[,0O 
 
 The Place of History 
 in Education 
 
 BY 
 
 J. W. ALLEN 
 
 FORMERLY BRAKENBURY EXHIBITIONER, BALLIOL COLLEGE, 
 
 OXFORD J HULSEAN PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY 
 
 AT BEDFORD COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 
 
 2.34^5 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1910
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGK 
 
 I. THE FIRST QUESTION ..... 1 
 
 What do we mean by " History " ? — The subject- 
 matter — History a form of thought — What is that 
 form to be ? 
 
 II. HISTORY AS A SCIENCE .... 6 
 
 Nature of scientific study — History of England 
 from this point of view — A problem in causation 
 — Can it be solved ? 
 
 III. CERTAIN RADICAL OBJECTIONS . . . 15 
 
 Complexity of factors — Free-will — The individual 
 and the mass — The action of masses — Great men, 
 coincidence, weather and accident in general. 
 
 IV. CERTAIN PRACTICAL INFERENCES . . . 41 
 
 Irrelevant aspects : the dramatic, picturesque, &c. 
 — Moral judgments — Other dangerous tendencies 
 — Political bias — The illusion of the present — Need 
 of detachment. 
 
 V. AN ILLUSTRATION ..... 64 
 
 The questions involved in the problem of the com- 
 mencement of the Hundred Years' War.
 
 vi Contents. 
 
 VI. HISTORY AS A PAGEANT .... 79 
 
 Personal points of view — The demand for history 
 as a pageant — Its reasonableness — The two kinds 
 of history. 
 
 VII. OF RECONCILIATION ..... 98 
 
 An impossibility — A division of labour wanted — 
 What kind of history are we to teach ? 
 
 VIII. OF EDUCATION ...... 106 
 
 Why teach anything? — "Technical" and other 
 education — Lack of system — To lay the founda- 
 tions of sound thinking, the right aim of a schol- 
 astic system — Training of the intelligence — Need- 
 ful knowledge — Moral training. 
 
 IX. OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY .... 137 
 Need of a national system — The knowledge we 
 want and don't want — " English " history — Eng- 
 land and Europe — Essential things. 
 
 X. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY . 156 
 Value of history for thought — Bearing on social 
 and political speculation — Value in intellectual 
 training — The charge of dullness. 
 
 XI. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY 
 
 MORAL ...... 170 
 
 What the teaching of history may possibly do for 
 morals ; and what it must not do. 
 
 XII. CONCERNING DIFFERENCE OF SEX . . 180 
 
 That women need not be educated, except " tech- 
 nically," differently from men. 
 
 XIII. THE INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL STUDY . 187 
 History in primary schools — Impossibility of teach- 
 ing history to young children — "Historical" 
 stories and fairy tales— An introduction needed — 
 The sociological basis — Transition to history.
 
 Contents. vii 
 
 XIV. A FINAL DIFFICULTY : THE POINT OF VIEW . 204 
 The subjective difficulty — History affected by" 
 unhistorical opinion — Nature of the following 
 illustrations. 
 
 XV. ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIFFICULTY — 
 
 THE REFORMATION (a) . . . . .210 
 
 THE REFORMATION (b) . . £22 
 
 THE REFORMATION (c) . . . . , £36 
 
 XVI. CONCLUSION 
 
 The foregoing statements unhistorical— Measures 
 of historical value — Historical progress. 
 
 247 
 
 XVII. POSTSCRIPT ...... 255
 
 s. 
 
 J 
 
 el 
 
 THE PLACE OF HISTOEY 
 IN EDUCATION. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE FlftST QUESTION. 
 2 3 fo^^ 
 
 Whether we set out to teach History or 
 to consider its place in a system of educa- 
 tion, it would seem prudent to arrive, 
 first of all, at an understanding of what 
 we mean by " History." There have been 
 people who, in class-rooms or through the 
 press, have taught history without ever 
 having attempted to attain such under- 
 standing. Perhaps they thought the 
 question a simple one. It has not 
 proved so. 
 
 About the subject-matter of history there
 
 2 Place of History in Education. 
 
 is, at the present time, no serious dis- 
 agreement. We are agreed that it is not 
 the doings of kings and highly placed 
 people ; that it does not consist, specifically, 
 in wars and revolutions or in parliamentary 
 proceedings or in law. We have known 
 this for some little time. Montesquieu 
 and Gibbon were aware of the fact, and 
 Macaulay knew it. "No past event," 
 declared the last-named great writer, "has 
 any intrinsic importance." Thomas Arnold 
 defined history as "the biography of a 
 society," so that, according to this defin- 
 ition, its subject-matter would be the 
 life of a society. The definition is only 
 spoiled by the presence of the article. 
 The subject-matter of history is the life 
 of all societies. In other words, it is the 
 past life of humanity, because of any 
 condition of humanity that was not social 
 we have no evidence at all. So far we 
 can all agree, because we all think now 
 of the past life of all human societies as 
 more or less connected. Assyrian, Baby-
 
 The First Question. 3 
 
 Ionian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, and 
 Roman society are all a nexus, and Rome 
 connects with all that has come later in 
 Europe. We do not doubt that if we 
 knew more we should be able to spread 
 the net wider, — wide enough, perhaps, at 
 last, to include the whole human race. 
 Within historic time, at all events, the 
 connections become closer and more ex- 
 tensive. Europe, Asia, and Africa act and 
 react on each other; America and Australia 
 tend to become outlying parts of Europe. 
 We cannot well define the subject-matter 
 of history otherwise than as the past life 
 of humanity. 
 
 But this is not history, any more than 
 the stars in their courses are themselves 
 astronomy. History is the result of a 
 treatment of this subject-matter by the 
 human mind. History is a form of thought. 
 If I ask what a loaf of bread cost in the 
 fourteenth century, or how safety matches 
 came into being, I am making history in 
 the proper sense. But when I go out for
 
 4 Place of History in Education. 
 
 a walk I am not making history, I am 
 only adding, very minutely, to its subject- 
 matter. 
 
 We come, thus, to our question. The 
 subject - matter of history being the past 
 life of humanity, what is history to be? 
 History itself will be the result of our 
 study and thought concerning that past of 
 man : what is to be the end and aim 
 of that study and thought? What is that 
 form or kind of history which will answer 
 most fully to our needs and desires, and 
 be, therefore, of most value to us? 
 
 This question has been answered in 
 various ways, and it is not possible that 
 different types of mind should return the 
 same answer to it. The answer true for 
 one mind is not true for another. It is, 
 for all of us, a question of what he or 
 she values most. You may say, if you 
 please, that it is a question of what he 
 or she ought to value most. Unfortunately, 
 to the question so put there is no answer. 
 To know what is absolutely best for us
 
 The First Question. 5 
 
 we should have to know the meaning of 
 the whole world, all the value and mean- 
 ing of life and death. If we could know, 
 in this absolute sense, what we want, 
 we should know the end of our lives, if 
 not of all life. Till we know this we can 
 give no answer to our question that will 
 be true for all of us.
 
 6 
 
 II. 
 
 HISTORY AS A SCIENCE. 
 
 Let us look, first, at that view of history 
 which presents it as what is called a 
 science. And first of all it should be 
 stated that this view — this answer to our 
 main question — has for the last fifty years 
 or so been becoming steadily more domi- 
 nant in the world of historical research and 
 historical writing. In England the year 
 1857 was marked by the commencement of 
 the publication of Buckle's ' History of 
 Civilisation in England,' and also of the 
 two great series, the ' Rolls Series ' and the 
 ' Calendars of State Papers.' In France and 
 in Germany the systematic collection and 
 publication of evidential documents of all 
 kinds had begun long before. The 'Monu-
 
 History as a Science. 7 
 
 menta Germanise Historica' dates from 1826. 
 The great mass of modern historical re- 
 search is justified from the scientific point 
 of view and hardly from any other. But 
 there is this to be added. Though it is 
 undeniable that historical research and his- 
 torical writing have been steadily becoming 
 more "scientific" in method and in aim, this 
 fact is, of itself, no reason for pinning our 
 faith to what may conceivably be a mere 
 passing phase in the history of the relation 
 of the human mind to the records of its 
 past. We must not follow the fashion in 
 this or in other things, but try to get to 
 the root of the matter. 
 
 When we say, as Professor Bury said in 
 his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, 
 that " History is a science, no less and no 
 more," what is it that we mean ? The 
 essential characteristic of scientific study is 
 that it aims at reaching objective truth. 
 It seeks to establish the real relations of 
 things. In aim, and therefore in method, 
 it is wholly intellectual. It demands a
 
 8 Place of History in Education. 
 
 suppression of the merely personal. If I 
 study a language for the sake of talking it, 
 or in order to enjoy its literature, I am 
 not studying it scientifically. If I study 
 painting or literature for the aesthetic 
 pleasure to be derived therefrom, my 
 study is not scientific however much I may 
 learn. If I study the past life of humanity 
 for the sake of drama or the picturesque, 
 or with a view to modern politics, my 
 work is not scientific. Science is concerned 
 with the questionings of the mere intellect. 
 Now there are, it may be said, three funda- 
 mental questions which the intellect asks of 
 a thing. It asks, firstly, how the thing 
 came to be what it is ; it asks, secondly, 
 what are its actual and immediate relations 
 to other things, which include all the modes 
 of its activity ; it asks, in the third place, 
 what are the consequences of these relations, 
 and how the thing itself is being modified 
 by action and reaction. Among these ques- 
 tions there is no first or last : they are con- 
 current. But, further, the intellect desires
 
 History as a Science. 9 
 
 to grasp and to express the quality of the 
 thing, and it seeks to do this in terms of 
 the thing's tendencies. This expression of 
 the quality of the thing sums up the know- 
 ledge we have gained of it, and, in regard 
 to living things, will amount essentially 
 to a statement of whether the thing is 
 still growing or tending to decay and dis- 
 solution. It is the effort to answer all 
 these questions about things that produces 
 science. And all these questions are con- 
 cerned essentially with causation ; not, that 
 is, with the idea of cause or with the nature 
 of it, but with those connections and sequences 
 which we take to be causal. Science might, 
 perhaps, be defined as that which is concerned 
 with the causation of things ; and the caus- 
 ation of things is their past, their present, 
 and their future, since nothing is, but all 
 things are becoming. 
 
 Let us now apply this conception to his- 
 torical study. Our subject-matter is the 
 life of humanity in the past, and we must 
 begin with palaeolithic man, or further back
 
 io Place of History in Education. 
 
 still if we can get further back. Our history 
 is going to be, logically, the final develop- 
 ment of biology. It is the latest phase of 
 life on the planet that we have to deal 
 with. Biology starts with a simple, single, 
 living cell, tries to trace from it the de- 
 velopment of the enormous diversity of 
 forms of simply animal life, and has some- 
 thing to say about the emergence of man. 
 Then anthropology takes up the tale. But 
 we can only distinguish anthropology from 
 history through a comparative lack of evi- 
 dence as to detail. 
 
 Let us look at what is conventionally 
 termed the history of England. From the 
 point of view of science what does this 
 become ? In the fifth century, Germanic 
 barbarians begin to make settlements in 
 what had been Roman Britain — barbarians 
 of the Iron Age following the Bronze Age 
 peoples, whose invasion had preceded that 
 of the Romans. There follows a long process 
 of conquest, of settlement, and of fusion. 
 As a result we get a number of little bar-
 
 History as a Science. 1 1 
 
 baric kingdoms ; communities economically 
 simple, structurally confused and indefinite, 
 possessing little knowledge of the world 
 they lived in and but rough arts and 
 appliances. And the problem of English 
 history becomes this, — out of those little 
 barbaric communities to evolve by an in- 
 telligible process the present British Empire. 
 It is a problem in causation. Generation 
 follows generation, and from moment to 
 moment things change. Men learn a little 
 and grow old and die and live again, with 
 a difference, in their children. The little 
 communities are kneaded by war and by the 
 Church ; they are broken up and re-cast 
 and forced into greater coherence and defini- 
 tion by foreign invaders. From generation 
 to generation everything grows — arts and 
 tools, knowledge, law, wealth — and every- 
 thing grows together. From generation 
 to generation the point of view shifts, the 
 ideals alter : no social habit lasts very long. 
 The little communities become one ; the 
 state becomes a national monarchy, increas-
 
 1 2 Place of History in Education. 
 
 ingly self-conscious. Centuries pass and 
 the growing community begins to bud off, 
 to throw out offspring, to establish colonies, 
 to struggle with the other great European 
 states for the control and exploitation of 
 lands over sea. It is all the growth of one 
 thing. It is all knitted together by the 
 generations in the closest manner conceiv- 
 able through so much time. And the prob- 
 lem, the great problem of historical science, 
 is just this : to represent the whole series of 
 changes as connected and as, to our minds, 
 inevitable. We have got to account, in the 
 only sense in which we can account for any- 
 thing, for every phase in all that great series 
 of changes. 
 
 It is a living thing, we must remember, 
 that we are dealing with ; it is, really, a 
 single living thing. Questions about the 
 future of this thing answer themselves as 
 we go along, up to a certain point. The 
 fifteenth century is the future of the four- 
 teenth. The point at which such questions 
 do not answer themselves is what we call the
 
 History as a Science. 13 
 
 present. But we must not let that fact mis- 
 lead us into imagining that the past merely 
 leads up to and, as it were, culminates in the 
 present. It no more does so than the four- 
 teenth century culminates in the fifteenth. 
 The movement we study still goes on from 
 moment to moment ; and really there is no 
 present, there is only past and future. The 
 present is no more than the past was. We 
 are not at any kind of end : w T e are in the 
 middle or in the mere beginning of the pro- 
 cess. There is an immeasurable future of 
 changes ahead. And so our history of 
 England will end, inevitably, by asking 
 questions as to the future. 
 
 When we have succeeded in presenting the 
 whole series of changes from the fifth century 
 onwards as a series of intelligible and inevit- 
 able sequences, we shall have a satisfactory 
 account of what we conventionally call the 
 history of England. But it is worth observ- 
 ing that, even then, we shall have no more 
 than that. There is still the development 
 of the Britons to be accounted for ; and in
 
 14 Place of History in Education. 
 
 that development the Roman occupation, 
 however important, is only an incident. 
 Further back are the peoples of the Bronze 
 Age, and further back still those who made 
 Stonehenge and Avebury. It is well to 
 recognise at once that there is not the 
 remotest chance of ever making our account 
 complete. But if we could make it even 
 approximately complete, beginning, let us 
 say, with the Roman occupation, a great 
 thing would have been done. How is it to 
 be done, and can it, in the nature of things, 
 be done at all ?
 
 i5 
 
 III. 
 
 CERTAIN RADICAL OBJECTIONS. 
 
 Evidently the task is a very difficult one. 
 The movement of any society as a whole 
 must be the sum of all the actions of all its 
 individuals and of all such actions of other 
 individuals as relate to it in any way. The 
 complexity of the factors concerned in the 
 birth of a world out of chaos must be 
 slight as compared with the complexity 
 of the psychological factors concerned in 
 the evolution of a society. The origin of a 
 species or of a group of species must needs 
 be a simple matter in comparison. 
 
 Looking at this extreme complexity of the 
 factors involved, we might well despair of 
 ever disentangling, even roughly, the causes 
 of any social phenomenon. Just consider
 
 1 6 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the complexity of the process which issues 
 in the commonest and most trivial human 
 acts. You decide, doubtfully, to invite 
 some acquaintance to dinner. Consider how 
 much may go even to such a petty pro- 
 ceeding. Your acquaintance, perhaps, is this 
 or that that is objectionable. He is ap- 
 proved of by Mr X ; but Mrs Y strongly 
 disapproves of him. He may make himself 
 useful ; but his manners are atrocious. Or 
 he is of no earthly use, but has charming 
 manners. It is a matter of slowly gener- 
 ated habits and a slowly generated point of 
 view. Little considerations of self-interest, 
 resting unconsciously on a basis of judg- 
 ment as to what is worth having in life, 
 move you this way or that. Little notions 
 of social propriety pull one way, little curi- 
 osities, perhaps, the other. In the end a 
 balance is struck, and you act — without even 
 knowing why. Possibly your chief motive 
 for action is something you are almost un- 
 conscious of. So mixed, as we say, are 
 motives that people rarely know why they
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 17 
 
 do a thing. Consider, also, how difficult 
 it is to be certain of what any one will do 
 under given circumstances. And consider 
 the things that people do do ! — the absurd 
 things, the futile things, the wholly un- 
 expected things. But the movement of 
 society is all compact of such complex and 
 mysterious doings. 
 
 One thing is certain, that in dealing scien- 
 tifically with this maze of thought and action 
 which is human history, we shall have to 
 assume determinism as an expression of the 
 truth. We shall have to assume that what- 
 ever a man does he does as a necessary con- 
 sequence of the interaction between his nature 
 at the given moment and his surroundings 
 at the given moment. We shall have to 
 assume that of absolute free will there is 
 none at all. 
 
 That there may be no doubt as to the 
 nature of the assumption to be made, let us 
 take a simple illustration. I am sitting at 
 home and feeling stuffy. I should like to 
 go out into the clear air and get a look at
 
 1 8 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the sky. On the other hand I do not want 
 to go out. It is slushy under foot outside, 
 and raw, and, moreover, there are some notes 
 I ought to make, only I don't want to 
 make them. So I sit balancing. Now I 
 am physically quite free to go out or stay 
 in as I choose. If I make up my mind to 
 go, there is nothing to prevent my going ; 
 if I choose to stay, I can stay. But there 
 ends my freedom. When I say " If I make 
 up my mind," I am assuming that it does not 
 make itself up. But that is just what it 
 does. A highly intelligent onlooker — that 
 is, one much more intelligent than any of 
 us, and one who knew much more about 
 myself than I know — might know exactly 
 what is going to happen. It is certain, 
 already, how my hesitations will end. The 
 interaction between me and my surround- 
 ings evolves motives, and what I call motives 
 are just a part of the process by which my 
 mind makes itself up. And so, equally, all 
 my actions are a necessary consequence of 
 the action of surrounding things upon me :
 
 Certain Radical Objections, 19 
 
 and I never could have done anything but 
 what I did do. The determination of my 
 action is just as complete and rigid — though 
 vastly more complex than that — as the 
 determination of the exact course of a 
 stone that I throw. And so universally. 
 Just as no stone could lie anywhere but 
 where it lies, so no human action in the 
 past could really have been other than it 
 was, and all things are for ever as they 
 must be. 
 
 " With the first clay they did the last man knead ; 
 And there, of the last harvest, sowed the seed : 
 
 And the first morning of Creation wrote 
 What the Last Dawn of Beckoning shall read." 
 
 This is a very cheering view, because it 
 makes a science of history possible. 
 
 Nevertheless, there are people who revolt 
 at this doctrine, as there are also people 
 who misunderstand it. It is sometimes 
 confused with what is called fatalism. In 
 truth it is absolutely opposed to this. By 
 fatalism is apparently meant a belief that 
 whatever you do the result will be the
 
 20 Place of History in Education. 
 
 same. If it be ordained by fate that you 
 are to be killed on a certain day, killed 
 you will be, whether you fight bravely in 
 the battle or whether you run away. But 
 determinism asserts that the consequences 
 of different things will always be different, 
 and of similar things always the same : 
 and these two assertions are one. But we 
 must not be betrayed into any discussion 
 of the idea of cause. 
 
 There remains the fact that numbers of 
 people who understand the doctrine of 
 determinism revolt at it and assert a 
 mysterious freedom of the will. Indeed 
 very few people really believe that deter- 
 minism expresses the truth. And there 
 remains the more important fact that the 
 theory of determinism cannot be demon- 
 strated as truth. Now, just as far as it 
 goes, the assertion of freedom of the will 
 is an objection to or a denial of the pos- 
 sibility of a science of history. Still, unless 
 your objection on this score is very radical,
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 21 
 
 some compromise is perhaps possible. We 
 have, perhaps, put the matter rather too 
 absolutely. There is no logical necessity 
 for the assumption of a quite absolute and 
 unlimited determinism. If the great mass 
 of human action is strictly determined, that 
 will be sufficient for the purposes of scien- 
 tific history. History must essentially deal 
 with the action of masses — that is, with 
 human action in its commonest forms ; and 
 if we may take that as strictly determined, 
 we can manage. If any one, for instance, 
 thinks that when his " conscience " is 
 aroused he becomes mysteriously free, that 
 belief does not constitute an absolute denial 
 of the possibility of historical science. If 
 that be true, then our margin of error — 
 the amount of error in all our generalisa- 
 tions concerning cause — will merely be 
 greater than it otherwise would be. 
 
 O 
 
 In this way we get over an initial diffi- 
 culty. But we have doue no more than 
 that. Our assumption of determinism does
 
 22 Place of History in Education. 
 
 not, of itself, help us to explain anything. 
 We are practically no nearer the explana- 
 tion of any individual action when we 
 have assumed that it is strictly determined. 
 History deals with masses, and so long 
 as we are dealing with masses the nature 
 of the difficulty is more or less obscured. 
 We are disposed to treat masses as though 
 they were not masses of individuals, and 
 to talk glibly and dogmatically about the 
 motives and feelings of masses with a sense 
 of assurance we never feel in dealing with 
 any single person. But the difficulty be- 
 comes clear and is brought painfully home 
 to us when we come to deal with "great 
 men " ; and not only with men who may 
 be called " great " for their own virtue, but 
 with any individual who, by reason of his 
 legal position or the way in which he is 
 regarded, is able to exercise an apparently 
 great influence over the lives of others, 
 and through them over the future. " Some 
 are born great, some achieve greatness, and
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 23 
 
 some have greatness thrust upon them." 
 It matters not which it is : the same 
 difficulty manifestly confronts us with each 
 of them. 
 
 However rigidly determined the conduct 
 of individual men may be, it can only be 
 explained, if at all, in the most crude and 
 roughly approximate manner ; and in the 
 record of the past we are met at every 
 turn by men upon whose individual action 
 much seems to depend. The action of these 
 men — kings, soldiers, statesmen, prophets — 
 baffles us. 
 
 Whenever you come upon a man whose 
 individual action appreciably affects the 
 course of change, in whatever degree, there 
 you have something which generalisation 
 necessarily ignores more or less completely, 
 and something which you can hardly hope 
 satisfactorily to explain. Attempts have 
 been made to show that the action of such 
 men is really unimportant. Napoleon, it is 
 said, creates a great commotion and causes
 
 24 Place of History in Education. 
 
 a couple of millions of premature deaths ; 
 but all the fuss only results in hurrying a 
 little the inevitable changes all over West 
 Europe prepared by the eighteenth century. 
 But such attempts are mere evasions of the 
 main difficulty. Conceivably we might get 
 over the difficulty in this manner if Napoleon 
 and Peter the Great represented only a 
 class of very rare and exceptional cases. 
 But in truth the difficulty concerning great 
 men is only part of a much larger and 
 more fundamental difficulty, — the difficulty, 
 that is, of explaining the action of any man 
 at all. The truth is that Napoleon and Peter 
 are exceptional cases only in degree. On 
 every page of the historic record you meet 
 men who in some degree appreciably affect 
 the course of things. It would be simply 
 absurd to say that things would have been 
 just the same in the long-run had none of 
 them ever lived. For, of course, the real 
 fact is that every man, woman, and child 
 who ever lived has, in some degree, traceable
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 25 
 
 or not, affected the course of history by a 
 personal action which defies satisfactory 
 explanation. The mass is made up of 
 individuals every whit as mysterious as 
 Napoleon. 
 
 How, then, can we hope to generalise 
 successfully concerning the action of masses 
 wheiD we cannot undertake to explain the 
 action of even any one individual of those 
 masses ? This is the fundamental difficulty 
 to which consideration of the action of "great 
 men " at once leads us ; and it seems at 
 first sight to constitute a very serious ob- 
 jection to the attempt to treat history as 
 a science. It looks rather as though would- 
 be scientific history must issue at last in 
 a series of mere ingenious guesses. The 
 historian will be driven to bring to bear 
 on the unmanageable mass of his facts his 
 own special ideas of how man's affairs are 
 governed. He will appeal, perhaps, to a 
 something not ourselves making for righteous- 
 ness, or he will have some more definite
 
 26 Place of History in Education. 
 
 theory of progress, and he will systematise 
 his facts in accordance with those ideas. 
 But in this case, be he right or wrong, he 
 will have demonstrated nothing, and the 
 result will not be knowledge. 
 
 Before going any further it is perhaps 
 necessary to state a fact which assuredly 
 it ought not to be necessary to state. The 
 object of historical science is not exact truth. 
 It is truth as exact as we can get it, but 
 it is not exact truth, because exact truth is 
 manifestly unattainable in this direction. 
 That admission, of course, constitutes no 
 objection to the scientific treatment of 
 history. In very few sciences can any 
 exact truth be attained, if even it can be 
 said to be attained anywhere at all. What 
 we loosely call " exact " science deals either 
 with truths reached by a purely logical 
 process that starts from fundamental facts 
 of our own mental constitution or else with 
 things that can be quantitatively measured. 
 The only science that can in any sense be
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 2j 
 
 said to be absolutely exact is the science of 
 pure mathematics. When you come to 
 things you incur at once an unavoidable 
 inexactitude. We do not estimate the mean 
 distance of the earth from the sun in frac- 
 tions of an inch. In the simply physical 
 sciences the amount of unavoidable inex- 
 actitude is relatively small ; in the biological 
 sciences it is relatively great. When you 
 come to consider the question of the develop- 
 ment in the past of a particular species of 
 animal, and of how it comes to live at present 
 where it does live, your answers to these 
 questions may be very significant and in- 
 teresting and even quite true so far as they 
 go, but they make no pretence of being exact, 
 and can never possibly become so. And 
 there can be no doubt that in historical 
 science we shall have to content ourselves 
 with still rougher approximations to truth 
 than can be attained in the higher branches 
 of biology proper. A good deal of current 
 objection to historical science is based on
 
 28 Place of History in Education. 
 
 nothing better than quite unreasonable de- 
 mands, associated with an erroneous notion 
 of the exactness of science in general. 
 
 To return to the fundamental difficulty 
 that has been stated. At the outset the 
 would-be scientific historian is met by the 
 assertion that all his generalisations as to 
 cause will be wrong because they must 
 needs concern the action of innumerable 
 people, while he really does not know why 
 any one of them acted. The assertion has 
 a formidable appearance, and the question 
 is not how far it is true but how far it is 
 really relevant. For it is undeniably true. 
 It is true that we ourselves constantly act 
 without knowing why. It is true that we 
 can only explain in a crude and unsatisfac- 
 tory manner the action even of such persons 
 as we know most familiarly. We find it 
 easier to account to ourselves for the con- 
 duct of a man of whom we know little than 
 for that of a man we know well. It is true 
 that we can never give such an account of
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 29 
 
 the action of our friends and acquaintance 
 as Paul Bourget, for instance, gives of the 
 conduct of his imaginary people. But it is 
 also true that for the purposes of historical 
 science we do not want any such account. 
 Even though it be true that the subject- 
 matter of history is entirely made up of the 
 inexplicable actions of mysterious individual 
 beings, it is also true that we do not re- 
 quire explanations of the conduct of any 
 one individual. 
 
 However complex human motive and the 
 cause of human action may be in any par- 
 ticular case, we shall nevertheless find, when 
 we come to classify motives, that they fall 
 under comparatively few distinct classes. 
 It is not the motive that varies infinitely, 
 but the constitution of the individual mind. 
 Though we cannot quantitatively estimate 
 the value of any given motive in any par- 
 ticular case, yet when we find a large 
 number of people doing about the same 
 thing under similar circumstances, we can
 
 30 Place of History in Education. 
 
 certainly infer something as to the quality 
 and make-up of their minds, and something 
 further as to the motive that is dominant 
 in the mass of them. If in two cases, the 
 circumstances being nearly the same, two 
 people act in nearly the same way, the mere 
 fact goes for nothing. They may not have 
 a single motive in common. Even though 
 they have at least one motive in common, 
 the dominant motive may be different in 
 the two cases. But if instead of two we 
 have a thousand, then any motive they have 
 in common is probably the dominant motive 
 with the mass of them ; and if we have a 
 million this probability is far higher still. 
 In this way we may establish with tolerable 
 certainty the fact of a dominant motive in 
 a mass of people, even though we cannot be 
 sure that it is dominant in any particular 
 one of them. 
 
