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PARTISAN REVIEW
have felt that sooner or later he or another would put order in the
chaos and bring light into darkness. Not so much genius or favor
was needed as patience and good luck. The law was certainly there,
and as certainly was in places actually visible, to be touched and
handled, as though it were a law of chemistry or physics. No
teacher with a spark of imagination or with an idea of scientific
method can have helped dreaming of the immortality that would
be achieved by the man who should successfully apply Darwin's
method to the facts
of
human history.
Those of us who have had occasion to keep abreast of the
rapid progress which has been made in history during the last fifty
years must be convinced that the same rate of progress during
another half century would necessarily raise history to the rank of
a science. Our only doubt is whether the same rate can possibly
be maintained.
If
not, our situation is simple. In that case, we
shall remain more or less where we are. But we have reached a
point where we ought to face the pQssibility of a great and perhaps
a sudden change in the importance of our profession. We cannot
help asking ourselves what would happen if some new Darwin
were to demonstrate the laws of historical evolution.
I admit that the mere idea of such an event fills my mind with
anxiety. When I remember the astonishing influence exerted by a
mere theorist like Rousseau; by a reasoner like Adam Smith; by
a philosopher, beyond contact with material interests, like Darwin,
I cannot imagine the limits of the shock that might follow the
establishment of a fixed science of history. Hitherto our profession
has been encouraged, or, at all events, tolerated by governments
and by society as an amusing or instructive and, at any rate, a safe
and harmless branch of inquiry. But what will be the attitude
of government or of society toward any conceivable science of his–
tory? We know what followed Rousseau; what
ind~strial
and
political struggles have resulted from the teachings of Adam
Smith; what a revolution and what vehement opposition has been
and still is caused by the ideas of Darwin. Can we imagine any
science of history that would not be vastly more violent in its
effects than the dissensions roused by any one or by all three of
these great men?
I ask myself, What shape can be given to any science of his·
tory that will not shake to its foundations some prodigious interest?
