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ΑΝ
INAUGURAL LECTURE
London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
[All Rights reserved.]
ΑΝ
INAUGURAL LECTURE
delivered iN THE DIVINITY SCHOOL
CAMBRIDGE
ON JANUARY 26, 1903
BY
J. B. BURY, M.A.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1903
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY.
IN saying that I come before you to-day
with no little trepidation, I am not uttering
a mere conventional profession of diffidence.
There are very real reasons for misgiving.
My predecessor told you how formidable he
found this chair, illuminated as it is by the
lustre of the distinguished historian whom he
succeeded. But if it was formidable then, how
much more formidable is it to-day! The terrors
which it possessed for Lord Acton have been.
enhanced for his successor.
In a home of historical studies where so
much thought is spent on their advancement,
one can hardly hope to say any new thing
touching those general aspects of history which
most naturally invite attention in an inaugural
6
1
lecture. It may be appropriate and useful now
and again to pay a sort of solemn tribute to the
dignity and authority of a great discipline or
science, by reciting some of her claims and
her laws, or by reviewing the measures of her
dominion; and on this occasion, in this place,
it might perhaps seem to be enough to honour
the science of History in this formal way,
sprinkling, as it were, with dutiful hands some
grains of incense on her altar.
Yet even such a tribute might possess more
than a formal significance, if we remember how
recently it is within three generations, three
short generations-that history began to forsake
her old irresponsible ways and prepared to
enter into her kingdom. In the story of the
nineteenth century, which has witnessed such
far-reaching changes in the gcography of thought
and in the apparatus of research, no small nor
isolated place belongs to the transformation
and expansion of history. That transformation,
however, is not yet complete. Its principle is
7
not yet universally or unreservedly acknow-
ledged. It is rejected in many places, or
ignored, or unrealised. Old envelopes still
hang tenaciously round the renovated figure, and
students of history are confused, embarrassed,
and diverted by her old traditions and associa-
tions. It has not yet become superfluous to
insist that history is a science, no less and no
more; and some who admit it theoretically
hesitate to enforce the consequences which it
involves. It is therefore, I think, almost in-
cumbent on a professor to define, at the very
outset, his attitude to the transformation of the
idea of history which is being gradually accom-
plished; and an inaugural address offers an
opportunity which, if he feels strongly the
importance of the question, he will not care.
to lose.
And moreover I venture to think that it
may be useful and stimulating for those who
are beginning historical studies to realise vividly
and clearly that the transformation which those
8
studies are undergoing is itself a great event
in the history of the world, that we are
ourselves in the very middle of it, that we are
witnessing and may share in the accomplish-
ment of a change which will have a vast
influence on future cycles of the world. I wish
that I had been enabled to realise this when
I first began to study history. I think it is
important for all historical students alike—not
only for those who may be drawn to make
history the special work of their lives, but also
for those who study it as part of a liberal
education-to be fully alive and awake to the
revolution which is slowly and silently pro-
gressing. It seems especially desirable that
those who are sensible of the importance of
the change and sympathize with it should
declare and emphasize it; just because it is
less patent to the vision and is more perplexed
by ancient theories and traditions, than those
kindred revolutions which have been effected
simultaneously in other branches of knowledge.
9
History has really been enthroned and en-
sphered among the sciences; but the particular
nature of her influence, her time-honoured
association with literature, and other circum-
stances, have acted as a sort of vague cloud,
half concealing from men's eyes her new
position in the heavens.