 Really, of course, things are by no means 
 so simple. Instead of one dominant motive 
 there may well be several practically equally
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 31 
 
 effective. Moreover, what we call motives 
 are in general not simple but rather very 
 complex things. Again, the assertion of any 
 motive not of the very simplest order in- 
 volves an assertion about the nature of the 
 mind it, as we say, acts upon. But all this 
 does not affect the argument. What it is 
 necessary to insist upon is simply this, 
 that we can make positive and approxi- 
 mately correct inferences as to the causes 
 of the action of masses of people without 
 being able to be sure about the action of 
 any one of them. The fact may be re- 
 garded as obvious. Obvious or not, it is 
 just on this fact that the whole science of 
 history, which deals and can only deal with 
 masses, depends. Once we have found a 
 way of dealing with the action of masses, 
 objections to historical science founded on 
 our inability to interpret individual action 
 fall to the ground. It is of no use for the 
 objecter to say that every individual in the 
 mass is as mysterious as Napoleon. That
 
 32 Place of History in Education. 
 
 fact no longer concerns us. Any individual 
 whom we can merge into the mass no longer 
 concerns us as such. 
 
 But we have still to find a way of deal- 
 ing with those individuals who obstinately 
 insist on being treated separately. The ob- 
 jection recurs in the form in which we first 
 stated it. We have still to deal with our 
 technically " great " people. If it be possible 
 to find dominant motives for the action of 
 masses, this does not enable us to explain 
 the action of any individual. And we have 
 to consider the cases of individuals whose 
 action as such has distinctly traceable re- 
 sults, and who cannot, therefore, be wholly 
 merged in the mass. 
 
 The question is just this : how far can 
 the great man, king, conqueror, discoverer, 
 or what not, be merged in the mass? We 
 have here a mind which, owing either to its 
 native power or to its place in society, exer- 
 cises some degree of control over the course 
 things take. We cannot explain the action
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 33 
 
 of this mind otherwise than very crudely. 
 How are we to merge it ideally with the 
 masses on which it acts so that our general- 
 isations concerning them will include its 
 action ? 
 
 It will certainly not help us much to talk 
 vaguely of the great man as a product of 
 his time. At best the phrase expresses a 
 half-truth only. The great man is produced 
 in the first place by his parents ; and they 
 are products of their time rather than of his. 
 The great man's great-grandfather may have 
 been a very important factor in his making. 
 At bottom the great man, like all the rest 
 of us, is the product not of his own time but 
 of all time. We are safer when we speak of 
 the great man as conditioned by his time, 
 though the phrase is dangerously near a 
 truism. But it means at least this, that the 
 notions and aims of the great man, being 
 formed by the action of his surroundings 
 on his mind, must needs be in some degree 
 representative of the aims and notions of a 
 
 c
 
 34 Place of History in Education. 
 
 number of his contemporaries and even in some 
 degree of all people of his time and place. 
 There is something helpful in this considera- 
 tion, though not, perhaps, very much. For 
 we have also to consider that the mind of 
 the great man might be equally representative 
 and yet very different from what it is. And, 
 moreover, just where it is most original it is 
 least representative. 
 
 However, it is not only the mind of the 
 great man, it is also his action that is circum- 
 stantially conditioned. The effectiveness of 
 his action will depend upon the degree of 
 correspondence between his mind and the 
 mind of the masses he acts upon. It is just 
 the coincidence between his action and the 
 desires, sentiments, habits, and dreams of 
 the masses that give it its effectiveness. 
 Technically absolute monarch though he be, 
 there is nothing at all absolute about his 
 power. He can only act on and through 
 other minds. He can, perhaps, act on bodies 
 also and hang people who differ ; but to do
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 35 
 
 so he must find hangmen. It remains true 
 under all conditions that the great man can 
 only act through other minds ; so that if 
 we understand the mass we understand a 
 good deal about the action of our great man. 
 We know or may know what he cannot do, 
 and we also know, at least in some degree, 
 what he must do. 
 
 Nor need we admit that of the personal 
 idiosyncrasy of the great man we can under- 
 stand nothing. If we cannot hope adequately 
 to explain his psychology and his constitution 
 and say what part his grand -parents and 
 what part his digestive apparatus played in 
 his policy, we can, perhaps, roughly approxi- 
 mate to the truth even with regard to these 
 matters. It is certainly not true that our 
 great man is an absolutely incomprehensible 
 being. He is, after all, very like ourselves. 
 
 All this trouble about great men is really 
 only part of a much larger trouble about what 
 we can only call accident. In our personal 
 lives we call anything accidental that happens
 
 36 Place of History in Education. 
 
 from causes altogether beyond our control. 
 If I am climbing on a mountain and my foot 
 slips, that is not accident but my own doing ; 
 but if a stone comes down on me from above, 
 that, from my point of view, is accident. 
 In the same sense human history is full of 
 accidents which produce more or less serious 
 results. From the historian's point of view 
 everything is accidental which, happening 
 from causes lying outside his range of inves- 
 tigation, yet produces results within that 
 range. The results of the action of great 
 men as such are of this nature. Just so far 
 as results are due to the idiosyncrasy of 
 some powerful person they are accidental. 
 And what of the great man himself? How 
 came he there at all ? He is a mere accident. 
 What if Cromwell had been killed in his 
 first fight? What if Napoleon had been 
 picked up by an English frigate as he crossed 
 from Acre in 1799 ? It would be ludicrously 
 absurd to say that such things do not happen. 
 There is no sort of reason why they should 
 not happen, and therefore, in the long-run,
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 37 
 
 they do. The story of man's life must be full 
 of unknown accidents. And anyhow, how 
 came the great man to be there at all ? It 
 is useless to try to evade the difficulty by 
 saying that the crisis produces the man. 
 A crisis no doubt tends to produce a man : 
 it certainly does not produce the man. 
 
 But the great man is only one of the 
 instruments of the great goddess, Chance. 
 Weather, as distinguished from climate, has 
 played a not inconsiderable part in human 
 affairs. How were the results of the Thirty 
 Years' War affected by the interference of 
 fog on the battlefield of Lutzen ? But the 
 grandest instance known to us of the 
 possible effects of weather is to be found in 
 the great French Revolution. It cannot be 
 doubted that the course of events in France 
 would have been very different from what 
 it was but for the terrible winter of 1788-89 
 which immediately produced the great famine 
 of the latter year. It may fairly be argued 
 that had that winter and spring been normal 
 there would have been no Reign of Terror
 
 38 Place of History in Education. 
 
 and no chance for Napoleon. There would 
 have been a revolution of some sort, no 
 doubt : how different a revolution no one 
 can say. 
 
 Again there are many kinds of coincidence, 
 and the arm of coincidence is very long. 
 It would be easy to multiply instances. 
 Consider what happened in France during 
 the so-called wars of religion. Great part 
 of Southern France seemed to be breaking 
 away from the rest of the country. The 
 Huguenot provinces were organising them- 
 selves more and more completely into the 
 form of an independent state. Already 
 they were making treaties with the Crown 
 as with a strange power. A declaration 
 of independence seemed coming. It looked 
 as though there would either be formed 
 in South France a new kingdom under the 
 King of Navarre or some such federal re- 
 public as that of the Swiss. But a series 
 of accidents, occurring just in time, made 
 the King of Navarre himself heir of the 
 crown of France. Yet Henry II. and Cath-
 
 Certain Radical Objections. 39 
 
 erine de Medicis had left four sons. Every 
 one of them died childless : and if any 
 one of them had had a son, or even a 
 daughter, the history of France would have 
 been changed, no one can say how much. 
 
 So, in conclusion, do the best that we 
 may with these fundamental objections to 
 the attempt to make a science of history, 
 we have, after all, to make certain serious 
 admissions. There is a considerable element 
 of accident in human history which defies 
 generalisation and is a cause of inexactitude 
 in all generalisations. The wider our general- 
 isation is and the more centuries it covers, 
 the less the amount of error from this cause 
 will be. But we cannot hope to escape it 
 altogether. All we can do is to state it 
 where we can see it and allow discount for 
 it everywhere. It remains true that so 
 long as we can deal reasonably with the 
 action of masses we have a good basis for 
 a scientific treatment of history. For, after 
 all, however large the amount of accident 
 exactly may be, it is demonstrable that
 
 40 Place of History in Education. 
 
 accident accounts for only a small percentage 
 of the total. But it must not be forgotten 
 that the explanation of the action of masses 
 by reference to dominant motives involves 
 a margin of error there also.
 
 4i 
 
 IV. 
 
 CERTAIN PRACTICAL INFERENCES. 
 
 The implications of a thing are part of 
 the thing. What we have now to do is to 
 draw certain practically important inferences 
 from our theory of scientific history. 
 
 It is the scientific historian whom alone, 
 for the present, we have to consider. He 
 is concerned essentially and almost all the 
 time with problems of causation. He 
 must, of course, ascertain how things were 
 superficially before he can even ask any 
 question. But there are very many facts 
 and aspects of fact with which he is not 
 concerned at all. He needs facts only to 
 explain other facts. What he is looking for 
 is real relations, that is, causal relations. If 
 he can find these he wants no more : if he
 
 42 Place of History in Education. 
 
 cannot find these he has found nothing. A 
 fact is only important to him because of its 
 bearing upon something else. An event 
 is only important so far as it has results, 
 and the results of an event are, to him, an 
 absolute measure of its importance. Every- 
 thing to him is result first and cause after- 
 wards, and so far as it is not cause it is 
 unimportant. 
 
 If we were dealing, from the scientific 
 point of view, with the battle of Blenheim, 
 we should not want to know how the Duke 
 of Marlborough felt about it. It is not a 
 question of not being able to find this out : 
 we do not need to find it out. It might 
 or it might not interest us to know ; but 
 we must not be misled into supposing that 
 things which interest us are, as such, of any 
 importance whatever. It is a common fail- 
 ing among historians to run off after some 
 point which happens to interest them, but 
 which is quite irrelevant to the matter in 
 hand. This is a form of egotism which 
 should be suppressed. We want to explain
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 43 
 
 why the battle of Blenheim went as it did, 
 but we do not want to build up a picture 
 of Marlborough's mind by an imaginative 
 process, the results of which are both un- 
 certain and irrelevant. The great man must 
 be to us a factor and nothing more ; unless, 
 indeed, we regard him as a nuisance, bring- 
 ing an element of accident into otherwise 
 intelligible sequences. We may have to 
 seek to explain his acts, but we are not 
 concerned with the quality of them. It does 
 not matter to us whether he is what is 
 called a hero or what is called a blackguard. 
 Discussion on the point is as useless as re- 
 search directed to finding out whether his 
 eyes were blue or green. We shall ask no 
 more questions about our great man than we 
 are compelled to ask ; and it is a nuisance 
 to have to ask any at all. 
 
 The inference maj^ be put more broadly, 
 in the form of two propositions, not quite 
 strictly separable. In the first place, the 
 scientific historian has no business with the 
 dramatic or the picturesque or the tragic or
 
 44 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the comic or the pathetic. The life of man 
 is full of these things, — so full that you can 
 find one or other or perhaps all of them 
 almost everywhere. At first sight it might 
 seem a paradox to say that the historian is 
 not to deal with them. But from the point 
 of view of the scientific historian these 
 things, or rather these aspects of things, are 
 irrelevant, if they can be said to exist at 
 all. It will not, indeed, do to say that they 
 exist only to the mind that sees them. That 
 would be to put the matter too broadly, and 
 lay oneself open to the retort that we do 
 not know that anything exists except to the 
 perceiving mind. But we may put it thus. 
 There are things and relations that exist to 
 the intellect as such, to the intellect un- 
 alloyed; and these are the things with 
 which science deals. And there are other 
 things and relations that do not exist at all 
 to the mere intelligence, and with such 
 things science cannot deal directly. The 
 tragic and the picturesque and so on are 
 among these. When we say that a thing
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 45 
 
 is tragic or comic we express not only how 
 we see it, but also how we feel it, and we 
 are, therefore, expressing something irrele- 
 vant to the purposes of a student of causa- 
 tion. One may put it, perhaps, more simply. 
 The tragic is an aspect of things, the comic 
 is another ; but neither has any real relation 
 except to the mind that sees it. They are 
 not causal. The revulsion of feeling, the 
 horror of his deed, the sense that he has 
 already destroyed his best part of life, 
 which make Othello stab himself, these are 
 causal things ; but they are not the tragedy 
 of Othello. It may well be difficult for the 
 most scientific of historians to avoid laugh- 
 ing or crying occasionally, but his laughter 
 and his tears are alike irrelevant. And so 
 with other such aspects of life. When the 
 historian narrates for the sake of telling 
 a good story, when he takes pains to bring 
 out the picturesque character of one inci- 
 dent, the ironic quality of another, it 
 matters not how well he does these things, 
 he is simply off the point. The blue pencil
 
 46 Place of History in Education. 
 
 of the scientific historian would be run right 
 through almost all the purple passages of 
 our histories. 
 
 We come to our second proposition, perhaps 
 more important, certainly more disputable ; 
 for no one can dispute the irrelevance of 
 the picturesque to scientific history. It is 
 this : that any kind of moralising and every 
 kind of moral judgment is also irrelevant. 
 There are, roughly, two sorts of moralising 
 that one commonly meets with in historical 
 writings. There is discussion about the 
 moral quality of a man and his acts, or, 
 which is nearly the same thing, about the 
 morality of the action of a mass, a party 
 policy, or a law, and there is the pure 
 gnomic element, consisting of statements of 
 general moral consequence, inferred from or 
 suggested by things under discussion. We 
 must distinguish, to some extent, between 
 these two. There are degrees of irrelevancy. 
 
 When, at the end of one of Mrs Mark- 
 ham's chapters, little Alice or little Henry 
 asks his mother, "Was Henry II. a good
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 47 
 
 man or a bad man, mamma?" we are in- 
 clined to laugh. Laugh by all means ; but 
 not only at Mrs Markham. Laugh, also, 
 at all the much more pretentious people 
 who solemnly engage in similar discussions. 
 In the given case we laugh, perhaps, only 
 at the implied assumption that Henry of 
 Anjou can be classed definitely as good 
 or bad. There is much more than that 
 to laugh at. It is not a good question 
 crudely put. Are we going to analyse 
 the elements of goodness and badness in 
 Henry, establish degrees and sum him up 
 as not black or white but a kind of 
 greenish -grey? A goodly task we have 
 set ourselves, and a pretty tangle we are 
 thrusting ourselves into to no purpose ! To 
 no purpose : we might be content with 
 that. In what way will our summing up 
 of Henry's moral qualities affect our esti- 
 mate of him as a factor in change ? It is 
 a clear case of digression. But one is in- 
 clined to carry the war a little way into 
 the enemies' country. These moral judg-
 
 48 Place of History in Education. 
 
 ments raise all kinds of questions, and an 
 historian who wishes to indulge in them 
 should explain his system of ethics. How 
 does he know that what 1 he calls bad his 
 readers do not call good? 
 
 What right has he to try Henry by his 
 twentieth -century notions of good and bad, 
 and impose those same notions on us ? We 
 will move the previous question and ask 
 what he means by good. Or is he an 
 impressionist merely, frankly saying, "This 
 strikes me as ugly and unpleasant, and 
 that, on the contrary, as quite nice " ? Our 
 answer may well be that we do not care 
 at all how things strike him. 
 
 But is he setting about to try Henry by 
 Henry's own standards? Is he going to 
 appeal against Henry or to justify him 
 by Henry's own conscience ? A distinction 
 must be made here. There is something 
 to be said for a curious inquiry of this 
 kind. If we could really get at the con- 
 science of a twelfth -century man we might 
 find it the key to a good many things.
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 49 
 
 Henry of Anjou was a prominent person, 
 and a good deal is known about him. The 
 inquiry as to what his moral consciousness 
 was like is worth making, if we see any 
 hope of an answer, just -because and only 
 because it might prove to be a key to 
 other matters. Nevertheless, that further 
 question — how far was Henry justified by 
 his own moral consciousness ? — is entirely 
 irrelevant. If we make an inquiry with 
 a view to a judgment on that question, 
 we are missing the point. Yet it may be 
 better that the inquiry should be made in 
 that way than not made at all. 
 
 To questions concerning the morality of 
 the acts of political parties or of nations 
 the same considerations apply. The moral 
 consciousness of a nation is a fact very 
 important to define ; but we have no 
 business with casuistry. But as to the 
 gnomic element in historical writing, from 
 the scientific point of view there is nothing 
 at all to be said for it in any case. When 
 an historian describes the fall of some great 
 
 D
 
 50 Place of History in Education. 
 
 personage and then adds remarks about the 
 instability of human grandeur, he is not 
 merely delivering solemn truisms, he is 
 also wasting his time. The fact that he 
 sometimes does this sort of thing, as Carlyle 
 did, in a brilliant and impressive manner, 
 is neither here nor there. 
 
 An average Englishman is still a moralis- 
 ing animal, though, perhaps, not quite so 
 much so as he was a few years back. 
 When an English historian indulges in 
 moral judgments or points a little moral 
 lesson, he is enjoying himself, one might 
 say, in a harmless fashion after all. More- 
 over, if his moralising runs to any serious 
 length, it can always be skipped. But 
 this lenient view of the case is only 
 partially just. This habit of moralising 
 encourages a popular belief that it is the 
 historian's business to moralise. Not long 
 ago a lady asked the present writer whether 
 he regarded Henry of Navarre as a hero. 
 She evidently thought him professionally 
 bound to have an opinion on this obscure
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 51 
 
 point. It proved quite useless to tell her 
 that he did not, in any sense, specialise in 
 heroism. The distinction was not appre- 
 hended. 
 
 In truth there are radical objections to 
 all this moralising. It involves assump- 
 tions about ethics ; it often involves some 
 degree of self-deception; and it sometimes 
 involves cant. This last case arises when 
 the historian poses as being very painfully 
 shocked at very ordinary misconduct. It 
 is astonishing to think what virtuous people 
 historians must be, if you take them to 
 mean all they imply. If I simply condemn, 
 in some sense, Charles II. 's or William III.'s 
 profligacy, or Elizabeth's lying, I am merely 
 doing something quite superfluous, I am 
 not making any claim to virtue. But if 
 I profess to regard these things with any 
 extreme horror, that certainly does seem to 
 imply an uncommon degree of virtuous 
 sensitiveness. And if I profess to be not 
 merely disgusted but positively surprised 
 at such iniquities, that implies an almost in-
 
 52 Place of History in Education. 
 
 credible innocence on my part. And there 
 is only this to add : that such a degree of 
 innocence is highly undesirable in an his- 
 torian, whatever it may be in other people. 
 
 So far as the conduct of a great man pro- 
 duces moral reaction at the time — so far as 
 people of his own time are disgusted or 
 moved to admiration by the moral aspect 
 of his proceedings — this moral aspect has, 
 of course, to be considered as a factor. But 
 conscience and all its attendant phenomena 
 must be for the scientific historian a result 
 simply and simply a cause. We have to 
 examine people's moral ideas because these 
 ideas more or less affect their conduct. We 
 have to treat the moral consciousness of any 
 particular time and place as a product and 
 try to explain it. 
 
 The tendency to sit in judgment from a 
 point of view at once ethical and modern 
 is only part of a much wider tendency to 
 test the past by the touchstone of our 
 feelings. The ethical judgment delivered 
 from modern standpoints is so completely
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 53 
 
 irrelevant to the purpose of scientific history 
 that it does little or no direct harm. An 
 historian may amuse himself in this way 
 without distorting facts or confusing his 
 ideas of what happened. He may be, as we 
 say, impartial in his ethical deliverances ; and 
 in that case they are no worse than useless 
 digressions. But there are greater dangers. 
 When a man sets out to travel in past 
 time many pitfalls beset the way of his 
 understanding. He is apt to attribute the 
 ideas with which he is most familiar to the 
 people he meets. He is apt to interpret 
 their actions by reference to ideas which 
 exist in his mind but never existed in 
 theirs. He is apt to find his Bill of Rights 
 or his Habeas Corpus Act in their Great 
 Charter. He tends to set up his own stand- 
 ard of values for the old states and the old 
 races. When he meets with a movement 
 which seems in some degree analogous to 
 some present - day movement with which 
 he sympathises, he is apt to think of it as 
 a proper, progressive sort of thing, and of
 
 54 Place of History in Education. 
 
 its opponents as obstructionists in some 
 large sense. He is apt to make of his own 
 mind a touchstone of progress, to think of 
 movement in the direction or along the line 
 of his own opinions as to what is good, as 
 advance, not merely in time. The human 
 mind is the victim of a strong tendency to 
 regard itself as infallible. It easily becomes 
 the victim of many kinds of bias, — of class 
 bias, or of patriotic bias, or of political bias. 
 Perhaps the most virulent of all these poisons 
 is the political bias. The historians are per- 
 haps few who, instead of approaching modern 
 politics through history, have approached 
 history through modern politics. But their 
 followers are many. It is not necessary to 
 deal here with the crudest forms of this evil, 
 though even these are common, if one judges 
 by the utterances of professional politicians. 
 But then professional politicians will say 
 anything, and one never knows. . . . Any- 
 how there is a strong tendency among those 
 afflicted with the bias of party politics to 
 take sides in the past as they do in the
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 55 
 
 present, and to condemn proceedings which 
 run counter to their notions and to applaud 
 the contrary things. Such people are apt 
 to see in the past a progressive development 
 of their own principles of action. They set 
 up their own ideas as standards of progress, 
 and close their eyes firmly to the fact that 
 these ideas have little or no real relation to 
 the past at all. They mislead themselves 
 with shadowy analogies and fail to see what 
 is vital by looking for something else. The 
 angry holding of decided party views about 
 the politics of to-day is not, perhaps, an 
 absolute disqualification for understanding 
 history. But indubitably such views involve 
 a very serious danger. The point of view 
 of people of past centuries is always hard to 
 realise. But it must be got at, and great 
 pains and patience are commonly required. 
 The one fatal procedure is procedure on an 
 assumption that it was a point of view at all 
 closely corresponding with any with which 
 we are familiar. 
 
 The attempt to find our party politics in
 
 56 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the past, or to read our conceptions into the 
 mind of the thirteenth century, is so hopeless 
 that it cannot coexist with any serious study 
 of history at all. But apart from such 
 crudities there is more subtle danger. The 
 tendency to regard the past as though it 
 led up to the present and then stopped is 
 strong and prevalent and radically distort- 
 ing. It leads people to think of such move- 
 ments as directly point to the present state 
 of things as "advances": and contrariwise. 
 " Advances," of course, these in a sense are : 
 advances in time past towards a condition 
 existing in time to come. But the most 
 " reactionary " movement is an advance in 
 this sense. The people who labour under 
 the illusion of which we speak mean more 
 than this by " advance." They have some 
 theory of progress for the nation or the race, 
 and they measure advance in what they call 
 progress by reference to present conditions. 
 Curiously enough the tendency to think in 
 this fashion seems to exist very strongly in 
 people who do not regard the present state
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 57 
 
 of things as at all satisfactory. We may 
 hear the same man sweepingly condemn our 
 present social and legal system, and a minute 
 later refer to some past movement leading 
 straight in our direction as an advance. 
 There would appear to be some confusion 
 in such cases. . . . 
 
 That the past does not in any sense cul- 
 minate in the present is one of those obvious 
 facts that need to be continually re -stated. 
 We can only see history in right perspective 
 against the vast unknown of the future. As 
 Professor Bury has finely said : " We must 
 see our petty periods sub specie perennitatis." 
 The one thing certain is change, and the 
 present is a mere notion, a theoretical point. 
 It will not do to assume any theory of pro- 
 gress. If you have a theory of progress, 
 try, by all means, to demonstrate it from 
 the facts of the past. If you have no dis- 
 tinct theory, it is better to put the word 
 altogether out of mind. But if you have 
 a theory, it is one which the scientific 
 study of history will in time establish or
 
 58 Place of History in Education. 
 
 in time condemn. Adopt your theory as 
 a working hypothesis and see how far it 
 will carry you. Probably in a short time 
 you will have forgotten it. In any case, 
 if your theory is not mere nonsense it is 
 an enormous historical generalisation. It 
 may be more than that ; but it must be 
 that. In any case, to try to make of our 
 present conditions a test of progress in the 
 past is merely silly. All progress in the 
 past must relate to the future. We none 
 of us have any knowledge of what that 
 future is going to be. What we should 
 like it to be is a totally irrelevant matter. 
 It is very unlikely to be that. We none 
 of us know that our European civilisation 
 has not already entered on a process of 
 secret decay. After all, there is one big 
 fact that we know about all earlier civilisa- 
 tions : they all perished. And there is one 
 thing certain, that nothing lasts. Nothing 
 at all lasts. Even the most fundamental 
 things change, if only very slowly. 
 
 Thus we arrive at a conception of the
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 59 
 
 virtue supremely necessary to the scientific 
 historian. We might call it impartiality ; 
 but the word is too narrow and has some- 
 what evil associations. As a rule, when 
 people speak of impartiality in a historian 
 they are thinking of his moral judgments. 
 They mean that when he comes to weigh 
 up a great personage, he makes the proper 
 allowances, he is sympathetic, he feels no 
 animus, he tries to judge the man by the 
 man's own standards. All this is needless. 
 If indeed the historian feels a strong an- 
 imus against his great personage he will 
 probably misunderstand his action, and this 
 may lead him to misunderstand the con- 
 ditions under which he acts, and in that 
 way become a cause of serious error. But 
 we don't want his moral judgments at all, 
 and, partial or impartial, they are equally 
 irrelevant. On the other hand, in relation 
 to the mass movements of history we want 
 something more than is expressed by the 
 word impartiality. We want a complete 
 intellectual detachment. A writer who feels
 
 60 Place of History in Education. 
 
 a strong bias for or against Catholicism or 
 Protestantism or any other 'ism, or for 
 or against democracy or aristocracy, is no 
 scientific historian. Not only ought such 
 bias to be impossible to the scientific histor- 
 ian, we may fairly say that it is impossible. 
 A man with such bias has not and cannot 
 take the scientific point of view in relation to 
 his subject. In the preface to his work on the 
 French Revolution, Taine told us that he 
 intended to contemplate the phenomena of 
 that time as a man may contemplate the 
 metamorphosis of an insect. It cannot be 
 said that Taine succeeded in doing this ; 
 but it must be said that he ought to 
 have done so. To the scientific historian 
 the dreams of humanity, its ideals, its 
 struggles and triumphs, its failures and 
 miseries, must be products and causes ; 
 political parties, whether of the past or of the 
 present, social wrongs and social questions, 
 wars and revolutions, heroes and prophets, 
 must be products and causes ; religion and 
 conscience must be products and causes.
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 61 
 
 What is needed is an intellectual de- 
 tachment so complete that all the hopes 
 of humanity fail to arouse a dominant 
 emotion. 
 
 Some one will perhaps ask, how, if the 
 historian's detachment is so complete, he is 
 to sympathise at all, and will perhaps say 
 that if he does not sympathise with any- 
 thing he will understand nothing. There 
 is a certain difficulty here. We can only 
 say that if he sympathises it must be with 
 all classes, with all causes, with all ideals, 
 with all sorts and conditions of men. His 
 sympathy must be Shakespearian in breath 
 and highly intellectualised. Assuredly he 
 must never for a moment be governed by 
 emotion. It may be objected, still, that we 
 are demanding too much of our scientific 
 historian, who, after all, is to be human. 
 But it must be remembered that we do not 
 expect any one man to do anything per- 
 fectly. All that is absolutely needed is 
 that a number of men should take the 
 scientific point of view and work honestly
 
 62 Place of History in Education. 
 
 from it as far as they can go. The errors 
 of each one will be corrected by the others. 
 Very little history has yet been written 
 strictly from this point of view. Certainly 
 very little has been written in English. 
 Our English historians seem generally to 
 be unable to resist the temptation to be 
 eloqueut or moral. It is not altogether 
 their fault. It seems to be expected of 
 them that they should digress in these 
 ways. On the other hand, a good deal has 
 been written more or less strictly from this 
 point of view upon what are called consti- 
 tutional and economic history. Those sub- 
 jects do not readily lend themselves to 
 dramatic or even to eloquent treatment. 
 Moreover, a really great amount of research 
 has been and is being done quite strictly 
 from this point of view. This research has 
 for its main purpose the helping of future 
 generations to build up a science of history. 
 One thing is certain in this connection. If 
 history is regarded as a science, it must be 
 regarded as a science yet in its beginning.
 
 Certain Practical Inferences. 63 
 
 Almost all our generalisations, almost all 
 our theories, are at present tentative, experi- 
 mental. It is doubtful if there be a single 
 short period in the history of any nation 
 our general notions of which will not be, 
 more or less completely, transformed in time 
 to come. We are making — perhaps we have 
 made — the first rough approximations to 
 historical truth. We are laying foundations, 
 and even these will probably have to be 
 altered. We suffer already from an indi- 
 gestion of facts : and there are many more 
 to come. We are only at the commence- 
 ment of understanding.
 
