09-09-2005, 10:31 PM
But if the literary side of humanism has been a barrier to the progress of scientific history, the discovery and elucidation of texts first made that progress possible. Historical criticism soon awoke. Laurentius Vallas brilliant attack on the Dona. tion of Constantine (1440), and TJlrich von Huttens rehabilitation of Henry IV. from monkish tales mark the rise of th new science. One sees at a glance what an engine of controversy it was to be; yet for a while it remained but a phase oi humanism. It was north of the Alps that it parted company witl~ the grammarians. Classical antiquity was an Italian past, thi German scholars turned back to the sources of their nationa history. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had discovere Otto of Freising and Jordanes. Maximilian I. encouraged thi search for manuscripts, and Vienna became a great humanistic centre. Conrad Celtes left his Germania illus-trata unfinished, but he had found the works of Hroswitha. Conrad Peutinger gathered all sorts of Chronicles in his room in Vienna, and published several,among them Gregory of Tours. This national movement of the 15th century was not paralleled in France or England, where the classical humanities reigned. The Reformation meanwhile gave another turn to the work of German scholars.
The Reformation, with its heated controversies, seems a strange starting-point for science, yet it, even more than the Renaissance, brought out scientific methods of historical investigation. It not only sobered the humanist tendency to sacrifice truth for aesthetic effect, it called for the documents of the Church and subjected them to the most hostile criticism. Luther himself challenged them. Then in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-1574) Protestantism tried to make good its attack on the medieval Church by a great collection of sources accompanied with much destructive criticism. This gigantic work is the first monument of modern historical research. The reply of Cardinal Baronius (Annales ecclesiastici, I 5881697) was a still greater collection, drawn from archives which till then had not been used for scientific history. Baronius criticism and texts are faulty, though far surpassing anything before his day, and his collection is the basis for most subsequent ones,in spite of J. J. Scaligers refutation, which was to contain an equal number of volumes of the errors in Baronius.
The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (I 5351573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Meichior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of correcting them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.
France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilians Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andr Duchesne (1584 1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (Met hodus ad facilem /zistoriarum cognitionens, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Moliere, returning home under the grey walls of St Germaindes-Prs, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc dAchery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martne, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product Jean Mabillons treatise, Dc re diplomatica (1681), was due tc the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose Acid Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (1643, &c., see BOLLANDISTSJ was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebrochs criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared thi~ manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons ar the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomati (q.v), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rule~ by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieva documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments. The great glossary of Ducange is still in enlarged editions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chronology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucons Palaeographia graeca (1708), the monumental Art de verifier les dates (3rd ed., 1818 183 I, in 38 vols.), and the Nouveau Trait de diplomatique (1750-1765) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographic historique, pp. 293 if.). Dom Bouquets Historiens de la Gaule et de Ia Francethe national repertory for French historians is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrustworthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old rgime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the fgth century, and the roll of honor of the French cole des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St- Germaindes-Prs.
The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collection of sources (Rerum Italicarum scriptores), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, produced no national collection of sources during the x7th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.
England in the 16th century kept pace with Continental historiography. Henry VIII.s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of medieval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian at Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi at Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection of the British Museum). In Elizabeths reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than fifteen repositories. In. the 17th and 18th centuries English scholarship was enriched by such monuments of research as ~Villiam Dugdales Monasticon, Thomas Madoxs History of the Exchequer, Wilkinss Concilia, and Thomas Rymers Feed era. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the f9th century was to reveal in England.
In the i9th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. The, result of this movement has been to revolutionize the whole subject. These men of the factory-devoting their lives to the cataloguing of archives and libraries, to the publication of material, and then to the gigantic task of indexing what they have produced-have made it possible for the student in an American or Australian college to master in a few hours in his library sources of history which baffled the long years of research of a Martne or Rymer. The texts themselves have mostly become as correct as they can ever be, and manuals and bibliographies guide one to and through them, so that no one need go astray who takes the trouble to make use of the mechanism which is at his hand. For example, since the papal archives were opened, so many regesta have appeared that soon it will be possible to follow the letter-writing of the medieval popes day by day for century after centttry.