The proposition that before the beginning
of the last century the study of history was
not scientific may be sustained in spite of a few
exceptions. The works of permanent value,
such as those of Muratori, Ducange, Tillemont,
were achieved by dint of most laborious and
conscientious industry, which commands our
highest admiration and warmest gratitude: but
it must be admitted that their criticism was
sporadic and capricious. It was the criticism
of sheer learning. A few stand on a higher
level in so far as they were really alive to the
need of bringing reason and critical doubt
to bear on the material, but the systematized
method which distinguishes a science was
Dorm
1
}
IO
beyond the vision of all, except a few like
Mabillon. Erudition has now been supple-
mented by scientific method, and we owe the
change to Germany. Among those who brought
it about, the names of Niebuhr and Ranke
´are pre-eminent. But there is another name
which historical students should be slow to
forget, the name of one who, though not a
historian but a philologist, nevertheless gave
a powerful stimulus to the introduction of
critical methods which are now universally ap-
plied. Six years before the eighteenth century
closed a modest book appeared at Halle, of
which it is perhaps hardly a grave exaggeration
to say that it is one of half-a-dozen which in the
last three hundred years have exercised most
effective influence upon thought. The work
I mean is Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer. It
launched upon the world a new engine-donum
exitiale Minervae-which was soon to menace
the walls of many a secure citadel. It gave
historians the idea of a systematic and minute
I I
method of analysing their sources, which soon
developed into the microscopic criticism, now
recognised as indispensable.
All truths (to modify a saying of Plato)
require the most exact methods; and closely
connected with the introduction of a new
method was the elevation of the standard of
truth. The idea of a scrupulously exact con-
formity to facts was fixed, refined, and canon-
ized; and the critical method was one of the
means to secure it. There was indeed no his-
torian since the beginning of things who did not
profess that his sole aim was to present to his
readers untainted and unpainted truth. But
the axiom was loosely understood and inter-
preted, and the notion of truth was elastic. It
might be difficult to assign to Puritanism and
Rationalism and other causes their respective
parts in crystallizing that strict discrimination
of the true and the false which is now so familiar
to us that we can hardly understand insensibility
to the distinction. It would be a most fruitful
I 2
!!
investigation to trace from the earliest ages the
history of public opinion in regard to the mean-
ing of falsehood and the obligation of veracity.
About twenty years ago a German made a
contribution to the subject by examining the
evidence for the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries,
and he showed how different were the views
which men held then as to truth-telling and
lying from those which are held to-day. More-
over, so long as history was regarded as an art,
the sanctions of truth and accuracy could not
be severe. The historians of ancient Rome
display what historiography can become when
it is associated with rhetoric. Though we may
point to individual writers who had a high ideal
of accuracy at various ages, it was not till the
scientific period began that laxity in representing
facts came to be branded as criminal. Nowhere
perhaps can we see the new spirit so self-con-
scious as in some of the letters of Niebuhr.
But a stricter standard of truth and new
methods for the purpose of ascertaining truth
13
were not enough to detach history from her
old moorings. A new transfiguring conception
of her scope and limits was needed, if she was
to become an independent science. Such a
conception was waiting to intervene, but I may
lead up to it by calling to your recollection how
history was affected by the political changes
of Europe.
It was a strange and fortunate coincidence
that the scientific movement in Germany should
have begun simultaneously with another move-
ment which gave a strong impetus to historical
studies throughout Europe and enlisted men's
emotions in their favour. The saying that the
name of hope is remembrance was vividly
illustrated, on a vast scale, by the spirit of
resurgent nationality which you know has
governed, as one of the most puissant forces,
the political course of the last century, and is
still unexhausted. When the peoples, inspired
by the national idea, were stirred to mould their
destinies anew, and, looking back with longing
14
to the more distant past, based upon it their
claims for independence or for unity, history
was one of the most effective weapons in their
armouries; and consequently a powerful motive
was supplied for historical investigation. The
inevitable result was the production of some
crude uncritical histories, written with national
prejudice and political purpose, redeemed by the
genuine pulse of national aspiration. But in
Germany the two movements met. Scientific
method controlled, while the national spirit
quickened, the work of historical rescarch. One
of the grave dangers was the temptation to fix
the eyes exclusively on the inspiring and golden
periods of the past, and it is significant to find
Dahlmann, as early as 1812, warning against
such a tendency, and laying down that the
statesman who studies national history should
study the whole story of his forefathers, the
whole developement of his people, and not
merely chosen parts.
But the point which concerns us now is that
·
15
the national movements of Europe not only
raised history into prominence and gave a great
impulse to its study, but also partially disclosed
where the true practical importance of history
lies. When men sought the key of their national
development not in the immediate but in the
remoter past, they had implicitly recognised in
some measure the principles of unity and con-
tinuity. That recognition was a step towards
the higher, more comprehensive, and scientific
estimation of history's practical significance,
which is only now beginning to be under-
stood.