 6 4 
 
 AN ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 It will be well at this point to deal with 
 some definite historical problem, not so as 
 to give a solution of it, but so as to make 
 out in what sort of way the scientific 
 historian will try to solve it, and what 
 sort of solution may be hoped for. As an 
 illustrative problem, in this sense, we may 
 take the causes of the commencement of 
 the Hundred Years' War. 
 
 On a superficial view of the facts we are 
 likely to be struck at once by Edward III.'s 
 claim that the French crown belonged by 
 right to him. AVith the moral, which in 
 this case includes the legal, character of 
 this claim we have, in this connection, 
 nothing to do. It may concern us to know
 
 An Illustration. 65 
 
 how far Edward or his people or his allies 
 believed in this asserted right : it cannot 
 concern us to know how far they were, in 
 some philosophical sense, right in so be- 
 lieving. It is here no question of the 
 character of the moral consciousness of the 
 people of Edward IIL's time, but simply of 
 the commencement of the war ; and we 
 must further consider that the amount of 
 belief in the claim is probably not a matter 
 of primary importance. People in the mass 
 and in the long-run believe what they find 
 it most convenient to believe ; and analysis 
 will always show a very close correspond- 
 ence between the beliefs of a mass or of 
 a class of people and what they conceive 
 as their interests. If, then, Edward III. 
 and his people believed in the justice of 
 the claim, they probably had very practical 
 and quite unphilosophical reasons for so be- 
 lieving. Their belief would probably prove 
 to be a mere product of the same causes 
 that, on the English side, produce the war. 
 The supposition that Edward III. made
 
 66 Place of History in Education. 
 
 war from a sense of duty to his own claim 
 and in the interests of international justice 
 is evidently one only to be entertained in 
 the last resort. Before such a claim as his 
 is ordinarily acted on, it must at least seem 
 desirable to make it good in other interests 
 than those of justice. Even if we are to 
 regard the accident of the legal claim as 
 a real cause of the war, we must still ask 
 why it was acted upon. But, as a matter 
 of fact, there are features in this case which 
 point to the conclusion that the claim was 
 an afterthought, and rather a pretext for 
 and an act of war than a reason for de- 
 claring it. If not by the homage done in 
 1329, at least by the convention of 1331 
 Edward had recognised Philip VI. as rightful 
 King of France. His re -discovery of his 
 own claim some years later is suspicious. 
 Moreover, even after Crecy, Edward III. 
 never did the only thing which could pos- 
 sibly have won the crown of France for 
 him even for a time : he never made any 
 serious attempt on Paris, as did Henry V.
 
 An Illustration. 67 
 
 On the whole, therefore, we may set aside 
 for the present this matter of the claim. 
 
 We will glance superficially over the facts 
 which appear to bear on the question. Ever 
 since Edward I. had started on his attempt 
 to conquer Scotland the French king had 
 been giving more or less assistance to the 
 Scots. Edward III.'s own efforts in the 
 same direction had been frustrated largely 
 by such interference. Now this French in- 
 tervention in Scotland is manifestly con- 
 nected with the English hold on Gascony, 
 of which the French king desired possession. 
 From the English point of view French in- 
 terference in Scotland, besides being annoy- 
 ingly obstructive in itself, amounted to a 
 diversion under cover of which the French 
 king might and did attack Gascony. Two 
 serious attempts to conquer Gascony had 
 been made by the French in Edward I.'s 
 time, and under Edward II. the French had 
 actually possessed themselves of large part 
 of that district. The policy and aim of the 
 French king in the matter were plain enough,
 
 68 Place of History in Education. 
 
 and in this policy he had already shown con- 
 siderable persistence. Now the retention of 
 Gascony was practically important to the 
 English because of the importance of the 
 Gascon wine trade. This trade, and also 
 the trade between England and Flanders, 
 was, moreover, a good deal disturbed by 
 French piracy. For instance, in 1327 a 
 certain Hugh Sampson states in a peti- 
 tion to the king that a ship of his, sailing 
 from Bordeaux to England, had been seized 
 off the Norman coast by four French ships, 
 and that the Frenchmen had slain his crew 
 and carried off his ship with 140 tuns of 
 wine. Such petitions from distracted mer- 
 chants seem to have been common, and of 
 redress there seems never to have been any. 
 This kind of thing had certainly been going 
 on for a long time, but no doubt it in- 
 creased as trade grew, and perhaps it in- 
 creased as a result of the wars over Gas- 
 cony and Scotland in Edward I.'s time. 
 From all these things we can make certain 
 inferences. All this unredeemed wrong and
 
 An Illustration. 69 
 
 loss means resentment in the minds of 
 a large number of the people concerned. 
 The people concerned in the trade are, of 
 course, not only the merchants, but also 
 their customers, and also the producers on 
 both sides of the sea, — for, of course, Eng- 
 land was sending stuff to Gascony to pay 
 for its Gascon wine. Further, these Scottish 
 and Gascon affairs probably give rise to a 
 similar resentment and sense of injury in 
 the mind of the king, though we cannot be 
 sure of that. And there is one thing more 
 that needs mention. The French kins was 
 endeavouring to get a hold on Flanders 
 through its Count. The growing English 
 trade in Flanders was imperilled. 
 
 These facts are not all the facts bearing 
 on our problem, but they are sufficient for 
 our present purpose. We have not ac- 
 counted yet for the commencement of the 
 war, but we have some material with which 
 to account for it. We cannot say simply 
 that under these circumstances Edward III. 
 determined upon war; determined to use
 
 70 Place of History in Education. 
 
 such sea power as he had, and to buy 
 support abroad, and determined further to 
 claim the French crown, partly as an excuse 
 for going to war at all, partly to define his 
 position in relation to Flanders, partly to raise 
 hopes of larger spoil among his allies, partly, 
 perhaps, in the hope of dividing the French, 
 and partly as an appeal to the patriotic 
 sentiment of the English. That statement 
 would be true as far as it goes, but it does 
 not go far enough. It indicates probable 
 causes, but does not definitely assign or dis- 
 tinguish among them. It leaves many ques- 
 tions open. Was Edward thinking chiefly 
 of Scotland, chiefly of Gascony, or chiefly 
 of Flanders ? Did he really wish to make 
 conquests in France altogether apart from 
 Gascony ? Did it seem to him that the 
 only way of holding Gascony in the long- 
 run lay in greatly reducing the power of 
 the French king, and, in fact, in holding 
 much more ? How far was Edward moved 
 by vanity, and how far by resentment? 
 How far was he influenced by the French
 
 An Illustration. 71 
 
 king's enemy, Robert of Artois ? How far 
 was he thinking of making himself popu- 
 lar? How far was he merely yielding to a 
 popular demand that something should be 
 done ? 
 
 All these questions must be answered in 
 some way before we can really know why 
 the war was begun. It becomes apparent 
 already that our knowledge can never be 
 exact. Moreover, just so far as we are 
 driven to seek the cause of war in the mind 
 of Edward III. we are in great difficulties. 
 We cannot get directly at that mind. Ques- 
 tions quite intimately concerning Edward 
 himself are all, more or less completely, 
 unanswerable. Even if we could get directly 
 at his mind it would not help us much. 
 Just so far as the beginning of war was due 
 to mere idiosyncrasies of Edward, it is of 
 the nature of accident. 
 
 How far can we, on the facts, escape an 
 unwelcome conclusion of this kind? We 
 must try to escape it, but we must also be 
 prepared to accept it. We shall certainly
 
 72 Place of History in Education. 
 
 reason badly if we set out with a rigid re- 
 solve to refuse any such conclusion. 
 
 Let us try if it be possible to eliminate 
 the king altogether. Can we say that the 
 root of the whole matter is the political 
 hold of the English on Gascony? This an- 
 tagonises the French king; it leads to the 
 French interference in Scotland, it sets up 
 resentment and uneasiness, it leads to an 
 aggravation of the prevailing friction on the 
 coasts ; finally, it brings the English king to 
 a merely inevitable conclusion that some- 
 thing vigorous must be done to secure 
 Gascony and put an end to the disturbance. 
 If this be the right way of putting it, 
 Gascony is the bone of contention, and the 
 war is merely a renewal of that between 
 Edward I. and Philip IV. But the assump- 
 tion here is that the retention of Gascony 
 was so important to the English that no 
 English king could afford to abandon it 
 rather than risk a war. The most practical 
 reason the English had for desiring to re- 
 tain Gascony was the existence of the wine
 
 An Illustration. 73 
 
 trade. Were, then, the English so anxious 
 about their Gascon wine, or so careful of 
 the traditional rights of the English crown 
 in Gascon)^, that they practically forced the 
 king into declaring war ? There is no evi- 
 dence to support such a view. The great 
 English barons drank a deal of Gascon wine ; 
 they made something out of the royal rights 
 in Gascony, and, as landowners, they must 
 have been interested in the Gascon trade. 
 But, apart from their own profits, they were 
 certainly not very anxious to uphold royal 
 rights, and, moreover, they do not seem to 
 have moved in the matter. The Gascon 
 barons were more fully interested in the 
 question, for they were essentially wine pro- 
 ducers. But they had little or no influence 
 in England. The merchants and towns- 
 people of England may have been ready to 
 make sacrifices to keep their trade, but you 
 can hardly say more. There is no likeli- 
 hood or evidence of any serious pressure 
 being put upon the king by his own sub- 
 jects. The theory breaks down. We must
 
 74 Place of History in Education. 
 
 return to the king. Any attempt to solve 
 
 political problems of the fourteenth century 
 
 without reference to the king is sure to break 
 
 down. One may be able to ignore modern 
 
 Prime Ministers, but never medieval kings. 
 
 We must look rather more closely at the 
 
 king. We know that he used a very large 
 
 amount of Gascon wine and that he only 
 
 occasionally paid for some of it. Moreover, 
 
 the more wine was imported the more the 
 
 king made by way of custom. And he not 
 
 only bought wine without paying for it and 
 
 took barrels in prise, but he also sold wine 
 
 himself. He had a very serious interest in 
 
 the Gascon wine trade, an interest that can 
 
 be measured by considerable amounts in 
 
 money. In the year 1337 Edward III. owes 
 
 £437 to one wine merchant and £221 to 
 
 another. He orders 600 casks of wine in 
 
 1333 and 500 more in 1335. Nor is it only 
 
 a question of wine to him. All the royal 
 
 rights in Gascony are of the nature of more 
 
 or less lucrative property, and mean income. 
 
 Loss of Gascony would mean loss of income,
 
 An Illustration. 75 
 
 and no medieval king loses income if he can 
 help it. And it is not only a question of 
 Gascony. All disturbance of trade in the 
 Channel affected the king's income, because 
 the more trade flourished the more customs 
 the king raised. As soon as we look at all 
 closely at the business, we see that King 
 Edward had solid, quite ordinary financial 
 reasons for doing something. Further, we 
 have to remember that conquest in Scotland 
 or in France meant, of course, considerable 
 outlay and risk, but meant increase of income, 
 besides honour and glory, if only the thing 
 were effectively done. On the one hand, 
 then, danger of loss, on the other prospect of 
 gain, as well as of the satisfaction of vanity 
 by honour and glory : what more is wanted 
 to explain the action of Edward III. or of any 
 normal man ? But, if you do want more, 
 there is resentment ; there is, possibly, a belief 
 in his own right to the French throne ; and 
 there is, finally, the certainty that the war 
 will serve the interests and express the senti- 
 ments of a large number of his subjects.
 
 76 Place of History in Education. 
 
 Are we now attributing too much to the 
 king? If the loss of Gascony would have 
 fallen wholly upon him, if the possible gains 
 of war would have fallen entirely to him, 
 then, indeed, we might argue that it would 
 have been impossible for Edward III. if not to 
 make war, at least to sustain it. But this is 
 not the case. The English people as a whole 
 had quite a practical interest in clearing the 
 narrow seas of French pirates and in salving 
 the Gascon and Flemish trade, and they, too, 
 were moved by sense of injury and by belief 
 that they had rights in France. The king, 
 after all, does but represent his subjects in 
 the matter. His interests in it are theirs. 
 Nor can we suppose that Edward III. ignored 
 the attitude of his subjects. He had, as we 
 say, much power, but he was no despot, 
 even in theory. The constitutional position 
 of the king has its bearing on the causation 
 of the war. 
 
 If we are right so far, then the commence- 
 ment of the war was not due, to any seriously 
 troublesome extent, to the personality of
 
 An Illustration. 77 
 
 Edward III. It is not his unique personal 
 character, as such, but his position as king 
 that is mainly concerned. It is his financial 
 position, the nature of his royal rights, and, 
 indirectly, his constitutional position : and 
 almost any man in his position we should 
 expect to act as he did. His claim to the 
 crown of France is another matter. But we 
 have indicated, at least, that he had good 
 and obvious reasons for making the claim, 
 and we have shown some cause to believe 
 that the claim was rather a matter of the 
 conduct of the war than a cause of its 
 beginning. 
 
 Historical truth is so many-sided a thing 
 that it is only by viewing it from many 
 distinct points that one may hope to seize 
 the whole. There is another way in which 
 the whole matter may be put and which will 
 express part of the truth. If the French 
 were resolved to seize Gascony and the 
 English to retain it, then war was inevitable, 
 and if Edward had not begun it the French 
 would have done so. This consideration does
 
 78 Place of History in Education. 
 
 nothing to explain why the English wanted 
 to keep Gascony or the French to get it ; it 
 does nothing to explain why the war came 
 when it did and in the form in which it did 
 come : it does not, in fact, bear on the actual 
 commencement of the war at all. But it does 
 relieve us of some of the trouble attaching 
 to any absolute choice on Edward III.'s part. 
 War was certain to arise over Gascony unless 
 he chose to abandon it. He chose, rather, to 
 begin it himself. 
 
 Our statement of the facts and our analysis 
 of them have alike been incomplete ; but 
 they are sufficient for our present purposes. 
 It is on such lines that this and all similar 
 problems have to be solved.
 
 79 
 
 VI. 
 
 HISTORY AS A PAGEANT. 
 
 Such objections to the theory of history as 
 a science as have so far been dealt with 
 have been assertions of the extreme diffi- 
 culty or even impossibility of arriving at 
 real knowledge of the causes of social and 
 political phenomena. We have now to 
 consider what is not logically an objection 
 to, but is rather a traversing of, the whole 
 contention implied in that theory. We have 
 to consider an alternative view of the best 
 way of approaching and dealing with the 
 past life of humanity. However enthusi- 
 astic any one may be over the conception 
 of scientific history, it would be very foolish 
 not to admit that to a large number of minds 
 it does not appeal at all. Indeed, to the
 
 80 Place of History in Education. 
 
 greater number of minds no form of science 
 appeals at all strongly. People are unintelli- 
 gently glad of the practical results secured 
 by the applications of science to common 
 needs ; but for science itself they commonly 
 care little or nothing. They even estimate 
 the value of it in terms of money to be made 
 by its application to business. But it seems 
 tolerably certain that nobody will ever make 
 much money out of historical science. Again, • 
 there are sciences the results of which, even 
 when not what is called practical, are impress- 
 ive to the meanest imagination. The sensa- 
 tional quality of certain astronomical and of 
 certain biological conclusions escapes only 
 the dullest. But whatever admirable results 
 in the way of a destruction of superstitions, 
 an increased rationalism in politics, an in- 
 creased sense of the future, and so on, we 
 may expect to arise from historical science, 
 we can expect no results of immediate and 
 inevitable impressiveness any more than of 
 " practical " value. And so we shall have 
 to become far more intelligent than we are
 
 History as a Pageant. 81 
 
 before many of us cease to declare that 
 scientific history is dull, and to ask the use 
 of it. 
 
 It may be thought that mere assertions 
 of the dulness or uselessness of historical 
 science are not worth traversing otherwise 
 than indirectly. But there are points of 
 view from which such assertions may, in a 
 certain sense, be made unanswerably. 
 
 It is not a matter of a single point of view 
 or of a single theory alternative to that of 
 history as a science. It is a matter of quite 
 multitudinous points of view, all equally 
 non- scientific, but the common quality of 
 which is a little hard to define. One may 
 distinguish them, perhaps somewhat crudely, 
 but sufficiently for our present purpose, as 
 those points of view which are essentially 
 personal. The scientific point of view may 
 fairly be called impersonal. It is not a 
 natural point of view in the present state 
 of humanity. A natural, that is, a really 
 personal point of view, is an expression of 
 the whole man. It is that point from which 
 
 F
 
 82 Place of History in Education. 
 
 a man looks at things with the whole of him- 
 self. It is not reached by any mere process 
 of reasoning, even if it be reached by reason- 
 ing in any degree at all. It is not deliberately 
 taken up. At any one moment the man is 
 there. It comprehends all a man's sense 
 of values of every kind, and it includes all 
 his prejudices and his habitual tone of feel- 
 ing. It is, at bottom, the man himself. But 
 the scientific point of view is one deliberate- 
 ly reached and taken, and has reference to 
 values of only one kind. It is more natural 
 to one man than to another, and it may, to a 
 great extent, become habitual ; but it is never 
 simply natural. Nobody looks at his friends 
 and neighbours from a scientific point of view. 
 There may be other points of view equally 
 impersonal, but we are not called upon to 
 consider them here. We have now to deal 
 with people who insist on approaching the 
 subject - matter of history from personal 
 points of view ; and because they are many, 
 there is difficulty in stating their case. Let 
 us suppose a mind which objects to the
 
 History as a Pageant. 83 
 
 scientific theory of history as inadequate 
 at best, and which sympathises with all 
 other objectors in the same sense, what- 
 ever exactly their views may be. Let us 
 suppose further that this mind desires to 
 state the common case of all such objectors. 
 
 It is, perhaps, impossible that he should 
 do this at all adequately, but we may con- 
 ceive that he might express himself some- 
 what as follows : — 
 
 "I do not care," he might say, "or I 
 care very little, for all this worry about 
 causation. You admit that your account 
 of the evolution of society will always be 
 very incomplete, in that there are great 
 tracts of time about which you have little 
 information or none at all. You admit that 
 your historic periods cover only a small 
 space of the history of humanity. You 
 admit that, what with great men and other 
 accidents, your best generalisations will only 
 be approximations to the truth, even where 
 your evidence is most complete. You ad- 
 mit that your explanations of the action of
 
 84 Place of History in Education. 
 
 masses by dominant motives involve some 
 decree of error in every case. You admit, 
 moreover, that this double process of analysis 
 and of synthesis by means of which you 
 are to reach your conclusions is a very 
 delicate and difficult process, and necessarily 
 very slow. You confess that most modern 
 research is valuable rather for a somewhat 
 distant future — of which, again, you admit 
 that you know nothing — than for anything 
 that by any stretch we can call the present ; 
 and yet you ask me to admit that this 
 endless groping is the most profitable mode 
 of dealing with the human past. I deny 
 it altogether. The very most I can admit 
 is that it is not an altogether irrational 
 procedure. I admit that by long striving 
 and patience some large view of the human 
 past, some new light on the human present, 
 may eventually be attained. Let those 
 who work in this hope continue to work 
 if this hope be sufficient for them ; but I 
 must assert that your utmost possible at- 
 tainment in this direction, could it even be
 
 History as a Pageant. 85 
 
 realised at once, would not be of such value 
 to us as what can certainly be had by treat- 
 ing the past in a quite different manner 
 and spirit. As to the people of the far 
 future, like you, I know nothing. It is 
 possible that these people may care more 
 for attenuated but approximately correct 
 generalisations than for flesh and blood, 
 for the strivings and sufferings and tri- 
 umphs and strange adventures of individual 
 men and women. It is possible ; and, again, 
 it is possible that they will care for none 
 of these things. In any case, our present 
 efforts cannot be directed by their hypo- 
 thetical tastes. For my part I believe that 
 there is only one thing perennially valu- 
 able to humanity, and that is the human 
 creature, the unique creature, the individual 
 soul. The proper study of mankind is not 
 generalised masses of people, not man, but 
 men. We do not greatly care — this is the 
 essence of it — for anything that appeals to 
 the mere intellect. Human beings cannot 
 in the long-run be satisfied except by an
 
 86 Place of History in Education. 
 
 appeal to their total humanity. The intel- 
 lect is a mere instrument of the desires that 
 rule the world. The desire of humanity is for 
 the human. You ask us to look at human life 
 as a series of changes going on from genera- 
 tion to generation, changes of social and legal 
 structure, economic changes, moral changes, 
 political changes ; and you ask us to con- 
 fine ourselves to trying to establish causation 
 throughout the series. You condemn as 
 irrelevant to this precious business any 
 attention to the individual as such or to 
 any of those aspects of life which are most 
 attractive to humanity. You talk of the 
 tragic and of the comic as mere aspects of 
 things without real relations. But you 
 admit that your causal relations are also 
 only aspects of things, and, moreover, that 
 they appeal, in the main, only to the intel- 
 lect. Causation may, of course, be inter- 
 esting. One may like to know something 
 of processes — of how the English came to 
 be in India, of how the House of Lords 
 comes to be where it is. Such odd things
 
 History as a Pageant. 87 
 
 it is pleasing to know about. It is good to 
 know such things, and to be able to see 
 modern institutions and laws and customs 
 in the light of their origin. But we certainly 
 don't want only this sort of thing. What 
 we want in history is not so much the 
 causation of change in human life as the 
 human life itself. We want the warm breath- 
 ing things, the men and women in their 
 habits as they lived, with all their irrele- 
 vant passions about them. These are the 
 things we love for their own sake — that 
 is, for their correspondence with us. The 
 study of them enlarges and enriches our 
 personal life as no study of mere causation 
 ever can. We do not care very much why 
 Mary Stuart failed. We want to realise her 
 in imagination ; we want her point of view 
 rather than any analysis of the factors 
 which ruined her and which she herself 
 did not understand. To most people of 
 time past and present, at least, history is 
 a pageant, no less and no more. It is a 
 vast procession of human lives, fascinating
 
 88 Place of History in Education. 
 
 to us because of the likeness underlying 
 all the differences and because of the differ- 
 ences through which we see the likeness. 
 We want, to use an image of Macaulay's, to 
 travel in past time, as we want to travel in 
 strange countries. We want to see life. We 
 want to see it under conditions which we 
 can only reach through the good offices of 
 the historian ; to see strange customs and 
 costumes and strivings over ideals that are 
 strange. And we wish for an historian to 
 be our guide, philosopher, and friend, our 
 courier, our Baedeker to the past. History 
 is full of glorious stories, matter for terror 
 and pity, and matter for laughter and rejoic- 
 ing. The historian we desire is he who will 
 force us to realise all this. If he be an artist 
 we shall value him not only for what he 
 shows us but for his way of showing it, 
 for his suggestiveness and for his passion 
 and even for his moralisings and specula- 
 tions. We shall value him for what he is. 
 We shall delight, for the time, in loving 
 what he loves and in hating what he hates,
 
 History as a Pageant. 89 
 
 and never ask whether he be impartial or 
 no. And if you say that such tastes are 
 childish, we reply that, in the same sense, 
 the whole human race is very childish, and 
 that it will be long indeed ere it ceases 
 to be so, if it ever ceases to be so at all. 
 And if you ask what good we expect to 
 derive from this kind of history, we say it 
 is the same kind of good that one gets from 
 novels and from plays and poems, along 
 with an element of some importance, an 
 element of absolute fact and of true 
 human memories that is not in them. 
 We say, moreover, that pity is always good 
 and laughter is always good, and that any 
 uplifting or enlarging emotion is always 
 good. We do not live by ideas alone ; we 
 live also and in still deeper measure by 
 emotions : and certainly we do not live by 
 ideas of causation. In truth we live by 
 the imagination, and to enrich that and to 
 stimulate it healthily and at the same time 
 to keep it in touch with the realities of life, 
 this is the true function of history."
 
 90 Place of History in Education. 
 
 It is not necessary to analyse at all 
 minutely this farrago of statements. Certain 
 main facts concerning it seem to stand 
 out quite clearly. To begin with, there 
 are certain exaggerations involved in the 
 foregoing statement of the adverse case. 
 They might have been avoided ; they are 
 no essential part of the case itself; but 
 it was as well that they should be included, 
 for they are such as one frequently hears. 
 It is a gross as well as a pertinent exagger- 
 ation to say, or to imply, that the scientific 
 historian of the present day cannot hope 
 to attain for himself or bis generation any 
 real understanding of the past, or light 
 on the present. We have admitted nothing 
 of the sort. If it be true that the results 
 of much modern research are for the future 
 historian to use rather than for ourselves, 
 and if it be true that even all our con- 
 clusions may subsequently have to be modi- 
 fied, this by no means involves that we 
 can at present reach no conclusions of value. 
 We would rather say that we are already
 
 History as a Pageant. 91 
 
 in a position to reach many conclusions 
 of value, and even that we have reached 
 some. It may well be, indeed, that we 
 are hindered from reaching others and from 
 putting those already within our reach more 
 distinctly than we do, because historians 
 are not agreed about values and persist in 
 trying to extract too many kinds of value 
 from the past and so dissipate their energies 
 and confuse their results. 
 
 Again, to say that the theory of scientific 
 history asks people to look upon the past 
 life of humanity as a mere series of con- 
 nected changes is not so much an exag- 
 gerated as a false statement ; for you cannot 
 look at the past at all without seeing more 
 than that, and you cannot deal at all with 
 the changes of things without thinking of 
 the things themselves. You cannot write 
 of the building up of an empire without 
 studying much that is, in one sense, merely 
 incidental to the process and in another 
 is part of it. 
 
 But when we have said this much, we
 
 92 Place of History in Education. 
 
 must admit not only that there is truth 
 in the view which has been presented, but 
 even that, in a sense, it is altogether true. 
 So far as it expresses a genuine point of 
 view it is incontrovertible. We come down 
 to the unassailable personal feeling. It is 
 useless and absurd to tell any one that he 
 ought to like this rather than the other, 
 unless by your "ought" you mean some- 
 thing specifically reasonable. You are quite 
 right to tell a man that he will be a fool 
 to throw himself over a cliff, unless he 
 wants to be killed ; but if he does want 
 to be killed, your proposition goes to the 
 ground with him. There are a large number 
 of people who are not especially interested 
 in causation, but who are more or less in 
 love with life and like to see as much as 
 they can of it on many sides. The demand 
 of these people for a kind of history adapted 
 to their desires will certainly be met, partly 
 because the demand is so large that it 
 will more or less pay to answer it, and 
 partly because such people will themselves
 
 History as a Pageant. 93 
 
 write history as they like it to be written. 
 You have, in fact, demands for, roughly 
 speaking, two different kinds of history ; 
 and the historian, perhaps not quite know- 
 ing what he wants himself, or sympathising 
 with both demands, or wishing to please 
 as many people as possible, is led to write 
 now as a scientific student, now as a moral- 
 ist, now as an artist in the dramatic or 
 the picturesque, now as a guide to a 
 museum of curiosities, — with the nonde- 
 script sort of results that we get. 
 
 We may be led, at this point, to ask 
 how far this demand for pictures of human 
 life, for imaginative or simply realistic treat- 
 ment of the past as a pageant of miscel- 
 laneous attractiveness, is justified in reason ; 
 but there is, surely, no question. To assert 
 that this demand is unreasonable would be 
 absurd ; and perhaps you could hardly do 
 the cause of scientific history more harm 
 than by making such an assertion. To 
 assert, for instance, that Carlyle's great 
 pictorial and humorous sermon on the
 
 94 Place of History in Education. 
 
 French Revolution is of little or no value, 
 because the sermon is not analytic and 
 gives only the vaguest and most inade- 
 quate idea of the causes of the great catas- 
 trophe, because it emphasises a few features 
 and utterly neglects others to the destruction 
 of all right proportion, this would be mon- 
 strously wrong. The value of a sermon does 
 not lie in its text. Even though the text 
 be finer than anything in the sermon, yet 
 the discourse is the thing. To say that a 
 great artist, or a great humourist, or a 
 prophet, cannot use historical material to 
 any fine purpose would be to talk down- 
 right nonsense. We want all of such work 
 that we can get. And if any one says that 
 this is the very finest way of using his- 
 torical material, and that, as has been said, 
 the finest of English historians are Shake- 
 speare and Scott, that may be undeniably 
 true from his point of view. 
 
