THE TENDENCY OF HISTORY
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generation can h!lve felt doubt of its tendency. Those of us who
read Buckle's first volume when it appeared in 1857, and almost
immediately afterwards, in 1859, read the Origin of Species and
felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural
laws, never doubted that historians would follow until they had
exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history.
Year after year passed, and little progress has been made. Perhaps
the mass of students are more skeptical now than they were thirty
years ago of the possibility that such a science can be created. Yet
almost every successful historian has been busy with it, adding
here a new analysis, a new generalization there; a clear and defi–
nite connection where before the rupture of idea was absolute;
and, above all, extending the field of study until it shall include
all races, all countries, and all times. Like other branches of
science, history is now encumbered and hampered by its own mass,
but its tendency is always the same, and cannot be other than what
it is. That the effort to make history a science may fail is possible,
and perhaps probable; but that it should cease, unless for reasons
that would cause all science to cease, is not within the range of
experience. Historians will not, and even if they would they can
not, abandon the attempt. Science itself would admit its own
failure if it admitted that man, the most important of all its sub–
jects, could not be brought within its range.
You may be sure that four out of five serious students of his–
tory who are living today have, in the course of their work, felt
that they stood on the brink of a great generalization that would
reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the
material world. As the great writers of our time have touched one
by one the separate fragments of admitted law by which society
betrays its character as a subject for science, not one of them can
have failed to feel an instant's hope that he might find the secret
which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one
self-evident, harmonious, and complete system. He has seemed to
have it, as the Spanish say, in his inkstand. Scores of times he
must have dropped his pen to think how one short step, one sudden
inspiration, would show all human knowledge; how, in these thick–
set forests of history, one corner turned, one faint trail struck,
would bring him on the highroad of science. Every professor who
has tried to teach the doubtful facts which we now call history must