Just let me remind you what used to be
thought in old days as to the utility of history,
The two greatest of the ancient historians,
Thucydides and Polybius, held that it might be
a guide for conduct, as containing examples and
warnings for statesmen; and it was generally
regarded in Greece and at Rome as a storehouse
of concrete instances to illustrate political and
ethical maxims. Cicero called history in this
1$34,
16
sense magistra vitae, and Dionysius designated
it 'Philosophy by examples.' And this view,
which ascribed to it at best the function of
teaching statesmen by analogy, at worst the
duty of moral edification, prevailed generally
till the last century. Of course it contained a
truth which we should now express in a different
form by saying that history supplies the material
for political and social science. This is a very
important function; but, if it were the only
function, if the practical import of history lay
merely in furnishing examples of causes and
effects, then history, in respect of practical
utility, would be no more than the handmaid
of social science.
And here I may interpolate a parenthesis,
which even at this hour may not be quite
superfluous. I may remind you that history is
not a branch of literature. The facts of history,
like the facts of geology or astronomy, can
supply material for literary art; for manifest

17
}
3
reasons they lend themselves to artistic repre-
sentation far more readily than those of the
natural sciences; but to clothe the story of a
human society in a literary dress is no more the
part of a historian as a historian, than it is the
part of an astronomer as an astronomer to
present in an artistic shape the story of the
stars. Take, for example, the greatest living
historian. The reputation of Mommsen as a
man of letters depends on his Roman History;
but his greatness as a historian is to be sought
far less in that dazzling work than in the Corpus
and the Staatsrecht and the Chronicles.
This, by way of parenthesis; and now to
resume. A right notion of the bearing of history
on affairs, both for the statesman and for the
citizen, could not be formed or formulated
until men had grasped the idea of human
developement. This is the great transforming
conception, which enables history to define
her scope.
The idea was first started by
Leibnitz, but, though it had some exponents
B.
2
18
in the interval, it did not rise to be a govern-
ing force in human thought till the nineteenth
century, when it appears as the true solvent
of the anti-historical doctrines which French
thinkers and the French Revolution had
arrayed against the compulsion of the past.
At the same time, it has brought history into
line with other sciences, and, potentially at
least, has delivered her from the political and
ethical encumbrances which continued to
impede her after the introduction of scientific
methods. For notwithstanding those new
engines of research, she remained much less,
and much more, than a science in Germany,
as is illustrated by the very existence of all
those bewildering currents and cross-currents,
tendencies and counter-tendencies, those various
schools of doctrine, in which Lord Acton was
so deeply skilled. The famous saying of
Ranke "Ich will nur sagen wie es eigentlich
gewesen ist "was widely applauded, but it
was little accepted in the sense of a warning
19
against transgressing the province of facts; it
is a text which must still be preached, and
when it has been fully taken to heart, though
there be many schools of political philosophy,
there will no longer be divers schools of
history.
The world is not yet alive to the full im-
portance of the transformation of history (as
part of a wider transformation) which is being
brought about by the doctrine of develope-
ment. It is always difficult for those who are
in immediate proximity to realise the decisive
steps in intellectual or spiritual progress when
those steps are slow and gradual; but we need
not hesitate to say that the last century is not
only as important an era as the fifth century B.C.
in the annals of historical study, but marks,
like it, a stage in the growth of man's self-
consciousness. There is no passage, perhaps,
in the works of the Greek tragedians so in-
structive for the historical student as that song
in the Antigone of Sophocles, in which we seem
2-2
20
to surprise the first amazed meditation of man
when it was borne in upon him by a sudden
startling illumination, how strange it is that he
should be what he is and should have wrought
all that he has wrought,-should have wrought
out, among other things, the city-state. He
had suddenly, as it were, waked up to realise
that he himself was the wonder of the world.
Οὐδὲν δεινότερον πέλει. That intense expression
of a new detached wondering interest in man,
as an object of curiosity, gives us the clue to
the inspiration of Herodotus and the birth of
history. More than two thousand years later
human self-consciousness has taken another
step, and the "sons of flesh" have grasped the
notion of their upward developement through
immense cycles of time. This idea has re-
created history. Girded with new strength
she has definitely come out from among her
old associates, moral philosophy and rhetoric;
she has come out into a place of liberty; and
has begun to enter into closer relations with
2 I
the sciences which deal objectively with the
facts of the universe.