 But the difference between this kind of 
 history and the other kind must be clearly
 
 History as a Pageant. 95 
 
 understood. What Shakespeare gives us is 
 not, from the scientific point of view, his- 
 tory at all. It is pure pageantry, and not 
 even realistic pageantry considered histori- 
 cally. It deals with individuals and their 
 fortunes, and the fact that some of these 
 individuals happen to be kings is nothing 
 to the purpose. It creates an atmosphere 
 regardless of any correspondence between 
 that atmosphere and that of the real 
 historic personages it includes. Its back- 
 ground is arbitrary or vague, and its back- 
 ground includes almost everything with 
 which the scientific historian has to deal. 
 It has nothing whatever to say to social 
 development. It is capable of writing a 
 history of the reign of King John without 
 even mentioning the Great Charter ; because, 
 when you come to look at it, the Great 
 Charter is not dramatic. Yet if any 
 one says that he finds more profit in 
 Shakespeare's Henry IV. than in any con- 
 ceivable analysis of that monarch's actual
 
 96 Place of History in Education. 
 
 position and relations, what more is there 
 to be said ? There is this to be said. At 
 the risk of being taken to be as stupid 
 as the mathematician who, after reading 
 Paradise Lost, inquired what it proved, we 
 must point out that Shakespeare proves 
 nothing. True, he has not tried to prove 
 anything ; but that is just the point — that 
 he has not tried. It is probably impossible 
 to frame any tolerable definition of history, 
 except from the scientific point of view. All 
 other kinds of history are written from a 
 point of view which is that of the natural 
 man and which varies with each writer. 
 But we reach here to a fundamental differ- 
 ence. The scientific historian must always 
 be trying to prove something : the other 
 kinds of historians are not. The value of 
 the scientific historian's analysis of Henry 
 IV. 's position depends upon the degree in 
 which it helps to explain other things. It 
 will help, let us say, towards an explanation 
 of the Wars of the Roses. In any case it 
 is only as an explanation that it has any
 
 History as a Pageant. 97 
 
 value at all. But Shakespeare's treatment 
 of the matter, however diversely suggestive, 
 establishes nothing, explains nothing, and 
 is intended to meet a demand totally distinct 
 from the demand for explanations.
 
 9 8 
 
 VII. 
 
 OF RECONCILIATION. 
 
 The attempt to reconcile the logically in- 
 compatible has always at once entertained, 
 and to some extent practically profited, 
 humanity. The inconsistent desires of man- 
 kind require such a procedure. When two 
 theories are hopelessly opposed, it may well 
 be that, by working on both, we may 
 obtain desirable results impossible to con- 
 sistency. 
 
 How far is any reconciliation possible 
 between the two views of history which 
 have been presented ? It seems fairly obvious 
 that ideally they cannot be reconciled at 
 all. Either you desire to prove something 
 or you do not ; either you are bent on
 
 Of Reconciliation. 99 
 
 studying causation for the sake of under- 
 standing actual development or you are not. 
 Moreover, you cannot really be doing this 
 and something else at the same time, how- 
 ever much you may wish to do so. You 
 can analyse your phenomena with a view 
 to explanation on one page and treat the 
 same phenomena as picturesque or dramatic 
 or what not on the next. But the one page 
 is unnecessary to the other; one or the 
 other, or both, if you please, are of the nature 
 of digressions. It must be observed, too, 
 that while the tragic and the comic and the 
 ethical are closely interlinked with each other 
 in the nature of the human sou], they are 
 not essentially interlinked with causation. 
 You may write with a double or treble 
 purpose, but they remain distinct. They 
 are in no sense reconciled by merely co- 
 existing. And from their co-existence all 
 your purposes, all your effects, are likely 
 to suffer. Shakespeare does not make the 
 mistake of bothering us with a discussion 
 of Henry IV. 's financial position or of the
 
 ioo Place of History in Education. 
 
 resources of the Percies on the eve of the 
 battle of Shrewsbury. 
 
 If the subject-matter of history be treated 
 as a miscellaneous pageant, history becomes 
 something far more nearly allied to the 
 novel than to any scientific study. It is 
 impressionistic art or it is antiquarianism and 
 deals in curios, or it is simply biography 
 in a complicated form. Its value will 
 then be as miscellaneous as that of all 
 museums, picture-galleries, plays, poems, and 
 novels taken together. It is hard to see 
 what can be gained by attempting to 
 unite this kind of history with the other. 
 It is impossible really to unite them, and 
 what is gained by sandwiching your scientific 
 discussions with bits of impressionism is not 
 manifest. The task of the scientific historian 
 as such is quite big enough for any one. It 
 seems as though he must inevitably lose 
 threads and confuse himself and even fail 
 to hold his main purpose clearly before 
 himself if he attempts not only to analyse 
 and state causal relations but tries also to
 
 Of Reconciliation. 101 
 
 act as an exponent of the human comedy 
 generally. We ought not to expect the one 
 mind to do the two things. In the first 
 chapter of his ' History of Civilisation in 
 England,' Buckle remarked that the higher 
 kind of scientific mind had never taken up 
 history. It might be said that the higher 
 kind of poetic mind has only rarely touched 
 it. How far these assertions are true it is, 
 happily, needless to inquire ; but any truth 
 there may be in them is probably partly 
 due to the fact that, at least till recently, 
 the historian has been expected to combine 
 the incompatible. What we still want is a 
 much more distinct division of labour. 
 We want the artist for the sake of his 
 artistry and the expert guide because all 
 intelligent people are more or less col- 
 lectors of curiosities. It might, indeed, be 
 said that we want the poet and the prophet 
 to supplement the work of the scientific 
 historian. The scientific historian himself 
 will want history written from other points 
 of view and with other objects than his
 
 102 Place of History in Education, 
 
 own ; because such history will frequently be 
 suggestive and helpful to him. But what, 
 above all, we want is to see the two things as 
 distinct, and to conceive of scientific history 
 as a thing logically complete in itself. It 
 once the distinction be fully and generally 
 realised, the further division of labour will 
 come. It is useless to say that the scientific 
 historian should never on any account drop into 
 poetry or moralising. But if he realise what 
 his main purpose is and pursue it honestly, 
 then he will always know that in dropping 
 into poetry he is yielding to temptation, and 
 he will yield only rarely unless he be alto- 
 gether of the wicked. On the other hand, 
 those who write history from some personal 
 point of view should feel themselves far more 
 free and do their business much better for 
 realising that they are not expected to give 
 explanations as such or to deal with things 
 merely because they are important from a 
 scientific point of view. It must be of 
 advantage to an artist to know that he may 
 write about King John without reference
 
 Of Reconciliation. 103 
 
 to the Great Charter. It is probable that 
 Carlyle would have done still better than 
 he did had he clearly known that he was 
 writing a sermon. The artist who deals in 
 history cannot, of course, be quite free. He 
 cannot have the freedom of a novelist. 
 He is not bound to explain more than his 
 artistic purpose requires him to explain ; he 
 is not bound to be exhaustive ; he is not 
 bound — he may even be bound not — to 
 argue : but he is bound not deliberately to 
 mislead. The more closely he stands by 
 fact the better. In some ways, perhaps, he 
 will be even more meticulously accurate 
 than the scientific historian, from whose 
 point of view so many things are of no 
 account. But the artist is not bound even 
 to refer to anything which is of no account 
 to him. He must be all the more scrupu- 
 lous. If he desires to invent, let him become 
 a novelist. There is clearly no excuse for 
 him if he perverts knowledge and yet calls 
 himself an historian in any sense. If he be 
 half-historian, half-novelist, he can gain little,
 
 104 Place of History in Education. 
 
 if anything, from his historical basis. He 
 will, rather, destroy it. Yet while he re- 
 nounces the freedom of the novelist his 
 work will gain a certain charm and 
 a certain point which the novelist can 
 never obtain. The records of the past are 
 a practically inexhaustible storehouse of 
 every kind of interest. Just as scientific 
 history has suffered by pursuit of what is 
 irrelevant to its purpose, so also has artistic 
 history. We may look forward to far more 
 splendid historical romance than we have 
 ever yet had, except from Shakespeare. 
 
 It is needless to expatiate on this point. 
 We have now to some extent cleared the 
 ground, and can face the question of the 
 teaching of history as part of the education 
 of the more or less young mind. What 
 kind of history is it that we are to teach ? 
 Are we to teach history as a science, or 
 are we to teach it, primarily, from some 
 personal point of view ? Or are we to try 
 to combine the two things ? Even though 
 we admit that history cannot satisfactorily 

 
 Of Reconciliation. 105 
 
 be written from the scientific point of view 
 and from some other at the same time, it 
 does not follow that a teacher of young 
 people should be strictly scientific or strictly 
 unscientific. The teacher may prefer to give 
 glimpses of both ways of regarding and 
 treating the past. The answers we give to 
 these questions necessarily depend on our 
 ideal of what education should effect.
 
 io6 
 
 VIII. 
 
 OF EDUCATION. 
 
 Befoke one can get to grips with the ques- 
 tions, What sort of history are we to teach 
 and how are we to teach it? certain pre- 
 vious questions must receive some sort of 
 answer. Why do we want to teach history 
 at all ? is the first of such questions to 
 confront us ; and this runs up into a larger 
 question, Why do we want to teach 
 anything ? 
 
 Now in answer to this it might at once 
 be said, " We want to teach certain things 
 because they are practically useful." It is 
 worth while to consider this answer in order 
 clearly to establish, at the outset, a necessary 
 distinction. " Education," broadly speaking, 
 is of two kinds. There is, necessarily, a
 
 Of Education. 107 
 
 deal of teaching which is based on the 
 desire of people to have themselves or 
 their children taught things which, they 
 suppose, will be practically useful to 
 them. 
 
 There has always been teaching of this 
 kind among men, and was before men were 
 human, as there is now among the animals. 
 But we have to ask what "practical useful- 
 ness " means. If a man wants to be a doctor 
 or a lawyer or a chemist or attache to an 
 embassy, and cannot become one without 
 passing an examination, he must have teach- 
 ing to enable him to pass, and such teaching, 
 it will be generally admitted, is "practically 
 useful" to him. Again, to teach a child to 
 read and write is admittedly to impart 
 "practically useful" arts. But what con- 
 stitutes the practical usefulness in these 
 cases ? Why does one say that the learning 
 of carpentry is practically useful and the 
 learning of Greek of no practical use? It 
 might be hastily answered that carpentry 
 and reading and writing are of assistance in
 
 108 Place of History in Education. 
 
 earning one's living, whereas Greek . . . 
 But the matter is not so simple as that. 
 People, for instance, talk of acquiring the 
 French language as a practically useful thing 
 to do. Yet in most cases ability to speak 
 French does not help towards earning a 
 living. It will help one to travel comfort- 
 ably in certain parts of Europe : it may, 
 perhaps, help one to understand the menu 
 card of an hotel. These things also are 
 conceived of as practical uses,. It becomes 
 clear that the common quality of all this 
 " practical usefulness " consists in ability to 
 do some definite thing which it is assumed 
 that we shall, or at least may, want to do. 
 Now this is also the distinguishing char- 
 acter of what is called "technical" educa- 
 tion. We reach the conclusion that the 
 teaching of French as a language to use 
 in travel or for social purposes is just as 
 much technical education as the teaching of 
 carpentry or cookery. In putting the matter 
 thus we are giving an extension to the 
 term technical education as it is ordinarily
 
 Of Education. 109 
 
 used. But it appears to be quite a logical 
 extension. 
 
 Evidently there is a radical difference 
 between this kind of education and the 
 education which is simply a training of the 
 mind in power and in knowledge. This 
 radical difference may, perhaps, be stated 
 thus. "Technical" teaching is that which 
 helps the individual as such to do something 
 he will presumably wish to do ; and it looks 
 no further. But teaching of the higher, or 
 at least of the other, kind looks beyond 
 the individual, and aims not so much at 
 fitting him to do things for himself as at 
 fitting him to do things that concern every 
 one, and that concern the future of humanity. 
 It is, one might say, a distinction between 
 education from the private and personal 
 point of view and education from the point 
 of view of society or of the race. 
 
 Now it is only with education in this 
 latter and larger sense that the historical 
 teacher can seriously be concerned. For the 
 amount nf " pra-p-tina l usefulness " _to be got
 
 no Place of History in Education. 
 
 out of the teaching of history is really 
 minute. No doubt it may enable you to 
 understand a certain number of references 
 in books, newspapers, and conversation that 
 otherwise would be quite dark. It may 
 possibly enable you to understand why a 
 certain class of people engaged in our edu- 
 cational controversies are called " Crom- 
 wellians." It may throw a humorous gleam 
 on some picture in the Royal Academy. It 
 should certainly help you to appreciate the 
 value of political references to "feudalism" 
 and of much current talk about the " lessons 
 of history." Possibly these, in their small 
 way, are practical values. Any real know- 
 ledge of history will certainly help you to 
 take a rational view of current politics and 
 of social and economic questions of the 
 moment. But is this of " practical " value ? 
 If you are to be a professional politician it 
 may be doubted whether a knowledge of 
 history will not be a positive hindrance to 
 your career. Your references, your argu- 
 ments drawn from history, will be much
 
 Of Education. 1 1 1 
 
 more sharply pointed if you know next to 
 nothing about it than they can be if you 
 have any true appreciation of the elusive, 
 complex reality. And if you have attained 
 to the scientific point of view in matters 
 historical, you will certainly never fit in 
 nicely with any political party. So that, 
 on the whole, we may conclude that the 
 teaching of history can never to any serious 
 extent become a part of technical education. 
 Our questions, Why do we want to teach 
 history ? and Why do we want to teach 
 anything? must be considered without any 
 reference at all to that kind of education. 
 We do not want to t_ ejich_Jiistory in order 
 to enable people to understand journalistic 
 allu sions . 
 
 When we consider the amount that is 
 talked and written about education nowa- 
 days, and the mass of literature that has 
 developed about the subject in the last 
 hundred years, it might seem that this 
 question, Why do we want to teach any- 
 thing ? should be easy to answer. But
 
 1 1 2 Place of History in Education. 
 
 though we have made considerable improve- 
 ments in the art of teaching this and that, 
 there is still no approach to a general 
 agreement as to what we should teach or 
 what the object of academic training should 
 be. We are, perhaps, agreed that it is 
 good, as far as it goes, to teach " practically 
 useful " things. Thereabouts our agreement 
 ceases. Even about that we do not really 
 agree at all. The claims of the practically 
 useful conflict, more or less, with the claims 
 of education of the other sort ; and there 
 can be no real agreement till these claims 
 are adjusted. But with " technical educa- 
 tion" we are not now concerned at all. 
 As soon as we pass beyond its sphere of 
 influence we enter chaos, — or, at least, if 
 that be exaggeration, we enter a region in 
 which disagreement is far more positive than 
 agreement. When we disagree concerning 
 the ideals of education in the larger sense 
 we disagree definitely and irreconcilably : 
 when we agree we become vague. In fact 
 this question, Why do we want to teach
 
 Of Education. 1 1 3 
 
 anything ? involving, as it does, this other, 
 What do we want to teach ? is really of 
 very great difficulty. Perhaps, after all, 
 we shall find that no answer is possible. 
 
 Yet we must try to reach some kind of 
 answer, and to that end we had best begin 
 by narrowing the question. We must be 
 careful not to make it too narrow or we 
 shall find we have not room enough to 
 stand. But, bearing in mind that our main 
 object at present is to find an answer to 
 the question, Why do we want to teach 
 history ? and that the teaching of history 
 must needs be scholastic, w r e need not be 
 thinking of education in the largest sense : 
 we may confine our view, so far as that 
 is possible, to scholastic education. 
 [ Scholastic education resolves itself into the 
 teaching of a number of different subjects 
 by persons supposed to be more or less 
 specially qualified to teach them. What- 
 ever be the aim of the teaching as a 
 whole, it takes the form of instruction 
 given in different subjects. One of the 
 
 h
 
 1 1 4 Place of History in Education. 
 
 subjects so taught is something or other 
 called "History." Obviously, before we can 
 decide how best to deal with this particu- 
 lar subject, we must have a clear notion of 
 the ideal connection of all the subjects 
 that are taught. If there be no such con- 
 nection, if there be no definable aim of all 
 this instruction as a whole, then, indeed, 
 our question has no answer. In that case 
 we are teaching history, as we are teaching 
 all other subjects, because it is the custom 
 to do so, or because some persons, some- 
 where, in authority, for some mysterious 
 and necessarily insufficient reason, think that 
 it ought to be done. 
 
 In that case it does not matter what 
 meaning we give to the word " history " or 
 how we treat the subject, so long as these 
 authorities are satisfied. That is to say 
 that it does not matter except to ourselves ; 
 and that is to say that it does not matter 
 at all. 
 
 Already we are in danger of ambiguity. 
 We have been speaking of the " higher "
 
 Of Education. 1 1 5 
 
 education as though it were a simple thing, 
 and even as though it were concerned only 
 with the intellect. But we cannot narrow 
 down our question as much as that. Edu- 
 cation must needs be moral as well as in- 
 tellectual, if only because it cannot possibly 
 avoid being both. But, however close may 
 be the connection in reality of moral 
 and intellectual training, they are ideally 
 separable, and for the sake of clearness it 
 will be best to separate them. For the 
 present we will confine our attention to 
 the question of the education of the intel- 
 ligence merely. 
 
 If we had a definite system of education 
 established here in England, if we had even 
 a definite theory, however unsystematised 
 our scholastic apparatus might be, there 
 would be a way of escape from our diffi- 
 culties. We could take the established 
 theory as a basis and refuse to question 
 it. Our procedure would not be at all 
 philosophic ; but it would be immediately 
 practical. As things are we are in no
 
 u6 Place of History in Education. 
 
 danger; for, in fact, we have neither system 
 nor theory. Our scholastic apparatus is an 
 unco-ordinated jumble of institutions new 
 and old, working, apparently, on different 
 theories as to the end in view. And this 
 unsystematised system is rendered the more 
 chaotic by the interference of different ex- 
 amining boards existing for different sorts 
 of purposes, and by the interference of local 
 authorities and even of religious sects, with 
 purposes only partially educational or not 
 educational at all. It is clear that we can 
 find no practicable foothold in this welter. 
 The thirteenth century may be said to have 
 had a theory of education, and the seven- 
 teenth century may be said to have had 
 a theory. We have fragments of conflicting 
 systems. The old systems have broken down 
 and the new one is not yet made : we 
 are trying to make it. Much thought and 
 energy is being given to the work, though, 
 unfortunately, a good deal of the energy 
 is supplied by people with quite uneduca- 
 tional ends to serve. We are going through
 
 Of Education. 1 17 
 
 the throes of a birth, perhaps, but the 
 conditions are not entirely healthy. No 
 one knows that the result may not be a 
 thing still-born, or a thing monstrous, or a 
 thing diseased. 
 
 We are all convinced of the value of the 
 higher education, and not one of us knows 
 what this higher education should do. But 
 this statement is false ; we are not all con- 
 vinced. Thousands of us, I should rather 
 say millions of us, are not convinced that 
 education other than "technical" has any 
 value at all. And there is no hope of 
 these millions ever being convinced until we 
 who are so agree about the main things. 
 Each one of us who is interested in the 
 matter must think the thing out for him- 
 self. There is no tradition, there is no 
 authority, on which we can shuffle off our 
 responsibility. 
 
 We agree, one may suppose, to regard 
 scholastic education as having for its end 
 the training of the mind and the imparting 
 of knowledge. Training is intellectual, or
 
 u8 Place of History in Education. 
 
 it is moral, or it is aesthetic. For the 
 sake of simplification we put aside for the 
 present the two latter kinds of training. 
 What do we want our schooling to do for 
 us intellectually ? What is our idea of an 
 intellectually thoroughly educated young 
 person? Must the outlines of that young 
 person remain for ever dim ? 
 
 It is, first of all, a question of essentials. 
 It is mere matter of necessity that we 
 should start with the assertion of some far- 
 reaching principle. What do we want our 
 schools to do for us intellectually ? The 
 question is surely put too narrowly. The 
 question rather is, What do we want our 
 schools to do not for us but for humanity 
 and for the future ? And to the question 
 put thus there seems to be a sort of answer. 
 \We want our schools to lay for the next 
 generation the foundations of sound thinking. 
 
 Possibly no one is more painfully aware 
 than the present writer how monstrously 
 large are the assumptions implied in this 
 assertion. To his mind, at least, it implies
 
 Of Education. 1 19 
 
 that sound thinking is a thing absolutely 
 necessary for the final salvation of human 
 society. It implies that man does not yet 
 know the things that belong to his peace. 
 It implies that a right educational system 
 will be concerned somewhat less with the 
 actual children in its schools than with their 
 children and their grandchildren. All these 
 propositions are disputable, and it is im- 
 possible to discuss them here. These things 
 must be assumed for the moment if we are 
 to make any further headway, and, it is 
 to be feared, others also. Even to state 
 clearly all the assumptions involved in our 
 proposition as to the end of scholastic edu- 
 cation on its intellectual side would involve 
 a long process. On the other hand, if we 
 are to assume nothing it is certain that we 
 shall never move at all. The assumption 
 that sound thinking is the right end of the 
 educational process on its intellectual side 
 has a fair and reasonable appearance. It 
 may be disputed or even disproved, but it 
 seems to throw the burden of disproof on
 
 1 20 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the other side. It is at least possible that 
 modern Europe may come in time to accept 
 it, and, practically, it seems as though it 
 might provide a basis for an educational 
 system. At least we may make the as- 
 sumption as a working hypothesis, and see 
 where it will take us. 
 
 It is clearly a question of training, first 
 of all, rather than of knowledge. How do 
 we want the intelligence to be trained with 
 a view to sound thinking? Put in this 
 way the question does not seem a very 
 difficult one to answer. We cannot make 
 the intellect a master, but we want to make 
 it as efficient a servant as it can be for all 
 purposes, and especially for the purpose of 
 thinking its way through the difficulties of 
 humanity. To enable it to become this 
 efficient servant we must, first of all, secure 
 for it fair play. Far from being an easy 
 thing to do, this is a thing that, under 
 present conditions, cannot possibly be com- 
 pletely done. It means that we have to 
 try to free the intelligence from presump-
 
 Of Education. 121 
 
 tions and prejudices, however generated, 
 and from all conventional modes of thought, 
 as such. We have to help it to distinguish 
 quite clearly between what it knows and 
 what it does not know, between what can 
 be in some sense or degree demonstrated 
 for it and what it has merely been told to 
 believe. We have to help it to free itself 
 from the complex entanglements of circum- 
 stance — to free itself from the hypnotism 
 of surrounding opinion. We have to lift 
 it out of its habitual plane. Every one 
 starts in a peculiar mental atmosphere of 
 his own, more or less stuffy and unhealthy, 
 and the elements of that atmosphere are 
 the opinions or mental habits of the 
 people immediately surrounding him. These 
 close him in as barriers. In that atmos- 
 phere his opinions tend to form automati- 
 cally and sub - consciously. We have to 
 break down those barriers and let in fresh 
 air. It will be hard work. Orthodoxies of 
 all sorts, class interests and instincts, social 
 conventions, parents and guardians, fight on
 
 122 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the other side. Only let us know what we 
 have to do. 
 
 But this is not all. Freedom of the in- 
 tellect involves more than mere emancipa- 
 tion from habit and early associations. It 
 involves honesty. This is not to say that 
 a person intellectual^ emancipated must 
 needs be morally honest. There is, perhaps, 
 not any reason why he should be ; but in- 
 tellectual honesty he must have. Not only 
 must he never wilfully shut his eyes — that 
 is downright lying — but he must keep them 
 very wide open. He must never gloss over 
 difficulties, or allow himself the anarchic 
 licence of a special pleader. He must never 
 tell himself that he knows what he does not 
 know. It is not a question of what he tells 
 other people. A conscious lie told to other 
 people, so long as it is fully conscious, will 
 not touch the freedom of his intelligence 
 unless, at least, it be very often repeated. 
 But he must never lie to himself, nor must 
 he tell himself half-truths. He will have to 
 keep a sharp watch on himself to see that
 
 Of Education. 1 23 
 
 he does not, for the brain of man is deceitful 
 and desperately wicked. 
 
 Yet more is required. The intelligence 
 must be freed, as far as possible, from 
 emotional disturbance. Emotional disturb- 
 ance arises when a man feels his whole being 
 concerned in the question he is considering. 
 He does not look at the thing with his in- 
 telligence only; he looks at it as though 
 he were part of it and becomes excited. It 
 may, indeed, be that he is part of it. 
 Nevertheless we want to detach the reason- 
 ing powers from the emotions, and from all 
 that is simply personal. We want to train 
 the mind to approach all questions as 
 though they had for it no personal bearing, 
 and that whether they have such bearing 
 or no. 
 
 This emancipation of the intelligence 
 should, it seems, be the primary aim of 
 intellectual training. Other things will 
 follow and go along with that. We want 
 to develop the power, and equally the habit, 
 of thinking in averages, in maxima and
 
 124 Place of History in Education. 
 
 minima, in masses and in centuries. We 
 want to develop a sense of the interde- 
 pendence of all branches of knowledge. We 
 want a sense of the complexity of every 
 question needing serious consideration. We 
 want to develop a power of suspending 
 judgment. l We want to make it easy and 
 even habitual to suspend judgment. )/' We 
 want to make it absolutely impossible to 
 hold opinions based on grossly insufficient 
 knowledge of the facts. We want a habit 
 of thinking of conclusions as more or less 
 probable rather than as true or untrue. 
 We want to develop a realistic imagination 
 of the number of different views that may 
 be held on almost any really complex 
 question. We want a logical habit and 
 we want an analytic habit. 
 
 All this seems to some of us mere matter 
 of course. It is, perhaps, of some special 
 importance to note that we want, further, 
 a training in the medium and means of 
 thought — that is, in language. We have 
 to train our young minds in the use and
 
 Of Education. 125 
 
 in the sense of words. '. Accurate thinking 
 and the accurate use of words must needs 
 go together. But there is no such thing 
 as perfectly accurate use of words, because 
 the great mass of words have not perfectly 
 exact meanings. "Words which represent 
 things are like things in this, that they are 
 vague at their edges. It is not a matter 
 of their being frayed by use, though of 
 course this happens also. In truth they 
 have no absolute outline. They shade off 
 into each other as things do. Because of 
 this and because of the weight of associa- 
 tion every word carries, words mean, at 
 best, slightly different things to different 
 minds. We want, therefore, to fill our 
 young minds with the sense of this elusive 
 quality of words, because we must recognise 
 the inexactness of our own thought before 
 we can get it as exact as it may be. 
 The study of language will help us greatly 
 in this as well as in other respects. One 
 language supplements another, not so much 
 by providing wholly untranslatable words
 
 126 Place of History in Education. 
 
 as by bringing out the non- equivalence of 
 roughly equivalent words. 
 
 When we consider how far from perfect in 
 intellectual freedom and honesty even the 
 best of us is, we may be inclined to declare 
 that these demands are preposterous. But 
 we can demand no less ; for nothing less 
 will in the long - run serve. To set the 
 feet of our children on the way of intel- 
 lectual freedom, that is the best we can 
 hope to do, but we must try to do that. 
 We are an ignorant, untrained, undisciplined 
 generation. But we are not all of us so 
 untrained and so ignorant as not to see 
 where we fail, as not to see something at 
 least of what it is our children require to 
 make them more competent than we are. 
 The future lies folded in them, and for 
 us they are the future. All our political 
 questions, all our social questions, relate 
 to them and are for them to answer. 
 We cannot see our way through the 
 tangle. All we can hope to do is to 
 set our children on the right road. We
 
 Of Erfuca Hon . 127 
 
 cannot even do that, but we may make 
 a beginning. The difficulty of these first 
 steps is indeed enormous. It is not so 
 much with the children as with the teachers. 
 We ourselves are the difficulty. The teach- 
 ing profession has to become a priesthood, 
 and we are none of us worthy, no, not one. 
 We are neither honest enough nor pure 
 enough for this work. But if only we can 
 recognise what we have to do, that recogni- 
 tion will itself be the first step. 
 
 We have said the least that can be said 
 concerning what is required for intellectual 
 training, and we come now to the question 
 of knowledge. What is that knowledge 
 which we are to regard as part of the 
 equipment every man and woman now needs 
 as a foundation for sound thinking ? The 
 human race has now been living on this 
 planet for a considerable time, and there 
 are a number of things important to us as 
 intellectual beings about which we have 
 acquired some positive knowledge. Let us 
 put the matter quite broadly. May we
 
 1 28 Place of History in Education. 
 
 not say that we want our youth to start 
 by knowing where they are? We want 
 them to start with at least a clear notion 
 of how much knowledge of vital things we 
 possess. We want them to start equipped 
 with the main conclusions that have been 
 reached about these things, and with the 
 main implications and bearings of these 
 conclusions clearly in mind. But at this 
 point some one will ask, " What are the 
 vital things?" The question has an ugly 
 look, but some sort of answer must be 
 given. There are people who will say, 
 " This and that are the only vitally im- 
 portant things, and about them we know 
 all we need know." And there are others, 
 perhaps, who will say, " Yes, these are 
 the really vital things, and about them we 
 know nothing whatever." Need we concern 
 ourselves with these people? We certainly 
 will not concern ourselves with them in 
 this place if we can help it. Yet 
 perhaps we may make a qualified admis- 
 sion to the effect that this also we have
 
 Of Education. 1 29 
 
 to learn precisely, what the vital things 
 are. 
 
