distant sources, or the army advancing from afar: Observe how absorbed was ancient history with the larger streams fed by hidden fountains; how its narrative was confined to the great leaders of thousands and tens of thousands. But in modern history each individual has his relative place; and looking as through a microscope we see an intricate network of rills from which the full stream is supplied. In this consists the difference between ancient and modern life, ancient and modern history. Simplicity is the characteristic of the primitive age; complexity is that of our present civilized and widely multiplied society. The ancient force was the force of the pre eminent leader-of the king, the warrior-chief; but the modern force is that rather of combined mankind-of the majority. Individuals were formerly absorbed under the domination of a single controlling will, but now they are blended or subdued by the co-operation of wills, among which the greatest or the pre-eminent is hard to discover. The course of history all the while is consecutive, knowing no cessation. There is a present, a past, and a future; but the present soon becomes the past, the future takes its turn as the present. And, after all, the only clear law of history is that of motion incessantly onward.

As students of history we seek next a subject and a point of view. Look, then, upon this vast chart of the world's progress. Retrace its course, if you will, and choose where you shall explore. Do not choose at random, but with this great universal record to guide you as a chart; as a chart capable, indeed, of correction, but in the main correct enough to serve the navigator. Having thus chosen, circumscribe your work; confine your exploration to a particular country, to a particular period, say of twenty, thirty, or a hundred years; let your scrutiny be close, and discover what you may to render the great chart fuller and more accurate than hitherto. If universal history be your subject, you will not go far beyond tracing the bold headlands, while on the other hand, with a small compass of work, you may contribute much information of genuine value. to your age. Explore from some starting point; you can de

scend upon it like a hawk. You may require some time to study its vicinity, to look back and consider what brought the stream to this point. But your main investigation will be not by exploring to a source, but by following the stream in its onward and downward current. In the present age one must be ignorant of much if he would be proficient in something.

Our chart of history opens like an atlas; it presents page after page of equal size, but with a lessening area for the sake of an increasing scale. One page exhibits a hemisphere, another a continent, another a nation; others, in turn, the state, the county, the municipal unit. From a world we may thus reduce the focus, until we have mapped within the same spaces a town or city, or even a single house; from a population of millions we may come down to a tribe, a family, or even (as in a biography) to a single individual, and we retrace the human course accordingly. Or we may trace backwards, as the genealogist does, in an order reverse to biography or general history. As we have projected, so we work, we investigate. In such an atlas as I am describing, how different appear both civil and physical configurations at different epochs. Compare, for instance, a map of the United States of our latest date with earlier ones in succession from 1787. Not only in national names and boundaries do they differ, not only in the obscure or erroneous delineation of lakes and rivers in unexplored regions, but in that dotting of towns and cities, that marking of county divisions, which positively indicates the advance of a settled population and settled State governments, Maps of different epochs like these, where they exist, are part of a permanent historical record.

Involved in the study of any civilization is the study of its religion, of its literature, of its political and military movements, of the appliances of science, of the changes and development of trade, commerce, and industries. Each of these influences may be traced apart, or their combined influence may be shown upon the course of some great people. In this present enlightened age, nations intersect one another more and more in their interests, and you may feel the pulse of the whole civilized world through the daily press. How different the task of preparing such a history as the nineteenth century requires, from that of ancient Athens, of China, of mediæval Britain, of early America. But in all tasks unity and selection should be the aim, and above all circumscription. One

must measure out his work with exactness, make careful estimates, and work the huge materials into place, besides using his pencil with the dignity and grace of an artist. In a word, he should be an architect. It is because of this union of the ideal and practical that Michael Angelo deserves the first place among men distinguished in the fine arts. And for this reason, too, we may well rank Gibbon as the foremost among historians; as greater, indeed, than Thucydides, Sallust, or any other of those classical writers who have so long been held up for modern reverence. And this is because, with skill equally or nearly as great as theirs, he conceived and wrought out a task far more difficult. In historical narrative the greatest triumph consists in tracing out and delineating with color and accuracy a variety of intricate influences which contribute to the main result. And who has done this so well as the author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," that greatest of all historical themes, that most impressive and momentous of all human events? See the hand of the master unfolding the long train of emperors and potentates; painting the revolt and irruption of distant nations, of remote tribes; gathering upon his canvas the Greeks, the Scythians, the Arabs, Mohammed and his followers, the fathers of the Christian Church, the Goths and northern barbarians who were destined to shape the civilization of modern Europe; leading his readers with stately tread through the whole grand pathway down which the highest type of a pagan civilization sank slowly into the shades and dissolution of the dark ages. I will not deny that Gibbon had faults as a historian; that his stately pomp might become wearisome, that he partook somewhat of the French sensuousness and skepticism which surrounded him as he labored. But of his profound scholarship and artistic skill there can be no question. Contrast with a task like his the simple narrative of some brief strife under a few heroes or a single one-like the history of the Peloponnesian or Jugurthine war, or like that of the Cortes invasion of Mexico which our own Prescott has so admirably described-and see how immense is the difference. Yet I would not be understood to disparage these other writers with simpler subjects. They have instructed and interested posterity and their own times; their fame is deservedly lasting; there is room in historical literature for them and for all. And our Anglo-Saxon appears to be. of all historical explorers, the best adapted to portray the man