The apparatus for this research is too vast to be described here. Archives have been reformed, their contents catalogued or calendared; government commissions have rescued numberless documents from oblivion or destruction, and learned societies have supplemented and criticized this work and co-ordinated the results. Every state in Europe now has published the main sources for its history. The Rolls series, the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and the Documents indits are but the more notable of such national products. A series of periodicals keeps watch over this enormous output. The files and indices of the English Historical Review, Historische Zeitsc/zrift, Revue, historique, or American Historical Review will alone reveal the strength and character of historical research in the later 19th century.
Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy, heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the pre-historic age.
This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history-the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of Homer as we are this. The old provi.. dential scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the gentile nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and castles are studied as genuine historic documents.
The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Rankes application of the principles of higher criticism to works written since the invention of printing (Kritik neuerer Gesc/iichtsschreiber) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are everywhere checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last years book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an old master remains an authoritative book of reference. Gibbon, Grote, Giesebrecht, Guizot stand to-.day by reason of other virtues than their truth. Old landmarks drop out of sighte.g. the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective cha~gesthe Renaissance grows less and the midrile ages more; the Protestant Revolution becomes a complex of economics and politics and religion; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident, &c., &c. The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the r9th century.
In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.
In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.
The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.
This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer vttempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.
In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.
In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.
The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.
This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer attempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.
BIBLIOGRAPITY.See Ch. V. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique (2 vols., 1904). This forms the logical bibliography of this article. It is a general survey of the whole apparatus of historical research, and is the indispensable guide to the subject. Similar bibliographies covering sections of history are noted with the articles where they properly belong, e.g. in English medieval history the manual of Chas. Gross, Sources and Literature of English History; in German history the Quellenkunde of Dahlmann-Waitz (7th ed); for France the Bibliographie de lhistoire de France of C. Monod (antiquated, 1888), or the Sources de lhistoire de France so ably begun by A. Moliniers volumes on the medieval period. Perha1.s the sanest survey of the present scientific movement in history is the clear summary of Ch. V. Langlois and Ch. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History (trans. with preface by F. York Powell, London, 1898). Much more ambitious is E. Bernheims Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichts philosophic mit Nac/jwejs der wjchti~sten Quellen und Ililfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (3rd and 4th ed, Leipzig, 1903). (J. F. S.)
The Reformation, with its heated controversies, seems a strange starting-point for science, yet it, even more than the Renaissance, brought out scientific methods of historical investigation. It not only sobered the humanist tendency to sacrifice truth for aesthetic effect, it called for the documents of the Church and subjected them to the most hostile criticism. Luther himself challenged them. Then in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-1574) Protestantism tried to make good its attack on the medieval Church by a great collection of sources accompanied with much destructive criticism. This gigantic work is the first monument of modern historical research. The reply of Cardinal Baronius (Annales ecclesiastici, I 5881697) was a still greater collection, drawn from archives which till then had not been used for scientific history. Baronius criticism and texts are faulty, though far surpassing anything before his day, and his collection is the basis for most subsequent ones,in spite of J. J. Scaligers refutation, which was to contain an equal number of volumes of the errors in Baronius.
The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (I 5351573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Meichior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of correcting them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.
France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilians Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andr Duchesne (1584 1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (Met hodus ad facilem /zistoriarum cognitionens, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Moliere, returning home under the grey walls of St Germaindes-Prs, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc dAchery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martne, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product Jean Mabillons treatise, Dc re diplomatica (1681), was due tc the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose Acid Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (1643, &c., see BOLLANDISTSJ was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebrochs criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared thi~ manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons ar the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomati (q.v), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rule~ by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieva documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments. The great glossary of Ducange is still in enlarged editions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chronology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucons Palaeographia graeca (1708), the monumental Art de verifier les dates (3rd ed., 1818 183 I, in 38 vols.), and the Nouveau Trait de diplomatique (1750-1765) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographic historique, pp. 293 if.). Dom Bouquets Historiens de la Gaule et de Ia Francethe national repertory for French historians is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrustworthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old rgime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the fgth century, and the roll of honor of the French cole des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St- Germaindes-Prs.