 One thing is certain : that we cannot 
 begin, as we might logically wish to begin, 
 with the very groundwork of thought. 
 There is just this objection to a demand 
 that we should go straight to the heart of 
 things and begin by considering pure being, 
 that it cannot actually be done. About 
 ultimate things we have reached no con- 
 clusion unless it be a conclusion that we 
 can know nothing. Will any one say that 
 therefore we have no real knowledge at 
 all? In a sense that proposition is true. 
 It is a truth that concerns us as intellectual 
 beings, but it is not a truth that concerns 
 directly the mass of the activities of life 
 or of thought. It is to this mass of our 
 vital activities that education has to be 
 adjusted. We should not desire, even if it 
 were possible to do so, to educate the 
 intellect into a condition of pure intellectu- 
 ality. 1 We desire, above all, to educate the 
 intellect as an instrument of thought in
 
 130 Place of History in Education. 
 
 our vital relations. We have to teach it 
 to seek and to apprehend such truth as it 
 can apprehend. NWe have to free it and 
 to purge it of passion and of superstition. 
 We have to widen its view and strengthen 
 its grip as much as possible, because such 
 advance as man can make will depend, 
 in the long-run, mainly on its strength 
 and its lucidity. Such advance is in no 
 way dependent on our capacity to appre- 
 hend the ultimate. 
 
 It is not, of course, a question of what 
 any particular person may happen to want 
 to know. It is not a question of any 
 developed and individual preference. It is 
 a question of what man as an intellectual 
 and as a social being requires to know. 
 The human mind is engaged in the ex- 
 ploration of the universe. It is seeking to 
 understand its own relation to what it calls 
 the universe. It has reached certain con- 
 clusions about its own place in nature, and 
 certain notions of what this world is, what 
 stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, and so
 
 Of Education. 131 
 
 on. We want scholastically to teach these 
 things to our young people. We must not 
 teach what we do not know, but we must 
 teach the most far-reaching, the most eman- 
 cipating things that we do know. Our 
 young people want, therefore, some at 
 least of the main conclusions and implica- 
 tions of physics and chemistry, geology, 
 and astronomy, and evolutionary biology. 
 They want a clear notion of the surface 
 of this planet, and of the working of wind 
 and rain and tide. They want language 
 and mathematics, mainly, perhaps, for the 
 sake of training in thought. How much 
 in each case they will require of these 
 things is a question that only experience 
 can answer. But they want also, I think, 
 history, and in connection with history, 
 Political and Social Philosophy. When we 
 have equipped our youth with a realisation 
 of what all this signifies, with a definite 
 notion not only of conclusions but of the 
 manner in which they have been reached, 
 and when we have trained their intelligence
 
 132 Place of History in Education. 
 
 into freedom and right method, then, and 
 not till then, shall we be able fairly to 
 say that we are an intellectually educated 
 people. We shall have laid the necessary 
 foundations for sound thinking. 
 
 A few words must be added concerning 
 the question of what moral training a rightly 
 organised educational system would give. 
 The question cannot be ignored by any 
 teacher. Moral training is inseparable from 
 intellectual training, and, at least in many 
 subjects, moral teaching is inseparable from 
 instruction. Every human deed has a moral 
 value, and in every little reference to such 
 deeds lurks a moral valuation. The teacher 
 of history must continually be dealing 
 directly, however impersonally, with the 
 moral judgments of others. Yet it is only 
 indirectly that the teacher of history as 
 such is concerned with the business of moral 
 training, and we are not therefore bound, 
 in this place, to consider the question fully. 
 
 Many persons appear to imagine that 
 while grave doubt may exist as to the
 
 Of Education. 133 
 
 right subjects of scholastic instruction, there 
 can be no serious doubt as to what is re- 
 quired morally. But such agreement as 
 actually exists on this question appears to 
 be merely superficial. We are really agreed 
 only on the truism that it is a useful thing 
 to inculcate useful habits. The general ques- 
 tion is, in fact, monstrously difficult, and 
 any theory on the subject involves a 
 philosophy of life. We know, or think we 
 know, within narrow limits, how we desire 
 the intelligence to be trained and what 
 is the knowledge most vital for thought. 
 We do not know with equal accuracy what 
 moral training is wanted. Logical process 
 is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
 The facts of nature alter not at all, or so 
 slowly that the human mind only with 
 effort becomes conscious of their increasing 
 change. But the moral standards and values 
 of that mind change far more rapidly. And 
 not only do they change with the genera- 
 tions, but they vary from one person to 
 another. Humanity is not at present ade-
 
 134 Place of History in Education. 
 
 quate to any coherent system of moral 
 training. We do not know exactly what 
 we want, still less do we know exactly 
 what the future requires of us. In the 
 present state of the world, at least, there 
 is not one best moral type but many types 
 that are fine, and many more than we, 
 perhaps, are inclined to recognise. 
 
 Yet we are not in utter darkness, and we 
 must work by such light as we have. We 
 know what we do not want better, perhaps, 
 than what we want ; but at least we know 
 something of both. We can see that it 
 is mainly a question of training the imagin- 
 ation, — a very delicate business, and requiring 
 a great honesty. We can see that some 
 mental habits are healthy and others un- 
 healthy. |'We believe that everything that 
 makes for" co-operation, for sympathy, for 
 self-respect, and for respect for all living 
 things, for largeness of purpose and steadi- 
 ness in pursuit, is good. We are sure that 
 everything that makes for personal greed, 
 for sensuality and sloth, for pettiness of
 
 Of Education. 135 
 
 purpose, is bad. How much a scholastic 
 system may do to develop the good and 
 eliminate the evil we do not know, for we 
 have not yet tried. 
 
 For the rest we can, of course, inculcate 
 useful and discourage detrimental habits. 
 This appears to be what most people are 
 thinking of when they speak of moral train- 
 ing. But this is merely moral training on 
 its "technical" side. It is, strictly, a depart- 
 ment of technical education. It is a training 
 which will tend to enable a boy or a girl to 
 " get on " in life, and just so far as this 
 getting on is represented as the sufficient 
 purpose of the habit inculcated, the training 
 is immoral rather than positively " moral." 
 The habit of punctuality is, no doubt, an 
 excellent business habit ; but its inculcation 
 as such is certainly no part of the higher 
 educative process. 
 
 To have written this much about the 
 intellectual and moral aspects of education 
 with hardly a reference to aesthetics is, per- 
 haps, characteristically English. There are
 
 136 Place of History in Education. 
 
 those who would say that training of the 
 intellect and the moral sense are relatively 
 unimportant, and important chiefly as they 
 subserve aesthetic training. It is probably 
 true that a people trained and educated 
 intellectually, and rich in useful moral habits 
 and lucid moral notions, but lacking in a 
 sense of aesthetic values, would be in every 
 sense a dull people and in all the highest 
 things a sterile people. There is a certain 
 danger here, and every teacher in every 
 subject should have it in mind. But in this 
 place only two things need be said. To 
 begin with, it is certainly better not to follow 
 the example of the Emperor Joseph II. in 
 trying to take the second step before we 
 have taken the first. And finally, the ques- 
 tion how far the teacher of history is specifi- 
 cally concerned either with ethics or aesthetics 
 is a question to be considered later.
 
 i37 
 
 IX. 
 
 OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY. 
 
 We are now, at last, in a position to con- 
 sider the exact place of history in our 
 scheme of education. What amount and 
 what kind of historical knowledge is de- 
 manded for the young mind as part of the 
 basis of sound thinking which our educa- 
 tional agencies as a whole should combine 
 to supply ? Evidently, in speaking thus of 
 the " young mind," we are speaking not of 
 the child of fifteen but rather of the 3 7 oung 
 person of full legal age or thereabout. 
 Quite obviously a child of fifteen cannot 
 have acquired more than the beginnings of 
 a foundation for the superstructure of 
 thought, even though, if the educative 
 process stop at that age, the foundations
 
 138 Place of History in Education. 
 
 laid may be sound and will be valuable in 
 proportion to the goodness of their material. 
 Evidently, too, we are not thinking merely 
 of our present national schools. It will 
 take all the time of all our scholastic 
 apparatus, up to and including the universi- 
 ties, adequately to lay our required founda- 
 tions. At present this apparatus does not 
 in any true sense constitute a system. It 
 will have to be made into one before any 
 large proportion of our population has a 
 chance of being educated. 
 
 The question how the teacher of history 
 should commence his share of the work 
 with very young students we will consider 
 later. The larger question must be answered 
 first. In this, as in all practical matters, 
 we must begin by thinking not of the 
 beginning but of the end. For the begin- 
 ning is determined by the end, if it is a 
 beginning of anything. 
 
 However great, in this or that respect, 
 the value of history treated as pageant 
 may be, it seems evident that it is a
 
 Of Educational History. 139 
 
 scientific view of history that is needed for 
 intellectual development. This conclusion 
 can hardly be escaped. The value of history 
 as pageant must needs be mainly moral or 
 mainly aesthetic. The instructional teaching 
 of history cannot be mainly either. It is, 
 therefore, with history as a science that 
 our schooling must be primarily concerned. 
 
 What sort of knowledge, then, of the 
 science of history is needed, and how much ? 
 But, clearly, the main question is not of 
 how much detail we should give, here, 
 there, or anywhere. Detail, as such, is not 
 needed at all. It is a question of main 
 facts. We want such detail as will help the 
 student to see how conclusions are reached 
 and what they mean. We want details as 
 an aid to imagination. We have to force 
 the student to realise that at every point he 
 is dealing with real life and to realise how 
 much is involved in every generalisation. 
 We shall need, in fact, a deal of detail. But 
 to cram into the young mind a mass of min- 
 ute knowledge concerning any one matter
 
 140 Place of History in Education. 
 
 or period can be no part of the general 
 educative process. And we certainly do not 
 want a lot of little facts and dates conven- 
 tionally assumed to possess some mysterious 
 importance. We have no time for irrelevant 
 detail. Nor do we need little facts with a 
 merely picturesque quality. Everywhere 
 and always we need things of value for 
 thought. 
 
 The study of history is capable of stimu- 
 lating, of widening and assisting thought 
 in many ways, but it has, it may be sup- 
 posed, a particularly direct bearing on such 
 thinking as is devoted to matters social 
 and political. We must not, indeed, teach 
 history primarily with a view to throw- 
 ing light on such matters. That is one of 
 the things we have most carefully to avoid 
 doing. We must keep close to the actual 
 facts and the actual factors of the great 
 historic process. We must, in actual teach- 
 ing, think of the process itself, first and last. 
 Nevertheless, in arranging our ideal historical 
 curriculum it is only reasonable to keep in
 
 Of Educational History. 141 
 
 mind the fact that knowledge of the historic 
 process bears upon social and political 
 questions more directly than upon anything 
 else. For this reason, and also because of 
 our relative ignorance in other departments, 
 it will be reasonable to take the history of 
 our European civilisations as in the main 
 our subject for teaching. Yet certainly no 
 young person should be allowed to grow up 
 in total ignorance of the Stone Age or of 
 the great civilisations that grew and decayed 
 before Rome was. The young mind should 
 acquire a notion of these things as a back- 
 ground for his studies of the later European 
 history. They should, at least, loom up 
 for him, a little shadowy and indistinct but 
 quite real, at the far end of his vista. 
 
 European history it must needs be if only 
 in the main outlines ; we cannot possibly do 
 with less. It is only because of a confusion 
 of technical training, with mental training 
 in the larger sense, that any one ever 
 imagined that it was enough for an English- 
 man to know something of the history of
 
 142 Place of History in Education. 
 
 England. But did any one ever actually 
 imagine this to be true? The old notion, 
 which still remains as a curious survival, 
 seems to have been that an Englishman 
 should know something of the history of 
 England and something of that of ancient 
 Greece and Eome. It would have been 
 hard to say why he should study things in 
 this discontinuous fashion. But the history 
 of Greece and of Rome seems to have been 
 regarded as a sort of adjunct to the study 
 of the classical languages and literatures. 
 Actually, of course, the study of languages 
 and literatures is a specialised branch of 
 history. 
 
 This antiquated view of the use of history 
 as an educational instrument seems, in fact, 
 to involve an assertion that history, as we 
 now understand it, is not a proper subject 
 for teaching at all. Yet it would perhaps 
 be better to keep to the older system rather 
 than to teach English history and that only. 
 "A man," people vaguely say, "ought to 
 know something of the history of his own
 
 Of Educational History. 143 
 
 country." This proposition we do not deny, 
 but we doubt whether he will ever know 
 anything worth knowing about it if he 
 knows nothing of European development as 
 a whole. For the real fact is that no 
 country has a history of its own at all, and 
 there is no more such a thing as English 
 history than there is such a thing as the 
 Atlantic Ocean. Or are we to teach " English 
 history" with the object of inculcating patri- 
 otism ? On this it may be remarked that 
 whether the scientific study of English his- 
 tory will tend to develop patriotism is very 
 dubious. The teaching of English history 
 definitely from a patriotic point of view is, 
 of course, a thing not to be tolerated. No 
 procedure could be less scientific, and per- 
 haps no point of view is more distorting. 
 There has been, in the past, a great deal of 
 this kind of thing. The struggle between 
 England and Napoleon, for instance, has 
 been fairly consistently represented as a 
 struggle between good and evil, — Castle- 
 reagh and Wellington representing the good
 
 144 Place of History in Education. 
 
 principle and Napoleon the powers of dark- 
 ness. Nonsense of that kind is likely to 
 be the result of looking at the historic pro- 
 cess from a patriotic point of view ; and 
 it is worse than nonsense, because falsehood 
 never ends with itself. You will, if you 
 are not very careful, find yourself engaged 
 in the cultivation of a whole scrub of rank 
 illusions. But if you are really very care- 
 ful, then you will find that, perhaps 
 insensibly, you abandon the patriotic point 
 of view altogether. 
 
 It may further be pointed out that the 
 inculcation of patriotism is a department 
 of moral training, not of intellectual train- 
 ing. Indeed, if it be educative at all, it 
 should perhaps be considered as a depart- 
 ment of technical education. Patriotism, it 
 is to be supposed, counts as a practically 
 useful virtue from a social, or rather from a 
 national, point of view. If the nation needs 
 to teach it as such it will probably do so, 
 but it is not the business of the teacher of 
 history.
 
 Of Educational History. 1 45 
 
 For all this it does seem that, practically, 
 we must teach more about the history of 
 the English — that is, of ourselves — than 
 about the history of other peoples. To take 
 European history simply as our subject, and 
 pay equal attention to all the greater 
 European movements and peoples, would 
 perhaps be to demand more of our teachers 
 than we can reasonably expect ever to get. 
 A possibly more serious objection is that if 
 we adopt this course we shall be in danger 
 of not getting close enough to the facts 
 anywhere. We should have to spread our 
 detail thinly over a very wide surface. We 
 should be in danger of teaching a series 
 of wide generalisations, accompanied by no 
 such amount of detail anywhere as would 
 suffice to vivify them to the young imagina- 
 tion. Unless we give our pupils an imagina- 
 tively realistic grasp of the matter taught, 
 we shall achieve little or nothing of value. 
 Therefore, while we try to give an idea of 
 the main features of European development 
 we must give a considerably more detailed 
 
 K
 
 146 Place of History in Education. 
 
 account of the features of specifically English 
 development. We may be sure that the 
 greater detail given in this connection will 
 help to make real for the imagination our 
 generalisations concerning the rest of Europe. 
 
 It is possible, indeed, that the time is not 
 far off when we shall refuse to be content 
 with anything less than a study of the main 
 European movements, and shall refuse to 
 dwell especially upon anything save in pro- 
 portion to its importance for Europe at large. 
 It may be that the present writer's sense of 
 difficulty in dealing adequately for educa- 
 tional purposes with European history as a 
 whole is determined or exaggerated by some 
 secret bias. It is so natural to find that the 
 historjr of ourselves is more significant than 
 the history of other people. Yet it can 
 hardly be denied that, in a sense, it actually 
 is so. Up to a certain point, and especially 
 for beginners, it is more significant because 
 it is more easily intelligible and more easily 
 led up to. 
 
 On the whole, then, reckoning details, most
 
 Of Educational History. 1 47 
 
 of the history we shall teach as part of the 
 ordinary pass curriculum, as it were, will have 
 to be English in some sense or degree. But 
 we must teach our pupils to see the whole 
 development of English life in relation to the 
 life of Western Europe generally. All our 
 laws, all our institutions are but specialised 
 forms of the laws and institutions which arose 
 in Europe on the union of the German bar- 
 barians with the wreck of the Roman Empire. 
 The significance and the proportions of any 
 English development can only be seen when 
 it is compared with analogous developments 
 elsewhere. To look at our modern parlia- 
 mentary system does not really help us 
 to understand the parliamentary system of 
 Edward I.'s time ; but we shall be helped 
 by looking at the States General of contem- 
 porary France. 
 
 The essential thing is that the young mind 
 should be trained to think of European, or 
 at least of West European, history as of a 
 single great complex growth or process, and 
 to think of English history as a special case,
 
 148 Place of History in Education. 
 
 only ideally separable from the rest. The 
 English people itself it must learn to think 
 of as a thing partly but never for a moment 
 perfectly detached, even at its period of 
 greatest isolation. For England was and 
 remains a detached portion of the Roman 
 Empire. 
 
 It would be quite useless to endeavour, in 
 this place, to make out an ideal course of 
 historical study in any detail. To do that 
 must be the work of experience. But we can 
 make our statement of what has to be taught 
 rather more precise than it is so far. Chron- 
 ologically speaking, we shall have to begin 
 if not with Greece, then with Rome. Cer- 
 tainly our young people ought not to grow 
 up in total ignorance of that Athenian civil- 
 isation which, if not definitely superior to, 
 strikes one as having been so much more 
 mature than our own. But while we West 
 Europeans are only collateral heirs of Athens, 
 we are the direct heirs of Rome. So of Rome 
 we must know more. We do not want 
 legends or details, but we want a notion of
 
 Of Educational History. 149 
 
 the transformations of the Roman Republic, 
 a notion, precise and general, of the exten- 
 sion of Roman dominion and of what it 
 signified, some notion, at least, of what was 
 involved in the great struggle with Carthage, 
 and a notion of how the Roman Republic 
 developed into the Empire. All this we 
 want in outline only, but in vivid outline. 
 Roman history, as it was taught, and as 
 unhappily it still is taught, was apt to stop 
 at the death of Julius Csesar. But for the 
 general purposes of education not only must 
 it not stop there, but it should, probably, 
 become rather more detailed from that point 
 onward. We need a fairly distinct notion 
 of the structure and composition of the 
 Empire, of its theory and of the nature 
 and main principles of its law. We want 
 a distinct notion of the radical differences 
 between its civilisation and our own. We 
 want, at least, some definite ideas as to the 
 causes of its decline and the overwhelming 
 disaster of its dissolution. We need, also, 
 distinct notions of the development within
 
 150 Place of History in Education. 
 
 it of the Christian Church, of its ideas and 
 tendencies, and of its position in the last 
 days of the officially Christian Empire. In 
 the chaotic welter that follows we must not 
 lose sight of the code of Justinian and his 
 destruction of the East Gothic kingdom in 
 Italy, which, perhaps, practically saved for 
 us the Koman law. But of the barbaric 
 welter itself we need only the barest out- 
 lines, and are indeed hardly in a position 
 to give more. Yet we need a distinct 
 notion of the great racial drifts and settle- 
 ments of which the British conquests of 
 Saxons and Angles is but a small item. 
 And we want a notion of the growth of 
 the readjusted Church, and of barbaric 
 monarchy, and of feudalism. We must 
 watch the young nations forming, aggre- 
 gating, and drifting apart. 
 
 It would be useless to continue in this 
 chronological fashion. At every stage of 
 the process we need a realistic idea of the 
 great formative movements. We must fix 
 our minds on economic conditions, on the
 
 Of Educational History. 1 5 1 
 
 distribution of wealth and its results upon 
 class divisions and upon government, on the 
 growth of trade and of towns. We must 
 watch the evolution of law and of govern- 
 mental agencies. We must think of such 
 institutions and of forms of government in 
 relation to their economic and social bases 
 and in relation to the ideas that dominate 
 them or that they express. We must note 
 the growing self-consciousness of states, and 
 of the struggle between them and the 
 economic or other grounds of that conflict. 
 We need to know, at least roughly, how it 
 was that at the end of the Middle Ages 
 England and France and Spain had strong 
 and growing national monarchies, while Ger- 
 many and Italy were still helplessly divided. 
 We must trace the struggle for dominion 
 and exploitation of the world beyond 
 Europe that began with the first realisation 
 of that world and is going on at this 
 moment. 
 
 In dealing with specifically English his- 
 tory we can only proceed on the same lines,
 
 152 Place of History in Education. 
 
 being careful to establish connections at 
 every possible point with our account of 
 Europe in general. It is a question of the 
 essence of the matter ; of the really big 
 things. What are these ? Take any dif- 
 ferentiated state you please — take the king- 
 dom of England at any one moment — what 
 are the most essential features of its being, 
 and those, therefore, which it is the main 
 business of history to trace ? An attempt to 
 state them in a logical order would be vain, 
 for not only do they co-exist, but they are 
 only ideally separable. We would put first 
 of all the economic condition of the state. 
 We must consider the nature of the state's 
 wealth, how it is getting its living, and who 
 are its customers, if it has any. We must 
 study the distribution of that wealth within 
 the state, and very carefully. In no very 
 long run this will be found to involve the 
 class divisions which exist within it. In 
 this connection, also, the system of land- 
 ownership is often of the greatest import- 
 ance, and this brings us to the law of real
 
 Of Educational History. 153 
 
 property. Secondly, we would point to the 
 governmental arrangements of the state, 
 which, we shall find, are more or less closely 
 connected with the distribution of wealth 
 within it. In this connection we must be 
 careful not to be deceived by formalists or 
 by lawyers who, mayhap, will tell us many 
 things that are only true in a technical 
 sense. We must distinguish between the 
 real and the technical constitution. Very 
 important, also, is it that we should under- 
 stand the state's theory of itself, the political 
 philosophy that dominates it or is expressed 
 in its constitution. Further, in the closest 
 connection with the governmental constitu- 
 tion we have to consider the whole legal 
 system of the state, and, in the largest 
 sense, its police system. Then come the 
 means of the state for defence and for 
 aggression, resting mainly on the mass of 
 its population and wealth. We must study 
 its military system, and its relation to 
 foreign states, and this will probably again 
 bring us to economic conditions. Finally,
 
 154 Place of History in Education. 
 
 there falls to be considered the intellectual 
 and moral standpoint and condition of the 
 people, and this will include its religion. 
 We are speaking of our imaginary state as 
 though it were homogeneous ; but if racial 
 lines of division exist within it, or if one 
 part of the country have a different law 
 from the rest, or special governmental ar- 
 rangements, this is likely to be a very im- 
 portant feature in the constitution of the 
 state. 
 
 Our summary does not pretend to be ex- 
 haustive in any sense, but it is these things 
 above all upon which we must fix attention 
 in dealing with the history of England, or 
 of any other country. In dealing with 
 events there should seldom be much doubt 
 as to what is of the first importance. A 
 mechanical invention may be so ; the life- 
 history of a king can hardly be. The im- 
 portant is that which endures, or that of 
 which the traceable effects endure from 
 generation to generation — that is, for some 
 considerable time. The important event is
 
 Of Educational History. 1 55 
 
 that which appears to affect the course of 
 change in some definite direction. 
 
 How much detail we can give either in 
 connection with English or with European 
 history is mainly a question of time. Other 
 things being equal, the more the better. 
 But before we can answer this question of 
 quantity we must know how much language, 
 how much physics, how much biology, and 
 so on, have to be taught. It will require 
 much experiment, and, measured by any 
 individual life, it will take a long time to 
 give a satisfactory answer to the question.
 
 15^ 
 
 X. 
 
 OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE 
 OF HISTORY. 
 
 To the question, what kind and amount of 
 historical knowledge is required for educative 
 purposes, a rough and generalised answer has 
 been given. We must now consider more 
 definitely than we have yet done how such 
 a course of study as has been roughly 
 sketched would assist in the laying of 
 foundations for sound thinking. 
 
 Throughout such a course of study we 
 should be dealing incessantly with the action 
 of masses, whether as states or as classes or 
 as political "parties." We ought to obtain 
 approximately accurate notions of the nature 
 of their action. Roughly speaking, the 
 action of masses is determined partly by
 
 Educational Value of History. 157 
 
 motives of what is called self-interest — that 
 is, by personal desires of various kinds, and 
 partly by various forms of idealism, con- 
 structive or destructive or simply conserva- 
 tive in tendency, as the case may be. We 
 ought to obtain a tolerably clear and 
 accurate notion of the relation between these 
 two sets of factors and of their relative 
 values. In this way, too, we should obtain 
 a fairly accurate notion of the nature of 
 inter -state conflicts and of the causes of 
 war. Further, we should be forced in some 
 degree to realise the complex ways in which 
 law and institutions grow and change, the 
 complex ways in which religions are trans- 
 formed and moral standards altered. We 
 should reach a distinct sense of the inter- 
 connection of all social phenomena, — of the 
 bearing, for instance, of economic facts upon 
 standards of morality and the claims of the 
 churches. On all these matters the science 
 of history, as it advances, will attain more 
 and more accurate notions ; but already the 
 study of history should at least give one
 
 1 58 Place of History in Education. 
 
 conclusions approximately correct. If history 
 be treated from a scientific point of view 
 the attainment of approximately correct 
 notions on these matters is certain, and no 
 system of history - teaching that did not 
 look to such results would be worth any- 
 thing. It is not a matter of European 
 history only. The more fundamental of our 
 generalisations concerning European history 
 will apply, more or less accurately, to those 
 great tracts of historic evolution of which 
 we know little or nothing directly. Our 
 notion of man's social evolution as a whole 
 cannot fail to be enriched and made more 
 precise by knowledge of the history of 
 Europe. 
 
 From our study of European history there 
 should also finally emerge a very profound 
 sense at once of the unity of human life 
 through all generations and of the abso- 
 lute continuity of change. The essentially 
 gradual character of that continuous change 
 will also, it may be added, become more 
 and more apparent. We need and we shall
 
 Educational Value of History. 1 59 
 
 get the sense of a vast growth continuing, 
 of a connected mass of being, continuously, 
 inevitably, gradually changing from moment 
 to moment. 
 
 A too exclusive study of history might 
 possibly result in an exaggerated sense of 
 the instability of things human. The 
 student, it might be, would seem to him- 
 self to be living in a world where nothing 
 is at all, a world where what he calls his 
 thoughts are but a phase of the thought 
 of some other being, where his personal 
 action has no significance save for some 
 future which is not his. In this mood he 
 would remember with a shock that that 
 future, when it comes, will be equally so 
 transitory as to be unreal. Yet to such 
 a mood as this history itself supplies a cor- 
 rective, since it tells of continuity as well 
 as of change. But there will certainly 
 emerge and remain a profound sense of the 
 instability of all the most apparently estab- 
 lished things. This sense is of high value 
 for thought. It saves one from bein^
 
 160 Place of History in Education. 
 
 hypnotised by the crude self-assertion of 
 the dominant. To remember, to know al- 
 ways that all the solid -looking, triumphant, 
 awe-inspiring things — Church and State and 
 nationality, thrones, dominions, and princi- 
 palities — are but passing phases of a process, 
 is to have grasped an emancipating fact. 
 
 If our conception of man's evolution as 
 a whole becomes more accurate and more 
 justly proportioned through the study of 
 history, this cannot fail to have an im- 
 portant effect on all the larger speculations 
 in which we may indulge. The study of 
 history is or may be one of the avenues 
 of approach to that synthetic philosophy of 
 the universe as it touches man's under- 
 standing, which is the final goal of the 
 intellect. There are many such avenues, 
 and this is one of them. It does not go 
 the whole way, and it is not a short cut. 
 None of them go the whole way, and there 
 are no short cuts. 
 
