THE WORLD HISTORIANS
361
one contributor." The same spirit of the times which transformed
the author of
The History of the Roman Republic
into an editor of
Latin inscriptions, transformed Lord Acton from the prospective
author of a (never completed) "History of Liberty" into the
founder of that cooperative enterprise of minute specialism that
became
The Cambridge Modern History.
The nature of the hidden force that changed the whole spirit
of history after the second
h~lf
of the 19th century in Europe and
a little later, but even more completely, in the United States, is
explained by a number of more or less critically-minded observers
as "a sort of industrial revolution," a carrying over of the eco–
nomic techniques of the modem "factory system" to the field of
historical research (Shotwell). "Since the days of Mommsen and
Ranke," says Toynbee, "historians have given their best energies
to the 'assemblage' of raw materials-inscriptions,.documents, and
the like-in 'corpus'es and periodicals; and, when they have
att~Jmpted
to 'work' these materials 'up' into 'manufactured' or
'semi-manufactured' articles, they have had recourse, once again,
to the Division of Labour and have produced synthetic histories."
In a slightly less sweeping manner the transition from a
highly generalized form of historical thought to a strictly special–
ized "scientific" research can be compared to the analagous devel–
opment that had taken place somewhat earlier in the realm of
physics. Here "philosophy of nature" has been entirely repudi–
ated. It has been most successfully replaced by a system of special–
ized sciences, and the only mystery consists in the question of how
the system of physical sciences could have preserved some kind of
intrinsic unity in spite of the complete destruction of all its general
principles achieved as early as 1748 by the criticism of Hume
which in some variant or other has generally prevailed among men
of science.*
Yet neither of the two analogies is sufficient to explain the
phenomenon. The development which led the later 19th and the
20th century historians to discard all philosophy in favor of spe–
cialized research has not produced anything like a truly universal
historical science. It has only deprived modem historians of those
remnants of unity and universality which their thought had still
retained from the religious and metaphysical traditions of the past.
•See A. N. Whitehead,
Science in the Modern World
(1925)
pp.
5
ff.