The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collection of sources (Rerum Italicarum scriptores), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, produced no national collection of sources during the x7th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.
England in the 16th century kept pace with Continental historiography. Henry VIII.s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of medieval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian at Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi at Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection of the British Museum). In Elizabeths reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than fifteen repositories. In. the 17th and 18th centuries English scholarship was enriched by such monuments of research as ~Villiam Dugdales Monasticon, Thomas Madoxs History of the Exchequer, Wilkinss Concilia, and Thomas Rymers Feed era. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the f9th century was to reveal in England.
In the i9th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. The, result of this movement has been to revolutionize the whole subject. These men of the factory-devoting their lives to the cataloguing of archives and libraries, to the publication of material, and then to the gigantic task of indexing what they have produced-have made it possible for the student in an American or Australian college to master in a few hours in his library sources of history which baffled the long years of research of a Martne or Rymer. The texts themselves have mostly become as correct as they can ever be, and manuals and bibliographies guide one to and through them, so that no one need go astray who takes the trouble to make use of the mechanism which is at his hand. For example, since the papal archives were opened, so many regesta have appeared that soon it will be possible to follow the letter-writing of the medieval popes day by day for century after centttry.
The apparatus for this research is too vast to be described here. Archives have been reformed, their contents catalogued or calendared; government commissions have rescued numberless documents from oblivion or destruction, and learned societies have supplemented and criticized this work and co-ordinated the results. Every state in Europe now has published the main sources for its history. The Rolls series, the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and the Documents indits are but the more notable of such national products. A series of periodicals keeps watch over this enormous output. The files and indices of the English Historical Review, Historische Zeitsc/zrift, Revue, historique, or American Historical Review will alone reveal the strength and character of historical research in the later 19th century.
Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy, heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the pre-historic age.
This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history-the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of Homer as we are this. The old provi.. dential scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the gentile nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and castles are studied as genuine historic documents.
The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Rankes application of the principles of higher criticism to works written since the invention of printing (Kritik neuerer Gesc/iichtsschreiber) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are everywhere checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last years book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an old master remains an authoritative book of reference. Gibbon, Grote, Giesebrecht, Guizot stand to-.day by reason of other virtues than their truth. Old landmarks drop out of sighte.g. the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective cha~gesthe Renaissance grows less and the midrile ages more; the Protestant Revolution becomes a complex of economics and politics and religion; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident, &c., &c. The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the r9th century.
In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.
In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.
The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.
This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer vttempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.
In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.
In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.
The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.
This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer attempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.
BIBLIOGRAPITY.See Ch. V. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique (2 vols., 1904). This forms the logical bibliography of this article. It is a general survey of the whole apparatus of historical research, and is the indispensable guide to the subject. Similar bibliographies covering sections of history are noted with the articles where they properly belong, e.g. in English medieval history the manual of Chas. Gross, Sources and Literature of English History; in German history the Quellenkunde of Dahlmann-Waitz (7th ed); for France the Bibliographie de lhistoire de France of C. Monod (antiquated, 1888), or the Sources de lhistoire de France so ably begun by A. Moliniers volumes on the medieval period. Perha1.s the sanest survey of the present scientific movement in history is the clear summary of Ch. V. Langlois and Ch. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History (trans. with preface by F. York Powell, London, 1898). Much more ambitious is E. Bernheims Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichts philosophic mit Nac/jwejs der wjchti~sten Quellen und Ililfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (3rd and 4th ed, Leipzig, 1903). (J. F. S.)