 Putting the larger speculation aside, it is 
 quite clear that any r eal knowledge of hist ory
 
 Educational Value of History. 161 
 
 should help us with all those speculations 
 and inquiries which tur n upon matt ers social 
 and political. Such knowledge should enable 
 us finally to rid ourselves of many supersti- 
 tions, — of modern superstitions concerning 
 authorities and majorities as well as of 
 antique, surviving superstitions concerning 
 nobility and claims of right. It will help us 
 to reckon progress from the Stone Age instead 
 of from the day before yesterday. It will 
 help us to separate the idea of progress from 
 the idea of mechanical achievement and from 
 any particular forms of progress which happen 
 to be immediately familiar to us. It will 
 assist in altogether destroying the ludicrous 
 superstition of our own immense superiority 
 as compared with those who have gone 
 before. It should assist us in dealing with 
 the churches and their various claims. It 
 should help us in dealing with all ethical 
 questions. It will show us institutions in 
 the light of their origin. It will take 
 us, to some extent, behind the scenes of 
 current politics. I do not mean that it 
 
 L
 
 1 62 Place of History in Education. 
 
 will let us into the futile secrets and 
 intrigues of politicians beyond the reach of 
 the press. These are not worth the knowing. 
 But it will teach us to look for, and will 
 he lp us' to see clas s interests and party 
 interests behind all the talk about rights 
 and wrongs^ It will set all claims of right 
 before us in the light of all the old claims 
 that are dead and all but forgotten. It 
 should help us to see all social facts in a 
 due proportion ; to see parliamentary pro- 
 ceedings in their real relation to the great 
 continuous movement that goes on apart 
 from politics. It should help us to see 
 government as a power of interference 
 rather than as a creative power. And 
 through the mental training obtained from 
 the study of history on right lines we 
 ought to be able to approach all political 
 and social questions with at least some 
 degree of intellectual detachment. Our 
 training should at least help us to think 
 of such questions without petty and irrele- 
 vant passion. Our knowledge should give
 
 Educational Value of History. 163 
 
 us a sense of the insignificance of our own 
 particular interests, and help us to see in 
 these questions a reference to something 
 larger than our own lives and larger than 
 the lives of all our contemporaries of a 
 moment. Our training and our knowledge 
 should make impossible for us the ludicrous 
 assumption that, of two parties in the 
 stat e, one is actuated by the highest 
 motives, by lofty public spirit and care 
 for the oppressed, and the other by motives 
 merely greedy and mean and self-regard- 
 ing. The frequency with which such an 
 assumption as this is met with in our 
 present political conflicts is one of the 
 surest signs of our general lack of a decent 
 education. When we have reached intel- 
 lectual freedom and honesty, and know what 
 we do not know, and refuse to deceive our- 
 selves with half-truths, and when we have 
 realised the difficulty of all these questions, 
 then only shall we be able to adopt a sane 
 point of view in regard to them. 
 
 It may, indeed, be said with assurance
 
 164 Place of History in Education. 
 
 that, altogether apart from the acquisition 
 
 of knowledge, history affords excellent 
 
 training - ground for the mind. There is 
 
 no menta l discipline more libe rating than 
 
 the being forced to realise a multiplicity 
 
 of points of view, and to realise, further, 
 
 how largely opinion is determined by 
 
 circumstance. These things history forces 
 
 us incessantly to do. Mathematics takes 
 
 us into a world of pure reason, and it is 
 
 good to be there ; but that world is so far 
 
 removed from the human world that we 
 
 may spend much time in it and never bring 
 
 back intellectual freedom. History keeps 
 
 us in the human world and yet takes us 
 
 altogether away from our circumstantial 
 
 surroundings. It tends, thus, to break 
 
 down the barriers which these surroundings 
 
 build against our progress. Again, any 
 
 serious effort to reach or to apprehend 
 
 historical truth imposes on us intellectual 
 
 honesty for the time being, forces us to 
 
 think in masses, in averages, and centuries, 
 
 forces on us a sense of the extreme
 
 Educational Value of History. 165 
 
 complexity of every social phenomenon, 
 forces on us a habit of weighing evidence 
 and of suspending judgment, compels us to 
 analyse and to be logical, and constantly to 
 endeavour to draw a sharp line between 
 what we know and what we do not 
 know. 
 
 We are brought up by the idea of a 
 possible objection. "Would our course of 
 history prove dull to the taught? To the 
 dull all things are dull ; but that is not 
 the question. Would it be dull to the 
 average mind in the long-run ? Are we 
 assuming, as a basis for our teaching, an 
 intellectuality that does not exist? There 
 is drudgery and drag in all learning : but 
 it is not a question of any occasional or 
 local dulness. Again, it may be pointed 
 out that at present the human mind is 
 inclined to rebel against any training or 
 instruction which does not seem of direct 
 practical usefulness. The charge of dulness 
 is likely to be brought against any subject 
 the end of the teaching of which is not
 
 1 66 Place of History in Education. 
 
 immediately obvious. It is likely to be 
 brought not so much by scholars as by 
 uneducated parents. The demand for merely 
 technical education is enormously strong. 
 But this is simply a thing that we have to 
 fight. The intellect is there : our business is 
 to educate it into intellectuality. Rebellion 
 against intellectual training is a thing to 
 which no quarter must be given. There 
 is a notion abroad that education should 
 be a pleasant process. So, indeed, it should, 
 and it is for us to make it so. But it must 
 not be made so by any concessions to the 
 adversary. There exists a certain tendency 
 towards the development of a school in 
 which work has become play and play work, 
 in which learning is cultivated in a gentle- 
 manly manner, so far as cricket allows, 
 in which the boys are provided with hot- 
 house fruit and billiard tables, in which 
 there is no real insistence on any but the 
 lowest possible standard of learning and 
 no insistence whatever on the life of the 
 intellect. If any such school actually exists
 
 Educational Value of History. 167 
 
 its speedy destruction is a thing worth 
 working for. 
 
 But when all this has been said we still 
 have not answered the question, would our 
 course of history be dull ? It must be 
 admitted without reservation that a subject 
 incapable of arousing interest in any but a 
 few minds is absolutely worthless as an 
 instrument of general education. The mind 
 gains little or nothing from mere drudgery, 
 and what little may be gained is gained at 
 enormous expense. There is always time 
 wasted in doing what one does not wish to 
 do. Nor will the mind ever really under- 
 stand a subject in which it feels no interest. 
 But is history, of the quality I have tried 
 to indicate, such a subject ? There are, 
 perhaps, minds to whom human life is un- 
 interesting. They are certainly not average 
 minds ; nor are they the minds of children. 
 History of any kind deals essentially with 
 human life. It is not as though we were 
 to deal in mere generalisations. To do so 
 would be to fail utterly of any purpose. It
 
 1 68 Place of History in Education. 
 
 is the evolution in the real life of the past 
 of the real life of the present that history 
 deals with. In every possible way the 
 teacher must drive home the actuality of 
 his subject. He must read human nature 
 into every legal technicality. It is always 
 there. If in one sense our sketch of European 
 history be a mere sketch, and though it be 
 drawn by science and not by art, will it not, 
 nevertheless, work out to a fine piece of 
 pageantry ? The wreck of an empire, the 
 fusion of races, the struggle for order, the 
 wars of classes, the conflict among the nations 
 for wealth and expansion, the broadening of 
 the stream of life, the advance of knowledge, 
 the conflict of idealisms, the movement 
 towards wider and wider co-operation, it 
 makes, surely, no mean a piece. It is the 
 very essence of the pageant that we wish 
 to present. Even though we leave to others 
 the moral commentary and present the thing 
 from no sesthetic standpoint, it must surely 
 appeal to the dullest imagination. What 
 has sometimes made history a dull subject
 
 Educational Value of History, 1 69 
 
 is the cramping of its teaching by unintelli- 
 gent restrictions and stupid demands, — the 
 restriction, for instance, to English history 
 and the demand for unrelated and insignifi- 
 cant facts. Properly taught it could hardly 
 be dull except to the very dull, It will help 
 to satisfy every kind of intellectual curiosity 
 concerning the things of the social order in 
 which we live. It will not only give new 
 meaning to our institutions and to our law, 
 it will give interest and significance to every 
 one of our old villages that are written in 
 Domesday, and to almost every road and 
 field in England.
 
 170 
 
 XI. 
 
 OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF 
 HISTORY— MORAL. 
 
 What can be done with history as an instru- 
 ment of moral training ? What will actually 
 be done in any particular case depends on 
 the teacher; but what is it that should be 
 done? The inculcation of useful habits, it 
 has been pointed out, is a branch of techni- 
 cal education. Be punctual — you will find it 
 pay: tell the truth — it generally pays: be 
 considerate of the claims of other people — 
 it pays in the long-run. The teaching of 
 history as such has nothing to do with this 
 sort of thing. Nor can history have much 
 say in the matter, even indirectly. " History," 
 said Henry St John, " is philosophy teaching 
 by examples how to conduct ourselves in all
 
 Value of History — Moral. 1 7 1 
 
 the situations of private and public life." 
 There are, truly, examples of every kind 
 of conduct, attended by many very 
 different kinds of results, to be found in 
 history. What philosophy has to say to it 
 all is not so clear. You might, no doubt, 
 instance Frederick the Great as an admir- 
 able example of punctual attention to busi- 
 ness : you can hardly call him as a witness 
 to the practical utility of truthfulness. 
 
 The question is whether history, as a 
 scholastic or academic " subject," can and 
 should be made an instrument of a moral 
 training not merely technical. Such train- 
 ing or teaching must have reference to 
 something beyond the mere needs of the 
 student. It must refer to society and to 
 
 the future. Not only so, but if it has 
 
 reference only to immediate social needs as 
 interpreted or conceived by government, it 
 is probable that no honest history -teaching 
 will b e_consistent~witK it. 5s an illustration 
 of what is meant, an order issued by the 
 German Emperor to the government schools
 
 172 Place of History in Education. 
 
 of Germany in the year 1889 may be quoted. 
 After laying down that the school teaching 
 of history should "show that the power of 
 the State alone can protect the individual's 
 family, freedom, and rights," it continues as 
 follows: "It must also bring the youth 
 to recognise how Prussia's kings have 
 exerted themselves to better the conditions 
 of the working classes in a continuous 
 development, from the legal reforms of 
 Frederick the Great and from the abolition 
 of serfdom to the present day. Moreover, the 
 school must show by means of statistics 
 how considerably and how constantly in this 
 century the wages and the condition of the 
 working classes have improved under mon- 
 archical protection." 
 
 It is quite needless to criticise this pro- 
 nouncement specifically. It is quoted merely 
 to illustrate the danger that state teachers 
 may be required to uphold the interests of 
 some governing class, to maintain some 
 particular form of government or some par- 
 ticular system of political thought. This is
 
 Value of History — Moral. 173 
 
 a danger inherent in all systems of state 
 education. It may exist equally under a 
 democratic as under an autocratic govern- 
 ment. Quite clearly it does not matter 
 whether an order of the kind quoted he 
 issued by an Emperor or by a County 
 Council. In either case it is equally an 
 offence to intellectual honesty and to the 
 cause of truth. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to deal with vague 
 current talk of the elevating influence of 
 hero - worship or of enthusiasm about this 
 cause or that. There are weightier pronounce- 
 ments. Lord Acton laid it down that the 
 main end of the study of history is the 
 development of the moral judgment and 
 the deepening of the sense of moral law. 
 Bishop Stubbs says that one, at least, of 
 the most important results to be obtained 
 through the study of history is the attain- 
 ment of a "perception of the workings of 
 the Almighty Ruler of the world," a recog- 
 nition of " a hand of justice and mercy, a 
 hand of progress and order, a kind and wise
 
 1 74 Place of History in Education. 
 
 disposition, ever leading the world on to 
 the better but never forcing, and out of the 
 evil of man's working, bringing continually 
 that which is good." 
 
 It is not necessary here to analyse these 
 views or to go into the difference be- 
 tween them. They are extremely interesting 
 views, and they may be correct ; but we do 
 not know that they are. They appear 
 to involve propositions we are not in a 
 position to prove, and certainly must not 
 assume. We might, indeed, adopt Lord 
 Acton's view in the pious hope that our 
 course of historical study would, indeed, 
 deepen the sense of moral law in the minds 
 of our students. But if we adopted that of 
 Bishop Stubbs, or if we deliberately tried 
 through the teaching of history to deepen 
 the sense of any particular moral law, we 
 should be putting a strain on our present 
 knowledge greater than it will bear. We 
 should lose our intellectual honesty, and 
 with that all hope of arriving at truth. 
 
 We are confronted again with this trouble-
 
 Value of History — Moral. 175 
 
 some question of what sort of moral training 
 is wanted. The deplorable fact is that we 
 really do not know. Personally, you may 
 be inclined to think that you do know ; 
 but when you analyse your opinion it will 
 probably resolve itself partly into personal 
 likes and dislikes of which you can give no 
 account, and partly into ethical theories 
 which are disputable. The actual " morals," 
 as distinct from the ethics, of a people at 
 any one time may be regarded as made up 
 partly of qualities, partly of habits, partly 
 of theories of duty, partly of fear of other 
 people or their opinions, and partly of 
 notions as to what is worth having in life. 
 Moreover, both the theoretic and the actual 
 " morality " of a people are involved with 
 all manner of arrangements that can only 
 be regarded as temporary, — laws of property, 
 for instance, and laws of marriage. How is 
 it proposed to affect all this through the 
 teaching of history ? What sort of a moral- 
 ity is it that you want taught? Is it an 
 ethical theory ? Is it a standard of con-
 
 176 Place of History in Education. 
 
 duct? What history will show is that 
 e thical theories and stan dards of conduct 
 a like change and pa ss away. 
 
 Desire is king, and is self-centred. It is 
 a question, finally, of the quality of desire 
 and the direction of the will. If we can 
 do something to make the will intelligent, 
 we shall probably do for morality in the 
 larger sense all that we can hope or reason- 
 ably wish to do. If a man's desires are 
 mean, so will his conduct be. But mean 
 desires are to some extent dependent upon 
 a lack of the sense of proportion, and upon 
 an unintelligent estimate of values. In this 
 direction j jie study of history should do 
 something for us. It should, at least, help 
 us to get rid of any overweening estimate 
 of our own importance. It should help to 
 make the simply selfish life seem both 
 petty and ridiculous. By pointing always 
 to large issues and large results, by insist- 
 ing on human life as a complex whole, it 
 should counteract the tendency to bury our 
 lives in the merely personal. It should
 
 Value of History — Moral. 177 
 
 crucify pitilessly against an enormous back- 
 ground the meanness of all mean things. 
 It should widen our sympathies along with 
 _our understanding. 
 
 There is one other thing that may be 
 done or aimed at. Analysis ought to show 
 us, in time, what are the moral qualities 
 that make for national success. At every 
 turn we are forced to consider this question 
 in one case or another. We are forced to 
 consider the moral element in a victory in 
 war or in a struggle between two states, 
 lasting, perhaps, for centuries, or in the 
 decline of an empire. So far as we can 
 arrive at positive conclusions of general ap- 
 plication as to the qualities that make for 
 success among peoples and at the historical 
 meaning of moral degeneration, we shall 
 arrive at conclusions of some ethical value. 
 There can be no doubt that we ought to 
 insist on such conclusions when we have 
 arrived at them : only it behoves us to be 
 extremely cautious how we conclude. There 
 are pitfalls on every side along this narrow 
 
 M
 
 1 78 Place of History in Education. 
 
 path. We must be on guard against all 
 current and conventional assumptions, and 
 equally against our personal likes and dis- 
 likes. We must-~deal very faithfully. We 
 must be quite prepared to accept con- 
 clusions that shock our moral sense, — the 
 conclusion, for instance, that victory in a 
 given case was largely due to the ferocious 
 egotism of the victors and the brutality of 
 their disregard of other people's claims. If 
 we set up a moral law and then look for its 
 working in history, we shall reach conclu- 
 sions of no value whatever. Connected with 
 this search for the moral factors in national 
 success is a certain danger. National success 
 may be measured by survival limit, by secur- 
 ity, by wealth, by the realisation of national 
 ideals, by achievement in art or in science. 
 If any of these be used as a measure of 
 individual success, what becomes of moral- 
 ity? We cannot teach that being good in 
 any accepted sense always pays, or that 
 what pays is good. The clanger is, of 
 course, greatest in dealing with children.
 
 Value of History — Moral. 1 79 
 
 We can hardly do worse for our children, 
 morally, than to teach them to measure 
 goodness by success in any ordinary sense, 
 or in any sense that the word can bear in 
 history. If we dare to do so we shall, no 
 doubt, be giving, in the strict sense, moral 
 instruction. 
 
 In the restricted sense such instruction 
 will be immoral.
 
 i8o 
 
 XII. 
 
 CONCERNING DIFFERENCE OF SEX. 
 
 So far we have assumed throughout that, 
 technical teaching apart, the education of 
 women should proceed on the same lines as 
 that of men. What right have we to make 
 this assumption ? It is argued that the 
 mind of woman differs profoundly from 
 that of man ; that her natural interests are 
 different from those of a man, and that it 
 will prove impossible to arouse in her efficient 
 interest in the courses of study which effici- 
 ently interest men. It is argued further that 
 as woman's social functions differ radically 
 from man's, so not merely her technical 
 education but her education in the fuller 
 sense should be conducted differently. 
 Society, not only now but in the future,
 
 Concerning Difference of Sex. 181 
 
 demands from women work different from 
 that it demands from men, and hence must 
 demand a different training for its women. 
 In respect of the teaching of history, a dis- 
 tinction is already made in the government 
 schools of Germany. In the German high 
 schools or secondary schools for girls, what 
 we roughly call political history is either 
 not taught at all or is taught very sketchily. 
 Girls, it appears, are not expected to acquire 
 any knowledge of international relations or 
 even of constitutional history. Political 
 history, it appears, is only to be "touched 
 upon in broad lines, as ... it conduces to the 
 awakening of a warm and personal interest 
 in great and active peoples and nations, 
 their fate and their works." What precisely 
 this means is not very clear ; but it seems 
 that girls are supposed to be concerned with 
 the history of literature and of art, with 
 religious and moral ideas, and with "national 
 and domestic customs," whatever that may 
 exactly include. The distinctions involved 
 seem superficial and indeed arbitrary. It
 
 1 82 Place of History in Education. 
 
 is needless to criticise them in detail, but 
 they do not seem to be distinctly related 
 to any real difference between the minds of 
 men and of women. I may be allowed to 
 say that, in my experience, so far as women 
 show special aptitude for any special de- 
 partment of history it is for the economic 
 and constitutional aspects of the subject. 
 Eoughly, the German idea seems to be that 
 women are concerned to know something 
 about the social life of peoples, but are not 
 concerned to know anything about their 
 political life. This appears to involve the 
 assertion that they are not to study evolu- 
 tion at all, and do not need any precise 
 notion of development even in social life. 
 For otherwise it is quite impossible to 
 maintain the distinction. In any case, 
 however, the important thing is that the 
 distinction is made at all. 
 
 The question is a quite serious one, and 
 if we in England have not yet taken it 
 quite seriously, that does not mean that we 
 may not be doing so before long. Possibly
 
 Concerning Difference of Sex. 1 83 
 
 it only means that we have not really as 
 yet paid much serious attention to the 
 question of a national educational system. 
 
 It is impossible here to argue the question 
 at length, but it may be worth while to 
 adduce a few considerations in connection 
 with it. In the first place it may be pointed 
 out that much of the objection to the edu- 
 cation of men and women on the same lines 
 seems to arise from a confusion between 
 "technical education" and the truly educa- 
 tive process. In regard to the former there 
 is obviously a strong case or rather an 
 imperative need for some differential treat- 
 ment of girls and boys. But when the 
 distinction between the two kinds of edu- 
 cation is clearly realised it will probably 
 be seen that, unless all education is to 
 be essentially " technical," the assertion 
 that women should be educated, in the 
 larger sense, on different lines from men 
 is an assertion that cannot rationally be 
 maintained. 
 
 Only one does not feel quite sure that
 
 1 84 Place of History in Education. 
 
 things are really moving in this direction. 
 We do not seem to have made up our 
 minds as to what we want women to be 
 and to do in our coming civilisation. If 
 men were to make up their minds on this 
 point in one way and women in another, 
 there would, of course, be a struggle. Such 
 a struggle, however limited, would be dis- 
 astrous, if only because the victors would 
 not gain what they wanted but something 
 different. What does the assertion of . 
 difference between man's mind and woman's 
 mean ? It is quite incredible that the 
 difference is radical. After all, a man has 
 a mother and a woman a father. Such 
 differences as exist on an average look like 
 differences of detail and of degree. As to 
 the total difference between the sexes it is 
 surely quite great enough in the nature of 
 things. There is no need to emphasise and 
 develop it artificially, even if we do not 
 rather desire to minimise it. Again, what 
 is the meaning of the argument based on 
 difference of social function ? No one denies
 
 Concerning Difference of Sex. 185 
 
 the difference, but how does it bear on the 
 educative process ? If the right end of that 
 process is provision of a basis for sound 
 thinking, are we going to say that we do 
 not want women to think at all ? We want 
 them, in that case, just to fit themselves 
 into the system provided by men's thinking. 
 Then the conclusion is clear. The education 
 of women must be "technical" only, and 
 the more empirical in character the better. 
 But who in the world wants this ? Can it 
 be conceived that this is what the coming 
 civilisation will want? All this talk about 
 difference of function necessitating a radical 
 difference of education seems to rest finally 
 on a conception of men and women as things 
 hopelessly divided ; whereas, in truth, we 
 are all parts of each other. We may return, 
 provisionally, to our original assumption. 
 The education that is good enough for 
 women will be just good enough for men. 
 
 If men had any really radical objection 
 to the intellectual education of women, that 
 would be practically a very serious matter.
 
 1 86 Place of History in Education. 
 
 But those who think they have are probably 
 under an illusion. It was reported not long 
 ago in the newspapers that at an Oxford 
 Union debate some one declared that if 
 women were given the parliamentary fran- 
 chise women would be utterly destroyed. 
 Presumably the speaker attached some pe- 
 culiar meaning to the word woman, which 
 seems an odd thing to do. But one has heard 
 a good deal of the prospect of this or that 
 destroying the attractiveness of women from 
 men's point of view. But on this point we 
 may put our trust in nature, — that attrac- 
 tiveness has its roots far deeper than any 
 of our modes of thought or any of our 
 social arrangements.
 
 i8 7 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL 
 STUDY. 
 
 The course of historical study which we have 
 very roughly sketched is to include the 
 history of Europe, is to have very special 
 reference to England, but is not to ignore 
 ancient Athens or even the Stone Age. It 
 is to be scientific in character. It should, 
 ideally, begin in the primary schools and 
 end in the university. We have now to 
 consider the question how such a course 
 should be started. Is history to form part 
 of the curriculum in primary schools, and if 
 so in what form ? If not, is there to be any 
 sort of preliminary teaching leading up to 
 the teaching of history proper? 
 
 In most of its aspects the course as a
 
 1 88 Place of History in Education. 
 
 whole will be non-moral. Its ethical value 
 will, perhaps, mainly consist in helping to 
 establish proportions and values. The 
 student will learn to look at things in the 
 mass and to refer action to its remoter 
 consequences. He will be gently assisted 
 to realise his own insignificance socially, 
 and at the same time to realise how com- 
 pletely all his action merges in a result. He 
 will see progress in the making. He will 
 perhaps indirectly be brought to form new 
 ideas as to what matters and what does not 
 matter, as what is worth having and what 
 is not. But all this clearly belongs to a 
 relatively late stage of the course. We can- 
 not begin by using history as a vehicle for 
 the moral instruction of the child. 
 
 Beginnings are generally difficult. It 
 seems clear that if we start teaching any 
 sort of formal history to a child under four- 
 teen, we shall be teaching what will be to 
 the child unintelligible rubbish. We shall 
 be assuming the existence in the child's mind 
 of what either is not there at all or exists
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 189 
 
 too vaguely to be brought iuto connection 
 with our narrative. If we try to tell the 
 history of England to a child as a story, it 
 will be a dull story and almost meaningless. 
 It will be a story about nothing in particular. 
 Moreover, we shall find it very difficult to 
 make any statement relevant to our main 
 purpose and at once true and intelligible. 
 Suppose we are talking about what used to 
 be called the Heptarchy. We cannot tell 
 the child that a number of little kingdoms 
 existed in England without explaining what 
 we mean by a "kingdom." What notion 
 will the child form of the king? Will he 
 think of the king as a man sitting on a 
 throne with a crown on his head, occasion- 
 ally giving orders about nothing in particular 
 and surrounded by persons in reverential 
 attitudes? Clearly this will not do. But 
 how are we to explain the king ? We shall, 
 perhaps, find ourselves telling stories about 
 particular kings, who will just be grown-up 
 people, their kingship being a mysterious 
 and ornamental something, linking them
 
 190 Place of History in Education. 
 
 vaguely with King Edward VII. But the 
 important thing about a king is, as a rule, 
 not his personality but — if one may use the 
 word in an unusual sense — his kingliness. 
 The important thing about him is the things 
 he is legally entitled to do, the things he is 
 expected to do, the things he takes to be his 
 rights or duties, the ideas other people have 
 about his claims, his property, and the nature 
 of the hold he has on his subjects. All this 
 makes up his " kingliness," and if we do not 
 explain this, the word " king " is nonsensical. 
 And how are we to explain this to any young 
 child ? 
 
 Are we going to start by telling the 
 child stories ? It is, no doubt, possible to 
 interest children by telling them more or 
 less true stories about personages absurdly 
 called "historical"; and in doing so you 
 may succeed in conveying to the child 
 mind the notion of real people who lived 
 a long time ago. But except so far as by 
 telling such stories you can help the child to 
 a sense of time and of change, it is not clear
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 191 
 
 what you hope to effect in the way of 
 preparation for an understanding of history. 
 You are in some danger, too, of planting in 
 the child's mind the notion that history is 
 essentially concerned with individual struggles 
 and exploits. You will not even have the 
 satisfaction of telling good stories. Histori- 
 cal stories are not, as a rule, good stories for 
 children. They imply too much and convey 
 too little. They are either too thin or they 
 are incomprehensible. Fairy stories are 
 much better and probably less misleading. 
 If it were only a question of how to stim- 
 ulate the child's imagination you might, 
 indeed, do as certain teachers are actually 
 now doing and tell stories now about histori- 
 cal heroes, and now from Spenser's Faerie 
 Queene. But it is a question of how to 
 arouse the imagination in a particular direc- 
 tion, and of how to prepare the child's mind 
 to deal with those aspects of human life 
 with which history deals. Your stories of 
 historical heroes will only have a remote 
 bearing upon historical questions, and your
 
 192 Place of History in Education. 
 
 stories from the Faerie Queene will have none 
 at all. 
 
 It is, nevertheless, possible that very 
 young children should make acquaintance 
 with history through such stories and only 
 through such stories ; and it is possible that, 
 in some slight degree and very indirectly, 
 these may help to prepare their minds for 
 the history that is to come later. But it 
 seems clear that they ought not to be 
 allowed to associate such stories with any- 
 thing called "history." They should asso- 
 ciate them rather with the Faerie Queene. 
 Whatever value such " historical " stories 
 may have for them it cannot consist mainly 
 in their being in any sense preparatory to 
 a history course. If it be of little use to 
 tell the child more or less true stories and 
 of no use at all to start with any sort of 
 narrative account of English history, are 
 we to wait till the child is fourteen or so 
 and then take the plunge into a regular 
 history course ? Something like this is 
 what, in very many cases, we actually do.
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 193 
 
 Children are put into technical history with- 
 out any sort of formal preparation, and they 
 " learn " it for some years without even 
 finding out what it is all about. 
 
 No one who has acted as a history 
 examiner in the matriculation examinations 
 of London University can have much doubt 
 of our need of some course of teaching 
 introductory to and preparatory for our 
 history course. We ought to make a start 
 by giving the child some notion of the 
 subject-matter of history. In the largest 
 sense this is simply the whole past life 
 of humanity considered as an evolution. 
 Therefore, in the logical order, we need 
 first of all to develop the sense of past 
 time, and then of great changes in that 
 past. But we should be doing this along 
 with something else. If nothing less than 
 the past life of humanity forms the subject- 
 matter of history, yet what history has 
 most specifically to deal with is the life 
 of societies as such, the life of states, the 
 life of institutions and of law, the life of 
 
 N
 
 194 Place of History in Education. 
 
 classes, the life of trade and of knowledge. 
 To all this the child needs an introduction. 
 We have to present to the child an aspect 
 of human life, and we cannot do so all at 
 once. What we first of all have to do is 
 to make real for the child the elements of 
 the historical course, the elements, that is, 
 of social and political life. 
 