The older view, which we may call the
politico-ethical theory, naturally led to eclecti-
cism. Certain periods and episodes, which
seemed especially rich in moral and political
lessons, were picked out as pre-eminently and
exclusively important, and everything else was
regarded as more or less the province of anti-
quarianism. This eclectic and exclusive view is
not extinct, and can appeal to recent authority.
It is remarkable that one of the most eminent
English historians of the latter half of the last
century, whose own scientific work was a model
for all students, should have measured out the
domain of history with the compasses of political
or ethical wisdom, and should have protested
as lately as 1877 against the principle of unity
and continuity. That inconsistency is an illus-
tration of the tenacity with which men cling
to predilections that are incongruous with the
Kind
S
22
whole meaning of their own lifework. But it
is another great Oxford historian to whom
perhaps more than to any other teacher we
owe it that the Unity of History is now a
commonplace in Britain. It must indeed be
carried beyond the limits within which he
enforced it, but to have affirmed and illus-
trated that principle was not the least useful
of Mr Freeman's valuable services to the story
of Europe. In no field, I may add, have the
recognition of continuity and the repudiation
of eclecticism been more notable or more fruit-
ful than in a field in which I happen to be
specially interested, the history of the Eastern.
Roman empire, the foster-mother of Russia.
The principle of continuity and the higher
principle of developement lead to the practical
consequence that it is of vital importance for
citizens to have a true knowledge of the past
and to see it in a dry light, in order that their
influence on the present and future may be
exerted in right directions. For, as a matter of
23
fact, the attitude of men to the past has at all
times been a factor in forming their political
opinions and determining the course of events.
It would be an instructive task to isolate this
influence and trace it from its most rudimentary
form in primitive times, when the actions of
tribes were stimulated by historical memories,
through later ages in which policies were
dictated or confirmed by historical judgments
and conceptions. But the clear realisation of
the fact that our conception of the past is itself
a distinct factor in guiding and moulding our
evolution, and must become a factor of greater
and increasing potency, marks a new stage in
the growth of the human mind. And it supplies
us with the true theory of the practical import-
ance of history.
It seems inevitable that, as this truth is more
fully and widely though slowly realised, the
place which history occupies in national educa-
tion will grow larger and larger. It is therefore
of supreme moment that the history which is
24
!!
taught should be true; and that can be attained
only through the discovery, collection, classi-
fication, and interpretation of facts, through
scientific research. The furtherance of research,
which is the highest duty of Universities, requires
ways and means. Public money is spent on the
printing and calendaring of our own national
records; but we ought not to be satisfied with
that. Every little people in Europe devotes
sums it can far less well afford to the investi-
gation of its particular history. We want a much
larger recognition of the necessity of historical
research; a recognition that it is a matter of
public concern to promote the scientific study
of any branch of history that any student is
anxious to pursue.
Some statesmen would
acknowledge this; but in a democratic state
they are hampered by the views of unenlightened
taxpayers. The wealthy private benefactors
who have come forward to help Universities,
especially in America, are deplorably short-
sighted; they think too much of direct results
25
and immediate returns; they are unable to
realise that research and the accumulated work
of specialists may move the world. In the
meantime, the Universities themselves have much
to do; they have to recognise more fully and
clearly and practically and preach more loudly
and assiduously that the advancement of research
in history, as in other sciences, is not a luxury,
subsidiary though desirable, but is a pressing
need, a matter of inestimable concern to the
nation and the world.
It must also be remembered that a science
cannot safely be controlled or guided by a sub-
jective interest. This brings me to the question
of perspective in ecumenical history. From the
subjective point of view, for our own contem-
porary needs, it may be held that certain
centuries of human developement are of a
unique and predominant importance, and pos-
sess, for purposes of present utility, a direct
value which cannot be claimed for remoter ages.
11
26
But we should not forget that this point of view
if legitimate and necessary, in one sense, is
subjective, and unscientific. It involves a false
perspective. The reason is not merely the
brevity of the modern age in comparison with
the antecedent history of man; it is a larger
consideration than that.
In his inaugural lecture at Oxford sixty
years ago¹, Arnold propounded as his conviction
the view that what we call the modern age
coincides with "the last step" in the story of
man. "It appears," he said, "to bear marks of
the fulness of time, as if there would be no
future history beyond it." He based this view
on the ground that one race had followed another
in the torch-bearing progress of civilisation, and
that after the Teuton and the Slav, who are
already on the scene, there exists on earth no
new race fitted to come forward and succeed to
the inheritance of the ages. This argument rests
on unproven assumptions as to the vital powers
1 1841.
27
and capacities of races, and as to the importance
of the ethnical factor in man's developement.
The truth is that at all times men have found
a difficulty in picturing how the world could
march onward ages and ages after their own
extinction. And this difficulty has prejudiced
their views. We may guess that if it had been
put to a king of Egypt or Babylonia 6000 years
ago, he would have said that his own age repre-
sented the fulness of days. The data to which.
Arnold appealed are insufficient even to establish
a presumption. The only data which deserve
to be considered are the data furnished by
cosmic science. And science tells us that-
apart from the incalculable chances of cata-
strophes-man has still myriads and myriads
of years to live on this planet under physical
conditions which need not hinder his develope-
ment or impair his energies. That is a period
of which his whole recorded history of six or
seven thousand years is a small fraction.
The dark imminence of this unknown future
K
28
in front of us, like a vague wall of mist, every
instant receding, with all its indiscernible contents
of world-wide change, soundless revolutions,
silent reformations, undreamed ideas, new re-
ligions, must not be neglected, if we would grasp
the unity of history in its highest sense. For
though we are unable to divine what things
indefinite time may evolve, though we cannot
look forward with the eyes of
"the prophetic soul
Of the wide world brooding on things to come,"
yet the unapparent future has a claim to make
itself felt as an idea controlling our perspective.
It commands us not to regard the series of what
we call ancient and medieval history as leading
up to the modern age and the twentieth century;
it bids us consider the whole sequence up to the
present moment as probably no more than the
beginning of a social and psychical developement,
whereof the end is withdrawn from our view by
countless millenniums to come. All the epochs
of the past are only a few of the front carriages,
ܘܐܕ
·
29
and probably the least wonderful, in the van of
an interminable procession.
This, I submit, is a controlling idea for
determining objectively our historical perspec-
tive. We must see our petty periods sub specie
perennitatis. Under this aspect the modern age
falls into line with its predecessors and loses its
obtrusive prominence. Do not say that this
view sets us on too dizzy a height. On the
contrary, it is a supreme confession of the limi-
tations of our knowledge. It is simply a
limiting and controlling conception; but it makes.
all the difference in the adjustment of our mental
balance for the appreciation of values,-like the
symbol of an unknown quantity in the denomi-
nator of a fraction. It teaches us that history
ceases to be scientific, and passes from the
objective to the subjective point of view, if she
does not distribute her attention, so far as the
sources allow, to all periods of history. It
cannot perhaps be too often reiterated that a
University, in the exercise and administration
30
of learning, has always to consider that more
comprehensive and general utility which consists
in the training of men to contemplate life and
the world from the highest, that is the scien-
tifically truest point of view, in the justest
perspective that can be attained. If one were
asked to define in a word the end of higher
education, I do not know whether one could
find a much better definition than this: the
training of the mind to look at experience
objectively, without immediate relation to one's
own time and place. And so, if we recognise
the relative importance of the modern period for
our own contemporary needs, we must hold that
the best preparation for interpreting it truly, for
investigating its movements, for deducing its
practical lessons, is to be brought up in a school
where its place is estimated in scales in which
the weight of contemporary interest is not
thrown.