 It sounds as though it might be very 
 difficult to do this, and perhaps it is. The 
 question is not whether it be difficult, but 
 whether it be possible. It is worth while 
 •to point out that in the national schools of 
 Belgium they are actually trying the ex- 
 periment of beginning just in this way. 
 You take a class of little boys or girls. 
 " What is your father ? " the teacher will 
 ask one of them, and with some trouble 
 the fact is elicited that the father is a 
 blacksmith. Then follow questions as to 
 what that means, and important facts are 
 sot at. The child's father shoes horses 
 and so on for other people, and takes 
 money for what he gives, and with money
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 195 
 
 buys food and other things necessary to 
 keep the family going. In a very short 
 time we have got to the economic basis of 
 our social structure without using any of 
 these formidable words; and we are getting 
 at that ancient unit of social structure, the 
 family. There follow questions as to the 
 mother's position in the family business. 
 
 There will probably have to be a good 
 deal of experiment before we can determine 
 the precisely right method of working on 
 these lines. But in the opinion of the 
 present writer the Belgians are on the 
 right track, and the sooner we begin ex- 
 perimenting the better. Take an English 
 village child of any class you please as a 
 simple case. The first thing that ought to 
 be doue by way of preparation for a real 
 teaching of history is to give that child 
 an idea of the village as a community or 
 society in little. It is a business of estab- 
 lishing essential facts and connections. We 
 need not look too closely. There are many 
 things we cannot explain, and if we do
 
 196 Place of History in Education. 
 
 our teaching well there will be many ques- 
 tions asked that we cannot answer intel- 
 ligibly. As soon, for instance, as we reach 
 the family we get things impossible to ex- 
 plain ; and yet a notion even of marriage, 
 as a partnership the conditions of which 
 are to some extent settled by law, can be 
 given. Through the everyday life, some- 
 thing of which the child sees, we get to 
 money and work and wages and rent. We 
 define the notion of property. We must 
 be careful at first to avoid intricacy, and 
 we may even be obliged to suggest what 
 is not true, though, of course, doing so as 
 little as possible. All the first steps will 
 be slow ; but the fundamental facts are not 
 really difficult of apprehension. We shall 
 come in time to the government of the 
 village. In a certain English village a class 
 of little girls was once asked the question, 
 "Who governs the country?" The answer 
 unanimously given was, " The king." " But," 
 insisted the teacher, " who governs under 
 the king ? " This question puzzled some of
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 1 97 
 
 the children, but from others the answer 
 came pat : " The policeman." It was quite 
 a good answer, and we too when we come 
 to government should begin with the village 
 policeman. 
 
 All the buildings, roads, institutions, and 
 personages of the village are object-lessons. 
 We shall come to the church and the 
 parson, the post-office and the village coun- 
 cil. Even the squire will be useful in ex- 
 plaining the nature of property and rent. 
 Very soon we shall, by means of the roads, 
 be establishing connection with the nearest 
 market-town. There, if not earlier, we shall 
 meet the railway. All our roads, mental 
 and physical, will finally lead us to London, 
 and London we shall exhibit as the distant 
 centre where post-office, roads, railways, and 
 policemen all meet. We shall reach the 
 idea of a large community that includes 
 the village, and the idea of a central direct- 
 ing power. From the policeman we can 
 reach the king by way of justices of the 
 peace and the assize town. It might, in-
 
 198 Place of History in Education. 
 
 deed, be very difficult to teach on these 
 lines but that we should have under our 
 eyes all the things which we begin to 
 teach about. 
 
 Along with all this we should try to work 
 in the idea of the past and of change. We 
 should not, in the early stages, make any 
 attempt to go far back. We, in the year 
 1909, are in some respects very favourably 
 situated for bringing home the idea of 
 change to the minds of our children. Only 
 some eighty years ago, in the lifetime of 
 the child's grandfather, there were no rail- 
 ways. That simple fact alone should help 
 us a good deal. We ought to be able 
 easily to lead the child's mind from that 
 to other connected changes in those eighty 
 years. So, gradually, we can feel our way 
 towards a remoter past and vaster differ- 
 ences. In doing this, also, we shall find 
 things in or near the village to help us. 
 Even if our village church be a new one 
 there will be old churches, old houses, within 
 walking distance.
 
 Iutrodtictiou to Historical Study. 199 
 
 Once we have implanted the idea of a 
 very long past and of change upon change, 
 century after century, we can begin telling 
 stories that will mean something. If, at the 
 same time, the child is being grounded in 
 Iaii2;ua2;e and in the bare elements of 
 physics, and from his science teacher has 
 been getting at the notion of a very remote 
 past in which even the animals and plants 
 were different, and has been learning some- 
 thing of really elementary geography, we 
 shall have laid, finally, a good foundation 
 for strictly historical and, indeed, for all 
 other kinds of teaching. At about the age 
 of fourteen, if not earlier, we ought to be 
 able to begin teaching our children history 
 proper — that is, the history of all those 
 social arrangements about which they have 
 been learning all this time. 
 
 In the case of the children of our great 
 cities this sociological preparatory course is 
 not, perhaps, quite so simple a matter. 
 These great cities are so complex and pre- 
 suppose so much. Yet the difficulty is only
 
 200 Place of History in Education. 
 
 one of degree. And in London, at all 
 events, the teacher will have advantages 
 denied to every teacher elsewhere. For 
 here he has, under the eyes of his children, 
 the outward and visible signs of all the 
 central things — Houses of Parliament, Gov- 
 ernment offices, the Bank of England, as well 
 as magnificent monuments of the past from 
 Westminster Abbey downwards. 
 
 It may further be remarked that, even if 
 we occupied all the time up to the age of 
 fourteen with this sort of instruction, and 
 then stopped and so never got to formal 
 history -teaching at all, this would be in- 
 finitely better than the attempt to teach 
 history without any sort of introduction. 
 For we should have given the child some- 
 thing worth having in itself, and infinitely 
 more educative than a knowledge of the 
 names of a number of kings and other 
 distinguished persons, with their "dates," 
 and some excessively vague notion of their 
 doings. 
 
 When we do begin to teach history we
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 201 
 
 shall be able to start on right lines, already 
 implied in our preparatory course. The 
 child will really know what it is all about. 
 He will realise that he is being taught about 
 the way real people lived and managed their 
 common affairs in his own country a long 
 time ago. He will see it first of all 
 as the story of his own community in 
 the past. The idea of causation should be 
 introduced as early as possible, but there 
 must be no premature insistence on it. 
 The first sketch given of English history 
 should be a sketch of the main course of 
 change with regard to sequence in time 
 but with little insistence on causation. It 
 is essentially, of course, all a matter of 
 causal connections, but we must first give 
 a roughly accurate outline of what has to 
 be explained. It is possible that the ideally 
 best first course in English history for a 
 village child would concern itself mainly with 
 the history of the village, and for a town 
 child with that of the town. In any case, 
 and without doubt, it should at every step
 
 202 Place of History in Education. 
 
 try to make the child realise what the 
 central government and its revolutions meant 
 to the village. We certainly should not 
 begin by concentrating attention on those 
 far - away beings, the central authorities. 
 We want the child to know, as far as 
 possible, what the West Saxon king meant 
 to the West Saxon village. We do not in 
 the least want him to know whether a 
 particular king obtained his position by 
 murdering his brother or otherwise. We 
 want him to have some clear notion of the 
 distribution of property in the settlements 
 of the Saxons and of their modes of justice. 
 We do not need to make much use of 
 legends about Hengest and Horsa. We 
 want the child to have an idea of what 
 the establishment of the Christian Church 
 involved, and to learn something of the bishop 
 and his monasterium, and of how things 
 altered and of how the village church came 
 at last to be built. But just as it is the 
 kingliness of the king that we want and 
 not the king himself, so also we want not
 
 Introduction to Historical Study. 203 
 
 the bishop but his episcopacy. We do not 
 need chatter about Augustine or Paulinus. 
 We do not need to refer to these people at 
 all except as aids to the imagination. We 
 must fix the minds of the children not on 
 a few people here and there but on the 
 common life and the great changes of it. At 
 every step we should make all possible use 
 not only of illustrative tales, which may 
 be very useful, but of such monuments of 
 the past as lie scattered over our yet un- 
 spoiled country. We can only at this stage 
 get a bare outline ; but we want a good 
 large comprehensive outline first of all. 
 Later we shall have to go over it all again 
 with more detail and more explanations. 
 That filling in should commence after we 
 have begun to deal with European history 
 as a whole.
 
 204 
 
 XIV. 
 
 A FINAL DIFFICULY: THE POINT 
 OF VIEW. 
 
 History has this special disadvantage as a 
 subject for teaching, that the personal phil- 
 osophy of the teacher and his social, political, 
 or religious opinions bear upon the subject 
 taught. The teacher, say, of geometry, faces 
 no such difficulty. Whatever his religious 
 opinions may be they have no relation to 
 the properties of a circle. But our ideas 
 of good and evil, our ideas of what is 
 supremely important for individuals or for 
 societies, determine our ideas of progress 
 and so to a considerable extent the view 
 we take of the past life of man. We cannot 
 get away from ourselves, and if we have a 
 philosophy or a religion we must needs see
 
 A Final Difficulty. 205 
 
 the human past in the light of it. It 
 may fairly be argued that by making an 
 effort to divest ourselves of our real beliefs 
 in dealing with history we shall merely be 
 making an absurd pretence, and shall end 
 either by telling our pupils what we believe 
 to be untrue or by telling them nothing at 
 all. It is mere nonsense to say that we 
 should simply describe things as they were, 
 for this is the very question : how were they ? 
 Clearly we cannot answer this question by 
 any array of figures and names. 
 
 This subjective difficulty is evidently a 
 serious one for every historical teacher and 
 writer. To say this is not to say that it 
 constitutes an equally serious obstacle to the 
 progress of historical science. It is conceiv- 
 able that the long continued study of history 
 will gradually eliminate all errors arising from 
 the interference of personal opinion : though, 
 indeed, this sounds rather like saying that the 
 errors of oue writer will be corrected by the 
 errors of others. But for the moment we 
 may leave the larger question aside. For
 
 206 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the individual teacher, in the present state 
 of knowledge, there is a serious difficulty, and 
 the nature of it must be made clear. 
 
 History deals not with static things, like 
 ideal circles, but with action and movement. 
 We cannot be content to know only the 
 cause of movement; we want also to know 
 its direction. Everywhere in history the 
 mind seeks for signs of advance in some 
 sense and on the other hand for signs of 
 retrogression or decay. It cannot be asserted 
 that the search for such signs is not an his- 
 torical inquiry. But in all such inquiries 
 it is impossible to eliminate the personal 
 and unhistorical opinions of the inquirer. 
 He can only state what he sees. Whatever 
 exactly be his theory of progress he can only 
 apply it. If his philosophy show him pro- 
 gress in this or that direction, it will be 
 worse than useless falsification for him to 
 pretend that he does not see it. And it 
 may well be that no one, either on historical 
 or on any other grounds, can convict him 
 of error. So w r e reach rival views of the
 
 A Final Difficulty. 207 
 
 same facts, each of which may or may not 
 be correct. 
 
 Again, the importance of any fact may be 
 said to vary with the point of view of him 
 who sees it. In surveying the same group 
 of correlated facts one writer w T ill emphasise 
 this part of the group, another that. One 
 writer will see the key of the problem here 
 and another there. The relative values of 
 the different features of the group, the 
 perspective of the group as a whole, will 
 alter according as the point of view is Cath- 
 olic or Protestant, aristocratic or democratic 
 or what not. And it will be impossible to 
 determine the amount of truth or error in 
 each of the resulting and rival presenta- 
 tions without first determining all manner 
 of big and unhistorical questions. It might 
 be argued that, to judge of the truth of 
 any particular view of any particular period 
 of history, we need a complete synthetic 
 philosophy of the universe. 
 
 The teacher may, of course, try in practice 
 to distinguish between what is generally re-
 
 208 Place of History in Education. 
 
 cognised as knowledge and what is not. He 
 may say : Thus and thus it was, and more- 
 over, thus and thus it seems to me to have 
 been. In advanced teaching this must always 
 be done. But in elementary teaching, where 
 it is, perhaps, most needed, the distinction 
 may be difficult to make clear. 
 
 It is as well to commence inquiry into 
 the nature of this difficulty by overstating 
 it, as is done here. But the difficulty itself 
 requires illustration, though, indeed, all the 
 history books yet written are illustrations 
 of it in some degree. In spite of this fact, 
 I have resolved to try, by means of an 
 illustration, to bring out sharply the extent 
 and the kind of difference in the presenta- 
 tion of correlated facts that may be made 
 by an alteration of the point of view. To 
 do this I shall take what is called the 
 Keformation and treat it in a very summary 
 fashion from three different points of view 
 in turn. These three summary presenta- 
 tions that follow are not, it may be said, 
 intended to be minutely accurate any more
 
 A Final Difficulty. 209 
 
 than they are intended to be exhaustive. 
 They are intended to illustrate the kind of 
 exaggerations, the kind of understatements, 
 the kind of omissions consequent on the 
 adoption of unscientific points of view, as 
 well as the more profound discrepancies 
 arising from difference in the point of view. 
 They are intended, however, to be plausible. 
 This much may be added by way of pre- 
 face. This process of trying to see things 
 now from one point of view and now from 
 another is a necessary process in historical 
 thinking. Only it must be undertaken 
 deliberately and honestly, and you must 
 start by making it quite clear to yourself 
 what assumptions are involved in each 
 point of view taken. The endeavour to do 
 so will tend to clarify all your thought. 
 The greatest danger of thought is the 
 presence of unrecognised assumptions ; its 
 greatest difficulty is the detection and 
 definition of them.
 
 2IO 
 
 XV. 
 ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIFFICULTY. 
 
 THE PREFORMATION (a). 
 
 What we call the English Reformation of 
 the sixteenth century had its definite begin- 
 nings in the fourteenth. Whatever social 
 and intellectual service the earlier Church 
 had rendered, the Church of the fourteenth 
 century, at least in England, had already 
 become an obstructive organisation of privi- 
 lege and superstition. The clergy formed a 
 highly privileged class. Their crimes could 
 not be punished by the methods of common 
 law, and in fact were not punished in an 
 adequate manner : their property was sacred 
 to an extraordinary degree. Through its 
 special courts the Church exercised a legal 
 power of interference with ordinary lay life.
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 1 
 
 It claimed that its excommunication created 
 a kind of outlawry, and whether the state 
 practically recognised this or not, its ex- 
 communication might be held to invalidate 
 a marriage or a will. Questions concerning 
 the validity of marriages and of wills were 
 decided in the courts of the Church by a 
 law over which neither king nor Parliament 
 had any control. The canon lawyers had 
 elaborated a law of marriage which made it 
 at once dangerously easy to contract a 
 marriage and noxiously difficult to contract 
 one that could not be invalidated. It was 
 a system that produced a maximum of 
 inconvenience and injustice, and served no 
 obvious purpose save that of drawing busi- 
 ness to the Church courts. Already the 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction was detested, and 
 already the immunities of the clergy had 
 begun to seem absurd. The Church was 
 rich and its wealth was ill -distributed and 
 ill-applied. Most of it was in the hands of 
 bishops and chapters and a few great 
 monasteries. The Church had, indeed, failed
 
 2 1 2 Place of History in Education. 
 
 to establish its claim to immunity from 
 taxation ; but it was generally believed that 
 it escaped its proper share of the burden. 
 The bishops were practically secular mag- 
 nates, living in luxury, grasping, sometimes, 
 at power and wealth, statesmen, perhaps, 
 or great builders or patrons of learning — 
 anything rather than Christian pastors. And 
 the prelates of the Church tended to become 
 identified with the great baronial families. 
 The Church was fast losing that democratic 
 quality which, in the earlier middle ages, 
 it to some extent possessed, and which helps 
 to account for its earlier popularity. It was 
 becoming more and more difficult for the 
 poorly born man to rise high in the world 
 by taking orders. The doctrinal system of 
 the Church was already threadbare. It was 
 tending to become a system in which 
 personal religion disappeared in a system 
 of sacramental forms. The believer's part 
 was to conform, the Church's part to save 
 him. The Church possessed a monopoly of 
 the saving grace of God and dispensed it
 
 Illustration of the Diffictdty \ 213 
 
 for the profit of the clergy. The whole 
 system was bound up with doctrines having 
 no foundation either in reason or in the 
 Bible. More and more, in the fourteenth 
 and fifteenth centuries, Church doctrine took 
 forms calculated to draw money from the 
 faithful. The late doctrine of the treasury 
 of merits, the consequent late development 
 of the doctrine of indulgence, received the 
 approval of papal practice for obvious 
 reasons. More and more frankly the Church 
 traded on superstition. And while the 
 doctrinal system of the Church was being 
 thus degraded, its authorities were en- 
 deavouring more systematically than ever 
 to suppress thought and to silence criticism. 
 They set their faces against translations of 
 the Bible into the living vernaculars at the 
 very time when Latin was ceasing to be 
 a living language. Above and behind all 
 this is the Pope, immersed in petty French 
 or Italian interests, now the tool of the 
 King of France, now a triple-headed monster, 
 and always, from the English point of view,
 
 214 Place of History in Education. 
 
 an interfering foreigner. He claims and he 
 actually has the last word on many ques- 
 tions that concern the lives of English 
 people. He claims to be able to present 
 to English benefices and to tax the English 
 clergy. At best he is the head of an alien 
 jurisdiction, the champion of clerical privi- 
 lege : at worst he is John XXIII. or 
 Alexander VI. 
 
 So the English Reformation began with 
 the statutes of provisors, the attempt to 
 restrict appeals to Rome, the great prae- 
 munire statute of 1393, and the dissolution 
 of the alien priories. Popular feeling ex- 
 pressed itself in attacks on clerical property 
 and clerical privilege. Heresy grew and 
 spread, and the advanced Lollards denied 
 every doctrine that propped the actual 
 position of the clergy. It may well be 
 that only the anarchy into which England 
 fell in the fifteenth century prevented a 
 very destructive reformation of the Church 
 in that age. 
 
 At the commencement of the sixteenth cen-
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 5 
 
 tury the restored monarchy is fast developing 
 a practical absolutism. The Church is weaker 
 than ever. The nobles are powerless to 
 protect it, even if they would. It has lost 
 almost all its hold on the larger towns and 
 on the mind of the educated class. In the 
 higher classes even the most convinced 
 Catholics are disgusted with its indulgences, 
 its fraudulent miracles, and its spiritual clead- 
 ness. The clergy form a wealthy, privileged 
 body, whose privileges have few defenders, 
 and whose wealth is coveted. Monasticism 
 is dying : if the monasteries were not the 
 dens of iniquity that Henry VIII. tried to 
 make them out to be, at least they no 
 longer served the moral or spiritual purposes 
 of the age. They expressed no idealism but 
 that of the most backward and ignorant 
 minds. They were mere anachronistic 
 survivals, and they had to be destroyed 
 before the Church of England could be set 
 on a foundation at once national and 
 rational. 
 
 Not only has the religion of the Church
 
 2i6 Place of History in Education. 
 
 ceased to be the religion of the nation, but 
 for a long time past the Church has been 
 more and more visibly repressive of religion. 
 It has been identifying religion with the 
 incredible, and making rational forms of 
 religion impossible by suppressing them as 
 heresy. All over Western Europe the more 
 educated classes have been steadily drifting 
 into sheer paganism. What we call the 
 renaissance was a change in the mental tone 
 and attitude of the upper classes, to which 
 the Church had altogether failed to adjust 
 itself. 
 
 The growing national self - consciousness 
 demanded at once the suppression of clerical 
 privilege and the liberation of the English 
 Church from Eome. The Church had to be 
 nationalised, the clergy to be made subject 
 to the common law, the doctrinal system 
 of the Church had to be brought into some 
 degree of harmony with the best thought 
 of the time. The power to impose belief 
 and set limits to thought had to be made 
 one with the power of the State and used
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 7 
 
 for national purposes or not at all. The 
 religiousness of the people had to be 
 allowed to run into the forms natural to 
 it. The Bible, as the source of Christianity, 
 had to be disentangled from the net that 
 had, little by little, been woven about it 
 by interested hands. 
 
 Up to a certain point the change was 
 easy. It was easy to renounce the Pope 
 and to destroy clerical immunities, but new 
 forms for the religious consciousness were 
 not so easily arrived at ; there is friction 
 and muddle. Tradition dies hard, and the 
 gulf between the educated and the ignorant 
 is hard to bridge. The king is enormously 
 strong, and has his own views. So, under 
 Henry VIII. the Reformation is partial and 
 tentative. The arrangements made have, 
 in many respects, a merely provisional 
 character, and the whole movement is to 
 some extent perverted to base uses. Henry 
 is invested with dictatorial powers in re- 
 lation to religion and the Church, greater 
 even than those the Pope had claimed.
 
 218 Place of History in Education. 
 
 The old doctrinal system is, for the most 
 part, illogically maintained, and Henry 
 impartially beheads Catholics for treason, 
 and burns Protestants for heresy. 
 
 But already much is effected, and more 
 is implied. The denial of papal authority 
 involves the denial that there is any power 
 in England which can claim to restrain 
 thought and settle belief, save only the 
 power of the Crown, which is the power of 
 England itself. The State may and it will 
 still hold to the ideal of national unity in 
 religion ; it may and will prescribe forms 
 of worship and insist on conformity ; it 
 may treat opinion as crime, but, at all 
 events, there is no power but that of the 
 State to do these things ; and the State 
 can make no claim to pronounce finaHy as 
 to what is true and what untrue. Even 
 Henry VIII. does not claim infallibility. 
 The State may, and does, declare, " This 
 you must not deny or you shall be burnt " ; 
 it cannot declare, " This you must believe 
 or be damned." Here is a great step forward,
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 219 
 
 for these two assertions are quite different. 
 The Reformation abolishes for England an 
 authority which claims to suppress thought 
 in the interests of truth and for the salva- 
 tion of souls. Henceforth if there is to be 
 religious persecution, it will be based on 
 considerations of national order and security ; 
 there remains no other ground on which it 
 can stand. If the State is not yet ready to 
 concede a right of private judgment in 
 matters of religion, this is because it does 
 not feel it safe to do so. But it asserts its 
 own right of judgment, and in doing so it 
 implies the larger freedom. Legal religious 
 toleration is now certain to come ; it is a 
 mere matter of time and experience. 
 
 The merely transitional or accidental 
 features of the work of Henry VIII. dis- 
 appear in the Elizabethan settlement, which 
 completes it. Every one is now bound to 
 go to church and nonconformist congrega- 
 tional worship is criminal. But if you do 
 not go to church on any one proper occasion 
 you have only to pay a shilling fine, and
 
 220 Place of History in Education. 
 
 even if you attend nonconformist worship, 
 you cannot, at all events, be put to death 
 for so doing. Only a bare conformity is 
 required ; while, on the other hand, the 
 formularies of the Church are so drawn as 
 to be capable of subscription by all but 
 Romanists or extremists among Protestants. 
 The Elizabethan Prayer-book is a master- 
 piece of compromise, and its practical 
 excellence lies in its ambiguity. But, 
 ambiguous as it is, at least the medieval 
 doctrinal system is thrown overboard. Even 
 in those points in which it is not denounced 
 it receives no official sanction. Transubstan- 
 tiation is formally denounced ; but you may 
 lawfully believe in consubstantiation, just 
 as you may lawfully take a more thorough- 
 going Protestant view of the great sacrament. 
 If you are a layman the law has really 
 nothing to say to your views so long as 
 you outwardly conform. Within wide limits 
 thought is legally free. 
 
 Christianity is relieved of its handicap, 
 gets, in this sense, a fresh start and another
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 221 
 
 chance. It had been in danger of being 
 altogether lost under a fantastic super- 
 structure. Now, at least, one can go back 
 to the originals, to the gospels themselves ; 
 and one has them, lawfully, in English. 
 But there is more involved than this. 
 Henceforth religiousness in England is 
 bound to take a personal form. The 
 Elizabethan system, while it limits the 
 right of private judgment in practice, at 
 the same time, by the vagueness of its 
 formularies, calls for the exercise of it 
 within wide limits. There is no longer any 
 question of an infallible authority. You 
 must determine the detail of your beliefs 
 for yourself if you want them detailed. You 
 must work out your own salvation. No 
 priest can forgive your sins or save you 
 through ceremonies. You stand on your 
 own feet and there is no longer anything 
 that can claim to stand between you and 
 God. This change is the essence of the 
 Reformation.
 
 222 Place of History in Education. 
 
 THE REFORMATION (6). 
 
 Not to go still further back, we may say 
 that all through the middle ages the Church 
 was fighting for two great principles. In 
 the first place it maintained the supremacy 
 of the spiritual power over all things tem- 
 poral. The spiritual power was embodied in 
 the Church itself, an institution divinely 
 founded and divinely guided, at once the 
 repository and the interpreter of revelation, 
 the keeper of the sacred book that was the 
 light of the world. But behind and in- 
 volved in the assertion of the authority of 
 the Church was the assertion of an eternal 
 and absolute principle of right, before which 
 all mere legal and technical rights, all mere 
 temporal authorities, kings or magistrates, 
 must give way and to which they must be 
 conformed. This is the essential assertion of 
 the Church, that such a principle of right 
 exists, and the Church claims authority as 
 the appointed interpreter of that principle,
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 223 
 
 and on no other ground. Along with this 
 goes the assertion that there are certain 
 truths concerning the nature of man and 
 his relation to God, knowledge of which is 
 necessary to all souls if they would not be 
 lost in the dark wilderness of the universe. 
 Concerning these truths man has not been 
 left without a guide, and his guide is the 
 inspired Church, which is able to lead him 
 into all truth, whereas his unaided reason 
 can find no truth at all. 
 
 On these first assertions, that there is 
 knowledge necessary for salvation, that there 
 are eternal principles of right, and that the 
 Church is the inspired guardian of those 
 principles and of that knowledge, a second 
 great assertion is founded. It is that 
 Christendom, as such, is a natural unity, a 
 natural State, because in the Church all 
 Christendom is one. All Christian society 
 owns the same fundamental law, recognises 
 the same essential principles. Diversity of 
 laws, diversity of kingdoms and states, is 
 an evil, and indeed illogical. It exists only
 
 224 Place of History in Education. 
 
 because the nominally Christian world is 
 not really Christian. The triumph of the 
 Church will mean the union of Christendom 
 and ultimately of mankind. The Church is 
 working to establish the Divine State, Civitas 
 Dei, the Kingdom of God upon earth. The 
 end of that State is the highest good of 
 mankind : and this is life eternal in con- 
 formity with the will of God. The earthly 
 end of society is peace, " the peace of the 
 rational soul," as St Augustine put it ; an 
 ordered harmony in which man may con- 
 template and learn and draw nearer to God. 
 In the Christian Church, at last, all mankind 
 will be one ; all class distinctions and race 
 distinctions will be trivial, all rulers will be 
 servants and every serf a disciple of Christ. 
 This was the practical ideal to which the 
 Church pointed, and which it strove to im- 
 pose on men's minds. 
 
 But the Church failed to conquer, that 
 is, it failed to convert, the world. Every- 
 where the mass of people remained un- 
 believing, or only half believing, entangled
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 225 
 
 in their petty personal aims and needs. 
 Everywhere the upspringing of the good 
 seed was choked by the tares. To save 
 itself from being altogether secularised and 
 so destroyed, to prevent its clergy and 
 bishops from becoming hereditary or from 
 becoming mere nominees of secular magnates, 
 the Church was forced to forbid its clergy 
 marriage and to centralise its authority in 
 the Pope. It was forced to insist on immu- 
 nity for its clergy from the jurisdiction of lay 
 courts, because these courts represented prin- 
 ciples more or less antagonistic to those of the 
 Church, and because the Church could not 
 admit the supremacy of a law it did not itself 
 sanction. It was forced to claim immunity 
 from taxation because power to tax is power 
 to destroy. To have admitted the supremacy 
 of mere state - made law would have been 
 an abandonment of the essential principles 
 of the Church. It would have been to 
 accept the division of Christendom, and to 
 have acknowledged that the State, as such, 
 is the judge of its own rights. The Church 
 
 p
 
 226 Place of History in Education. 
 
 could no more admit the supremacy of the 
 medieval state than the early Christian 
 could sacrifice to Csesar. It was, in fact, 
 the old question in a new form. 
 