Beyond its value as a limiting controlling
31
conception, the idea of the future developement
of man has also a positive importance. It
furnishes in fact the justification of much of
the laborious historical work that has been
done and is being done to-day. The gathering
of materials bearing upon minute local events,
the collation of MSS. and the registry of their
small variations, the patient drudgery in archives
of states and municipalities, all the microscopic
research that is carried on by armies of toiling
students it may seem like the bearing of
mortar and bricks to the site of a building
which has hardly been begun, of whose plan
the labourers know but little. This work, the
hewing of wood and the drawing of water, has
to be done in faith-in the faith that a complete
assemblage of the smallest facts of human history
will tell in the end. The labour is performed for
posterity—for remote posterity; and when, with
intelligible scepticism, someone asks the use of
the accumulation of statistics, the publication
of trivial records, the labour expended on

32
4
minute criticism, the true answer is:
"That
is not so much our business as the business
of future generations. We are heaping up
material and arranging it, according to the
best methods we know; if we draw what con-
clusions we can for the satisfaction of our own
generation, we never forget that our work is
to be used by future ages. It is intended for
those who follow us rather than for ourselves,
and much less for our grandchildren than for
generations very remote." For a long time to
come one of the chief services that research
can perform is to help to build, firm and solid,
some of the countless stairs by which men of
distant ages may mount to a height unattain-
able by us and have a vision of history which
we cannot win, standing on our lower slope.
But if we have to regard the historical
labours of man, for many a century to come,
as the ministrations of a novitiate, it does not
follow that we should confine ourselves to the
collection and classification of materials, the

33
technical criticism of them, and the examination
of special problems; it does not follow that the
constructive works of history which each age
produces and will continue to produce according
to its lights may not have a permanent value.
It may be said that like the serpents of the
Egyptian enchanters they are perpetually
swallowed up by those of the more potent
magicians of the next generation; but-apart
from the fact that they contribute themselves
to the power of the enchantment which over-
comes them-it is also true that though they
may lose their relative value, they abide as
milestones of human progress; they belong to
the documents which mirror the form and
feature of their age, and may be part of the
most valuable material at the disposal of
posterity. If we possessed all the sources which
Tacitus used for his sketch of the early imperial
period, his Annals would lose its value in one
sense, but it would remain to the furthest verge
of time a monument of the highest significance,
3
B.
34
in its treatment, its method and its outlook, for
the history of the age in which he lived. When
the ultimate history of Germany in the nineteenth
century comes to be written, it will differ widely
from Treitschke's work, but that brilliant book.
can never cease to be a characteristic document
of its epoch.
The remarks which I have ventured to offer
are simply deductions from the great principle
of developement in time, which has given
a deep and intense meaning to the famous
aphorism of Hippocrates, that Science is long,
a maxim so cold and so inspiring. The humblest
student of history may feel assured that he is
not working only for his own time; he may feel
that he has an interest to consult and a cause to
advance beyond the interest and cause of his
own age. And this does not apply only to
those who are engaged in research. It applies
also to those who are studying history without
any intention of adding to knowledge. Every
individual who is deeply impressed with the
35
fact that man's grasp of his past developement
helps to determine his future developement, and
who studies history as a science not as a branch
of literature, will contribute to form a national
conscience that true history is of supreme im-
portance, that the only way to true history lies
through scientific research, and that in promoting
and prosecuting such research we are not in-
dulging in a luxury but doing a thoroughly
practical work and performing a great duty
to posterity.
K
One of the features of the renovation of the
study of history has been the growth of a larger
view of its dominion. Hitherto I have been
dwelling upon its longitudinal aspect as a
sequence in time, but a word may be said about
its latitude. The exclusive idea of political
history, Staatengeschichte, to which Ranke held
so firmly, has been gradually yielding to a more
comprehensive definition which embraces as its
material all records, whatever their nature may
36
be, of the material and spiritual developement,
of the culture and the works, of man in society,
from the stone age onwards. It may be said
that the wider view descends from Herodotus,
the narrower from Thucydides. The growth
of the larger conception was favoured by the
national movements which vindicated the idea
of the people as distinct from the idea of the
state; but its final victory is assured by the
application of the principle of developement and
the "historical method" to all the manifestations
of human activity-social institutions, law, trade,
the industrial and the fine arts, religion, philo-
sophy, folklore, literature. Thus history has
acquired a much ampler and more comprehensive
meaning, along with a deeper insight into the
constant interaction and reciprocity among all
the various manifestations of human brain-power
and human emotion. Of course in actual practice
labour is divided; political history and the
histories of the various parts of civilisation can
and must be separately treated; but it makes a
37
vital difference that we should be alive to the
interconnexion, that no department should be
isolated, that we should maintain an intimate
association among the historical sciences, that
we should frame an ideal-an ideal not the less
useful because it is impracticable-of a true
history of a nation or a true history of the world
in which every form of social life and every
manifestation of intellectual developement should
be set forth in its relation to the rest, in its
significance for growth or decline.
Cambridge has officially recognised this wider
view of history by the name and constitution of
the body which administers historical studies-
the "Board of Historical and Archaeological
Studies." If that branch of historical research
which we call archaeology bears a distinct name
and occupies its distinct place, it is simply
because the investigation of the historical records
with which it deals requires a special training of
faculties of observation not called into play in
the study of written documents. But it must
3-3
it
38
1
not be forgotten that the special historian whom
we call an archaeologist needs a general training
in history and a grasp of historical perspective
as much as any other historical specialist. It
must be borne in mind that this, as well as his
special scientific training, is needed to differ-
entiate the archaeologist from the antiquarian
of the prescientific Oldbuck type, who in the
first place has no wide outlook on history, and
secondly cannot distinguish between legitimate
profitable hypotheses and guesses which are
quite from the purpose. Such antiquarians
have not yet disappeared. It is significant
that two brilliant historians, to both of whom
the study of history in this country is deeply
indebted, built perilous superstructures in regard
to the English Conquest upon speculations
which were only superior specimens of the pre-
scientific type. It is earnestly to be wished
that the history schools of the Universities
may turn out a new kind of critical anti-
quarians in Britain who instead of molesting
39
their local monuments with batteries of irrelevant
erudition and fanciful speculation, with volleys
of crude etymologies, will help to further our
knowledge of British history, coming with a
suitable equipment to the arduous, important
and attractive task of fixing, grouping, and
interpreting the endless fragments of historical
wreckage which lie scattered in these islands.
I venture to insist with some emphasis on this,
because there are few fields where more work is
to be done or where labourers are more needed
than the Celtic civilisations of Western Europe.
In tracing from its origins the course of western
history in the Middle Ages, we are pulled up
on the threshold by the uncertainties and ob-
scurities which brood over the Celtic world.
And for the purpose of prosecuting that most.
difficult of all inquiries, the ethnical problem,
the part played by race in the developement of
peoples and the effects of race blendings, it
must be remembered that the Celtic world
commands one of the chief portals of ingress
40
into that mysterious prae-Aryan foreworld, from
which it may well be that we modern Europeans
have inherited far more than we dream. For
pursuing these studies it is manifest that scholars
in the British islands are in a particularly favour-
able position.
Most beginners set to work at the study
which attracts them, and follow the lines that
have been constructed for them, without any
clear apprehension or conviction of the greater
issues involved. That apprehension only comes.
to them afterwards, if indeed it ever comes. It
has seemed to me that it might not be amiss if
historical students, instead of merely taking the
justification of their subject for granted, were
brought at the outset to consider its significance
and position from the highest point of view,—if
they were stimulated to apprehend vividly that
the study of history and the method of studying
it are facts of ecumenical importance. In at-
tempting to illustrate this-very inadequately in
41
the small compass of an introductory address,—
I have sought to indicate the close interconnexion
between the elevation of history to the position
of a science and the recognition of the true
nature of its practical significance as being itself
a factor in evolution.
I may conclude by repeating that, just as he
will have the best prospect of being a successful
investigator of any group of nature's secrets who
has had his mental attitude determined by a
large grasp of cosmic problems, even so the
historical student should learn to realise the
human story sub specie perennitatis; and that, if,
year by year, history is to become a more and
more powerful force for stripping the bandages
of error from the eyes of men, for shaping public
opinion and advancing the cause of intellectual
and political liberty, she will best prepare her
disciples for the performance of that task, not
by considering the immediate utility of next
week or next year or next century, not by
accommodating her ideal or limiting her range,
42
but by remembering always that, though she
may supply material for literary art or philo-
sophical speculation, she is herself simply a
science, no less and no more.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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