 But, of course, the Church failed. The 
 growth of the national states rent Europe 
 and the Church in pieces. The dream of a 
 European unity faded in face of the plain 
 impossibility of its realisation. Already in 
 the fifteenth century the inter -state right 
 asserted by the medieval Church is becoming 
 the right of every state to take all it can get. 
 The Church's ideal of peace is replaced by 
 Machiavelli's grim implication — asserted later 
 in so many words by Hobbes — that the 
 natural relation between any two states is 
 one of war. Justice becomes law, and the 
 law of a legislative power over which the 
 Church has little or no control. As the 
 national states define themselves, the Church 
 becomes more and more disorganised. Its 
 disintegration begins long before the Refor- 
 mation. The clergy themselves are infected 
 by that national sentiment which is the
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 227 
 
 mother of schisms. The local Churches 
 begin to think of themselves as national ; 
 the bishops, forgetting Anselm and Becket, 
 become servants of the king. Heresy in- 
 creases and paganism revives. As early as 
 the beginning of the fourteenth century a 
 French king has the audacity to try to make 
 of the Papacy an instrument for the advance- 
 ment of French monarchy. In pagan fif- 
 teenth-century Italy, the Pope himself tends 
 to become a pagan. In the general failure 
 of faith the Church loses faith also. This is 
 the fault of the Church, that it lost faith and 
 forsook its ideal. 
 
 The Eeformation is the nemesis, but a 
 nemesis not only for the Church but for all 
 the peoples of Western Europe. The Church 
 had pointed the way to a European hege- 
 mony : the peoples refused to follow it. The 
 Church had upheld the supremacy of the 
 things of the spirit, and Europe followed 
 after the flesh. It is the nemesis of failure 
 in idealism, of narrow views, of racial feeling, 
 of irrational dislikes and jealousies, of short-
 
 228 Place of History in Education. 
 
 sightedness and a petty mind. The Church 
 is torn in pieces. What takes its place? 
 There is nothing to take its place. Europe 
 becomes an anarchy of immitigably hostile 
 states. 
 
 If it were good for man that Europe 
 should be split into a series of independent 
 warring states, bound together by no prin- 
 ciple, acknowledging no superior, making 
 each a god of its own material interests, 
 recognising no higher law, taking The Prince 
 for its gospel, and, true to its principles, 
 denouncing its prophet, then the failure of 
 the Church, of which the Reformation is 
 the issue, was, without doubt, good for man. 
 At the Reformation the European states 
 finally declared and established their inde- 
 pendence. In doing so they had to abandon 
 far more than a dream of European unity. 
 They forswore the principle of right as 
 between state and state : they disowned 
 religion itself. The nations asserted that 
 state rights and state interests, as such, are 
 primary and above all other considerations.
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 229 
 
 But the interest of a state, as such, is not 
 the good of mankind, nor anything that 
 can be called the salvation of souls. The 
 Reformation marks the triumph of the prin- 
 ciple of competition in inter-state relations. 
 In denying the authority of the Church the 
 nations denied the existence of national 
 obligation and disabled Christianity itself. 
 
 It is matter of course that they did 
 not, at the time, know that they were 
 doing these things. Protestantism repre- 
 sents an attempt to reconcile Christianity 
 with the absolutism of the State. The 
 futility of such an attempt would have 
 been obvious but for the strength of the 
 desires and interests it subserved. The 
 whole history of Protestantism goes to 
 prove that Christianity stood or fell with 
 the Church. From the outset the Protestant 
 churches had no rational basis. They started 
 by repudiating their only possible basis — 
 the authority and tradition of the Church 
 itself. They appealed from the Church to 
 the Bible, ignoring the fact that without
 
 230 Place of History in Education. 
 
 the Church there is no Bible at all. It 
 was the Church which had selected those 
 Greek and Hebrew books which make up 
 the Bible. If belief in their inspiration 
 did not rest on the authority of the 
 Church, upon what did it rest ? To repudi- 
 ate the authority of the Church was, in 
 the long-run, inevitably, to repudiate the 
 Bible also. It was natural that men who 
 had been brought up as Christians, and 
 were, indeed, actually Christians, should fail 
 to see that they were logically bound to re- 
 pudiate Christianity along with the Church. 
 They clutched at the Bible as a drowning 
 man clutches at a straw. Soon the deep 
 waters closed over them. Ever since the 
 Reformation the Protestant churches have 
 been drifting towards latitudinarianism, uni- 
 tarianism, agnosticism, and the drift away 
 from Christianity has only been partially 
 arrested by the desire to retain the endow- 
 ments and privileges they secured by their 
 surrender to the State. 
 
 The Christian Church had begun by defy-
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 231 
 
 ing Caesar. It refused to admit that the 
 will of Caesar made absolute law ; it asserted 
 a higher law to which that will must con- 
 form itself. All through the centuries that 
 followed the collapse of the Eoman Empire 
 the Church was striving to establish that 
 higher law. But in the sixteenth century, 
 over a great part of Europe, at last the 
 Church surrenders. It does sacrifice to 
 Csesar. Henceforth its ideals are those of 
 the State, which defines its doctrine, limits 
 its action, pays its ministers, appoints its 
 bishops. The reformers had fondly imagined 
 they were releasing it from bondage to the 
 Pope ! 
 
 The Reformation, it is true, was not 
 wholly destructive. What it helped to build 
 or to strengthen was, however, simply the 
 modern state. Calvinism, indeed, tried to 
 escape the inevitable by a new identification 
 of Church and State, by establishing a gov- 
 ernment of the righteous, a reign of the 
 saints. But such identification as it 
 aimed at proved in the long-run to be
 
 232 Place of History in Education. 
 
 impossible, and Calvinism directly produced 
 nothing, politically, but short-lived and re- 
 actionary tyrannies. 
 
 If one looks at England in particular, the 
 destructive, the illogical, the irreligious 
 character of the Reformation is there as 
 apparent as everywhere else ; the State is 
 the only gainer. There is a political and 
 legal and social change of great importance : 
 and it is essentially political, legal, and 
 social. The government plunders the Church 
 of its property, turns its bishops into royal 
 officials, assumes power to dictate doctrine 
 and settle ritual as it pleases, and bribes 
 the landowning class with the spoil of the 
 monasteries. The destruction of the monas- 
 teries involves not merely much temporary 
 misery, but the loss of a series of magnifi- 
 cent monuments of medieval art, the aesthetic 
 value of which it is permissible to regard 
 as greater than that of all the art work of 
 the renaissance. Finally, the Elizabethan 
 compromise is arranged, and the best its 
 apologists seem able to say for it is that it
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 233 
 
 involved an approach to state toleration in 
 religion, and that its formularies were so 
 vague as to mean practically nothing. It 
 is described as a masterly compromise which 
 saved the country from civil war ; but, in 
 fact, it did not even do that : the civil war 
 came less than a hundred years later. In 
 any case what gain is there for religion or 
 for thought ? You get a Church the 
 " articles " of which favour Protestantism, 
 but are so worded that a not too consistent 
 Catholic can say he believes them ; the 
 liturgy of which tries to look as though it 
 were Catholic and does not dare to be so ; 
 the rubrics of which are so vague and con- 
 fused that no one has ever been able to be 
 sure of what precisely they mean. And 
 doctrine, liturgy, and rubrics alike are at 
 the mercy of Parliament. 
 
 It is claimed that the Reformation, 
 indirectly but necessarily, freed thought 
 and led to the establishment of legal religious 
 toleration. Very indirectly was it so, if at 
 all. The dogmatism of the reformers was
 
 234 Place of History in Education. 
 
 at least as great as that of the Church. "It 
 is certain," wrote Luther, "that whoever 
 does not hold with me will be damned 
 eternally." In England, toleration was the 
 result not of the Reformation but of the 
 great struggle of the seventeenth century. 
 Its establishment involved the breakdown of 
 the Elizabethan system. As a matter of 
 fact, the Reformation led everywhere to 
 religious persecution. Under Wolsey, books 
 were burnt, but not men. It was the 
 Reformation that brought into fashion the 
 burning of heretics. The State assumes 
 absolute control of the Church, and heresy 
 logically becomes a crime against the State. 
 Toleration was in no real sense a result 
 of the efforts of the religious reformers of 
 the sixteenth century. It resulted simply 
 from the discovery, through bitter experience, 
 that national unity in religion was unat- 
 tainable and that the effort to attain it 
 involved chronic civil war. It had always 
 been the State which burned heretics when 
 they were burned, — and this not merely
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 235 
 
 in a technical sense but for its own pur- 
 poses. Wycliffe died in his bed in spite of 
 papal anathema and prosecution ; and if 
 later Lollards were burned it was rather 
 as dangerous social revolutionaries than 
 as heretics. Protestants habitually attribute 
 to the Church much for which the Church 
 as such was in no way responsible. They 
 refer one to the Spanish Inquisition ! But 
 the Spanish Inquisition was a state -made, 
 state-controlled machine, established in de- 
 fiance of the Pope and used to destroy the 
 freedom of the Church itself and to increase 
 the royal power in Spain. The real fact, 
 indeed, is that the Spanish Inquisition was 
 an essentially Protestant institution. 
 
 The only religious revival of the sixteenth 
 century of any value in the long-run was 
 the Catholic revival expressed in the re- 
 formed Papacy, the Jesuits and the Coun- 
 cil of Trent. On the religious side the 
 Reformation was the Counter-Reformation.
 
 236 Place of History in Education. 
 
 THE REFORMATION (c). 
 
 People brought up in a Protestant tradi- 
 tion are especially likely to find it difficult 
 to understand the Keformation. They are 
 taught from the outset to regard the 
 Reformation as having essentially consisted 
 in the development of the various forms of 
 Protestantism. But the complex body of 
 changes which we roughly summarise as 
 " the Reformation " can never be understood 
 on this theory. The common and popular 
 error in dealing with what is called 
 the Reformation consists in starting from 
 an assumption that the Reformation was 
 primarily and essentially concerned with 
 religion and religious systems of thought. 
 The Reformation, we are told, was a rebellion 
 against Catholic doctrine or against the 
 claims of the Pope. It was a restatement 
 of Christianity, a return to the Bible or a re- 
 turn to the early Church. It was an assertion 
 of essential Christianity as against a barbarous
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 237 
 
 and fantastic travesty. By persons less in- 
 clined to lay stress on the importance of dog- 
 matic religion, we are told that the Reformation 
 was in the main a moral revolt, a revolt 
 against iniquity in high places, an assertion 
 that personal righteousness is the one thing 
 needful. All such statements equally miss 
 the main point. The Reformation was 
 neither essentially religious nor essentially 
 moral. It might be more true to say that 
 it was essentially non-moral and irreligious. 
 It was, in truth, essentially social and 
 political. 
 
 The collapse of the Roman Empire involved 
 a period of chaos. For a long time life, 
 property, and institutions were alike ex- 
 tremely insecure. But at every moment 
 there is a striving after order and security. 
 As the social settlements become definitive, 
 as the great immigrations of barbarians 
 cease, the struggle becomes more hopeful. 
 There is, as a matter of course, talk of 
 reviving the Roman Empire. Efforts are 
 even deliberately made to that end. But
 
 238 Place of History in Education. 
 
 all such talk was nonsensical. Difficulties 
 of transport and communication, difficulties 
 of language and racial habit and law, made 
 any sort of European fusion or order an 
 impossibility. Order and security could only 
 be established from a number of independent 
 centres. All efforts to create a central control 
 for Christendom ended by merely creating 
 friction and increasing disorder. The Roman 
 Empire of the middle ages was a mere fiction, 
 a dream with hardly the substance of a 
 dream. But the Hildebrandine dream of 
 a Christendom united in the Church was 
 equally a baseless vision. It had no real 
 relation to the facts. To think of Christen- 
 dom as such as a natural state was to be 
 the victim of a grossly exaggerated notion 
 of the power and place of religion in the 
 life of man. Christendom was itself a fiction. 
 In no profound religious sense was Europe 
 ever Christian at all. Had all Europe desired 
 what Hildebrand desired, something might 
 have been achieved ; though even then 
 difficulties of transit and of language would
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 239 
 
 have proved an insurmountable barrier to 
 any effectual union. But as very few people 
 indeed really desired anything of the sort, 
 the ideal of the Papacy was almost as mere 
 a dream as that of the Empire. 
 
 Nevertheless, the Church for a long time 
 served the cause of law and order. It gave 
 a new moral sanction to law, it gave its aid 
 to secular powers struggling to keep the 
 peace, it consecrated the king, it upheld an 
 ideal of order and unity and peace, it helped 
 to keep Latin as the language of Christendom. 
 By performing these and other services it 
 acquired wealth and privilege, jurisdictions 
 and immunities and an international recos- 
 nition. But the monarchies, or some of 
 them, outgrew the Church. They became 
 strong enough to stand on their own feet 
 without the crutches of religion. They began 
 to treat the Church as its superiors and to 
 try to master it. Gradually, from the point 
 of view of the growing secular monarchies, 
 the Church becomes an obstruction in the 
 path, a hindrance to co-operation, a restraint
 
 240 Place of History in Education. 
 
 on the action of the central power. There is 
 a long struggle. People have spoken of 
 WyclifTe as the "morning star of the Refor- 
 mation," or declared that the Reformation 
 began for England in the fourteenth century. 
 These ideas arise merely from the Protestant 
 association of the Reformation with doctrinal 
 systems adverse to that of Rome. The 
 Reformation had begun for England when 
 Henry II. drew up the Constitutions of 
 Clarendon ; it had begun when Henry I. 
 defeated or successfully evaded the vast 
 undefined claims that underlay the opposition 
 of Anselm ; it had begun when William I. 
 ruled that his barons were not to be excom- 
 municated by the Pope without his leave 
 given. The Reformation is merely the final 
 and decisive phase of an age-long struggle 
 between the secular and the ecclesiastical 
 powers. 
 
 The sixteenth century is the age of the 
 definitive triumph of the national monarchies 
 and of the secular power in all its forms, 
 in West Europe generally. That definitive
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 24 1 
 
 victory is the Reformation. Or if this way 
 of putting the fact be regarded as too 
 flagrantly at variance with the common use 
 of the term, then we must say that the 
 Reformation, the strictly " religious " Refor- 
 mation, is merely a comparatively unim- 
 portant aspect of this victory of the secular 
 power. Everywhere the Reformation meant 
 a nationalisation or at least a secularisation 
 of the Church. To associate it with Pro- 
 testantism is merely misleading. It had 
 really only an accidental and circumstantial 
 connection either with Protestantism or with 
 Catholicism. It took place, in greater or 
 less degree, in Catholic and Protestant 
 countries alike. Francis I.'s concordat with 
 the Pope in 1516, whereby the appointment 
 of all bishops in France was given to the 
 Crown and his Ordinance of Villers Coterets 
 in 1539, curtailing ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 
 involved changes exactly similar to those 
 effected by Henry VIII. in England. In 
 Protestant Germany the princes secularise — 
 that is to say, appropriate — church property, 
 
 Q
 
 242 Place of History in Education. 
 
 dissolve the monasteries, subject the clergy 
 to their tribunals, turn the bishops into 
 nominees of their own. But Ferdinand 
 of Austria equally dissolves monasteries 
 and appropriates the property, and every 
 " Catholic " German prince went as far as he 
 dared in the same direction. In Spain the 
 king established control over his clergy by 
 means of the Inquisition, and nothing but 
 Protestant tradition prevents us from seeing 
 the Inquisition as the great instrument of 
 the Reformation in Spain. The so - called 
 Protestant states are merely those in which 
 the subjugation of the Church by the secular 
 power is most complete and most formal. 
 
 In all this religion as such plays a very 
 small part. The closer you get to the 
 facts of the Reformation in any country, 
 the less you will see of religion as a factor 
 therein. Princes follow the lines of least 
 resistance and are Protestant or Catholic 
 as circumstances dictate. Is there a single 
 instance of a "Protestant" prince whose 
 interests were not bound up with the
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 243 
 
 triumph of Protestantism, or of a prince 
 remaining Catholic in spite of his interests? 
 It is indeed probably true that every 
 "Catholic" prince in Germany, except the 
 emperor, would have become " Protestant " 
 had he dared. On the whole the sovereigns 
 of Europe were inclined to Protestantism, 
 because it enabled them to plunder the 
 Church and to efface it as an obstacle. 
 Francis I. patronised Protestantism just as 
 long as he felt it safe to do so. But in 
 France Protestantism became identified with 
 provincial separatism, and so prevented the 
 Reformation from going further than it did go. 
 But it is not a question of the princes 
 only. With the masses it was at bottom 
 the same. The " religious opinions " of the 
 masses were, as they always are, determined 
 not by religious aspirations or by contro- 
 versy, but by local needs and convenience. 
 Protestantism became the religion of all those 
 to whom, for all manner of circumstantial 
 reasons, Protestantism was convenient. In 
 city after city Protestantism appears merely
 
 244 Place of Histo/y in Education. 
 
 as the last phase of an age-long struggle 
 against its bishop. Geneva became the 
 very capital of Protestantism ; but it was 
 so even at Geneva. For an age past the 
 city had been struggling against its bishop's 
 claims to sovereignty. In the early six- 
 teenth century the bishop, unable any 
 longer to maintain his claim without as- 
 sistance from without, had obtained the 
 support of the Duke of Savoy. The object 
 of the Duke was of course to establish 
 himself as sovereign in the city. The re- 
 public was hard pressed. That under these 
 circumstances it should become Protestant 
 is a mere matter of course. On the one 
 hand the bishop's claims could be far more 
 radically and effectively dealt with on a 
 Protestant than on a Catholic basis ; on 
 the other, the support of the Protestant 
 Swiss cantons against the Duke of Savoy 
 could not be easily obtained on other 
 terms. So, and for no other reason, Geneva 
 became Protestant. Is any one prepared 
 seriously to maintain that the Geneva popu-
 
 Illustration of the Difficulty. 245 
 
 lace was won over by the sheer power of 
 the word of Farel or of Calvin ? Their 
 preaching prevailed because its pratical drift 
 coincided with the desires of the citizens 
 of Geneva. Calvin's dictatorship at Geneva 
 is essentially similar to the "tyranny" 
 established in some hard - pressed Italian 
 city in the fourteenth century. 
 
 Protestantism is in fact a mere by-pro- 
 duct of the Reformation. It is an attempt 
 to readjust religious conceptions to a new 
 political and social order. The medieval 
 system of society, already for long broken 
 up and disorganised, is being violently swept 
 away, and various religious systems emerge 
 as by-products of the revolution or as neces- 
 sities of the new conditions. In themselves 
 they involve no kind of intellectual advance. 
 
 Nor is there much truth in the assertion 
 that Protestantism made for religious tolera- 
 tion. The first effect of the Reformation 
 was to make toleration impossible and to 
 produce persecutions on a scale and of a 
 severity impossible under the earlier system.
 
 246 Place of History in Education. 
 
 Yet on this point, too, much popular mis- 
 conception exists. It may fairly be said 
 that there never was such a thing as re- 
 ligious persecution. No government, that 
 is, ever persecuted a religion from a zeal for 
 truth or for the sake of the salvation of 
 souls. Men would have to be very much 
 more religious than they have ever been 
 to make religious persecution possible. So- 
 called religious persecutions are the outcome 
 of political and social conflicts in which 
 religion is the merest incident. The greatest 
 "religious persecutions" Europe has known 
 were an outcome of the Reformation.
 
 247 
 
 XVI. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Historical truth is a highly complex thing ; 
 and partly because of its complexity, partly 
 for lack of evidence, it can never be given 
 anything like complete definition. From 
 any point of view you may catch a partial 
 glimpse, you may see a real aspect of the 
 many-sided, indefinable fact. But a partial 
 truth is not a truth. It is in fact what 
 Dr Johnson would have called a lie. Before 
 truth is attained all our partial glimpses 
 have to be combined in a single, complex, 
 and comprehensive statement. But views so 
 contradictory as those expressed in the fore- 
 going statements concerning the Reformation 
 cannot be logically combined. Are we 
 doomed, by the constitution of our minds,
 
 248 Place of History in Education. 
 
 to arrive at nothing but a series of " views " 
 which will not combine and yet which can- 
 not, severally, be convicted of falsehood? 
 
 Which of these three ways, for instance, of 
 looking at the facts of the Reformation is 
 the right one ? We may say at once that 
 we do not know and that, as historians, we 
 do not care. From the historian's point of 
 view all three statements are manifestly in 
 the wrong. It is not that they suffer from 
 over - emphasis or from compression. The 
 emphasis is deliberate and the compression 
 is unavoidable. Our objection to them is 
 not based on their numerous sins of omission 
 or of commission in detail. We object to 
 them simply because they are essentially 
 unhistorical statements. All three involve 
 assumptions as to what is good for mankind, 
 in the mass or individually, which, whether 
 justified or not, lie far beyond the scope of 
 historical inquiry. The assumption that the 
 liberation of religious thought or the religious 
 sense is supremely important, the assumption 
 that the recognition of a higher law than that
 
 Conclusion. 249 
 
 of the State is supremely important, the 
 assumption that the difference between 
 religious opinions is the difference between 
 Tweedledum and Tweedledee, to all these 
 and all similar assumptions history has 
 nothing whatever to say. They are, from 
 the historian's point of view, pure irrelevan- 
 cies. When from these three " views " of 
 the Reformation we have eliminated all such 
 irrelevancies, we shall probably find that 
 they are susceptible of reconciliation. 
 
 Every science has a borderland. When we 
 come to determine the importance a par- 
 ticular change has for humanity we have 
 reached the absolute frontier of history ; 
 and, as historians, there we must stop. If 
 we do not stop there, we shall inevitably set 
 about answering the question by means of 
 considerations which may or may not be 
 philosophically sound, but which are certainly 
 unhistorical. We have reached the point 
 at which history begins to merge into some- 
 thing larger. In every science it is the 
 same : you come to a point at which your
 
 250 Place of History in Education. 
 
 inquiry becomes part of a question which 
 does not wholly belong to your science. 
 History can and will throw light on these 
 questions as to what constitutes progress for 
 humanity. It cannot pretend to resolve 
 them save in an arbitrarily limited sense. 
 History is essentially concerned with change 
 and the causes of change. With the direc- 
 tion of change it is concerned only so far 
 as this can be determined by purely histori- 
 cal inquiries. 
 
 " If," some one will probably say, " we 
 are to study causation simply, and in doing 
 so are to suppress as irrelevant all our 
 notions of what is good and what is evil 
 in the largest sense, how are we ever to 
 discriminate between what is important 
 and what is not ? We shall have no 
 measure of values at all. Every measure 
 of value implies a philosophy of life. Would 
 you have us assume that all changes are 
 equally important ? In that case we can 
 go as we please and history becomes a 
 mere chaos."
 
 Conclusion. 251 
 
 It has already been pointed out that it 
 would be worse than useless for any indivi- 
 dual inquirer to suppress his honest and 
 carefully considered impression of the truth. 
 Any attempt to justify such procedure would 
 be mere sophistry. It is not by any kind 
 of pretences that truth is to be won. But 
 the implications of the question as above 
 put are unjustifiable. The conception of 
 historical science itself implies a measure 
 of values quite apart from our personal 
 philosophies. In the first place a social fact 
 or a social change is important in proportion 
 to the extent of its action and results includ- 
 ing its whole duration in time. But apart 
 from this we have another measure aris- 
 ing from general agreement as to the funda- 
 mental importance of certain human needs, 
 of which the need for food is the most 
 absolute. An historical phenomenon, we 
 may say, is important as it affects common 
 needs and in proportion to the extent and 
 duration of its effects upon them. The 
 measure is not, of course, exact, and it is far
 
 252 Place of History in Education. 
 
 from comprehensive. Once we get beyond 
 the needs that are really fundamental, 
 "need" becomes matter of opinion. But 
 of " needs " not generally recognised the 
 historian as such must beware. 
 
 But there exist other and more compre- 
 hensive historical measures of value. The 
 idea of progress may have reference to the 
 individual or to states, nations, or races, or 
 to humanity in the gross. The individual 
 history has only to consider as a factor, and 
 with his " happiness " or his moral elevation 
 it is totally unconcerned. The progress of 
 a state or nation history will measure by 
 reference to survival, to proof of fitness, to 
 energy, security, and domination. But history 
 has also its own idea of progress for humanity, 
 and in this idea it finds a comprehensive 
 measure of value. The historical idea of 
 progress must at bottom be an historical 
 generalisation. It must be wide enough 
 to include all the known facts of man's 
 development and it must be established 
 beyond doubt. It can have no connection
 
 Conclusion, 253 
 
 with religious or ethical systems or ideas 
 of happiness. There are two respects in 
 which, reckoning from the Stone Age, man 
 may be said, without doubt, to have advanced. 
 He has advanced in 'knowledge and he has 
 advanced in power. Nor need we, in so 
 saying, shrink from using the word advance 
 as meaning something more than increase. 
 In so using it we are, indeed, making an 
 assumption that does not stand beyond the 
 reach of criticism. Yet, provisionally and 
 as a working hypothesis, we may fairly 
 make it, since the general sense of civilised 
 mankind will be with us in so doing. Man 
 has advanced in knowledge and in power, 
 and the two movements are not the same. 
 For power comes not only of knowledge 
 but also of co - operation, and co - operation 
 does not come wholly of knowledge but 
 depends also on moral factors. Let the 
 historian therefore fix his mind on these 
 two things and fearlessly measure all change 
 by reference to them. This measure he may 
 use fearlessly because it is incontrovertibly
 
 254 Place of History in Education. 
 
 based on history itself. Progress in other 
 senses or in some yet larger sense there 
 may be, but with that he has no concern. 
 If history is to play the part in progress 
 which it yet may play it must begin by 
 recognising its limitations.
 
 255 
 
 XVII. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 It is only by assuming the existence of a 
 system of education, at least ideally, that 
 we can assign to History or to any other 
 subject any " place " in education at all. A 
 system implies a theory. Where there is a 
 theory there will be a system, even though 
 no public money be spent upon it : and 
 where there is no theory there can be no 
 system, though we spend millions a -year 
 from rates or taxes upon machinery. If 
 we had a number of co- existing and rival 
 systems, then History might have a place 
 in each of them, and if so, it would be, in 
 each case, a different place. But it is only 
 on a theory of education, based on a theory 
 of values, that we can determine the place
 
 256 Place of History in Education. 
 
 in education of anything. It is really im- 
 possible to discuss the place of History in 
 education except in reference to a theory 
 of what education should do. We might, 
 indeed, content ourselves with pointing out 
 that History may do this, that, or the other 
 for the mind, according as you deal with 
 it. A book of considerable size might be 
 written on these lines. It would be a 
 waste of paper. 
 
 When one has succeeded in reading a 
 book through, it is generally necessary to 
 complete the process by asking oneself 
 what it has all been about. This is a 
 question that may well be asked by authors 
 as well as by readers. What is it that we 
 have been discussing? Here, in England, 
 we have no system of education. Have we, 
 then, been trying to determine the " place " 
 of History not in education, as we set out 
 to do, but in cosmic space ? 
 
 A system of education can only be based 
 on agreement as to values. It must allow 
 for difference, but it must be founded on
 
 Postscript. 257 
 
 agreement. On our agreements a system 
 might be built, and perhaps is being built. 
 It is the place of History in such an hypo- 
 thetical system that we have been discuss- 
 ing. We have tried to reach a basis of 
 agreement below all controversies. Just as 
 the teacher of History is bound to dis- 
 tinguish between his personal philosophy 
 and his positive knowledge, so the educa- 
 tionalist is bound to suppress his own inti- 
 mate opinions and try to dig down to the 
 level of values generally recognised. Only 
 at that depth can safe foundations be laid. 
 
 If we, collectively, had a religion, many 
 other problems would be solved besides the 
 problem of religious education. Actually 
 the problem of religious education is not 
 an educational problem. We have conflict- 
 ing religions and we have no religion, and 
 our problem is to reconcile interests rather 
 than philosophies. Whichever it be, the 
 problem is not educational. But if we had 
 a religion, not only would our present diffi- 
 culty about religious education disappear,
 
 258 Place of History in Education. 
 
 but our difficulties about the place of His- 
 tory in education would, for the most 
 part, also disappear. For a religion is a 
 belief concerning the cosmos which deter- 
 mines our sense of values. It is not clear 
 that any completely satisfying system of 
 education can be founded on anything 
 smaller than a religion. It may be argued 
 that we can never solve any of our educa- 
 tional problems till the religious difficulty 
 has disappeared. In any case, provisionally, 
 there is but one thing to do. We must dig 
 down below our controversies and found our 
 system on our agreements. It may be that 
 we shall find these insufficient to bear any 
 very lofty or weighty structure. It may 
 even be that they will bear nothing but a 
 makeshift, temporary structure of planks — 
 a system of technical education. But it 
 will be well to make sure that they will 
 not bear more. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
 
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