Arnold teaches it by an original method; Humboldt
points out its naturalistic tendencies and origin; Herder and Hegel, De
Tocqueville and Guizot, the eminent writers on Civilization, on Art, on
Education, Political Economy, Literature, and Natural History, more
and more exhibit the facts of humanity and of time under such new
combinations, by so many parallel truths and principles, that it is
difficult to conceive that History, as now understood by the educated
and the reflective, is the same thing once crudely embodied in a ballad
or mystically conserved by an inscription. To multiply relations is the
destiny of our age, and to converge all that is discovered through the
laws of Science upon the records and relics of the past is a process now
habitual and pervasive.
And yet how little positive satisfaction does the lover of truth, the
aspirant for what is authentic and significant, find in current and even
popular histories! Certain general notions of the character of nations
we, indeed, distinctly and correctly attain: that Chinese civilization
is stationary, the French instinctively a military race, the Swiss
mercenary, and adventurous in engineering and religious reform,--that
modern German literature was as sudden as simultaneous in its
development,--that Holland redeemed her foundations from the sea,--that
Italy owes to art, and England to manufactures, her growth and grandeur.
These and such as these are problems which the history of the respective
countries, however inadequately told, reveals with authenticity; but
when we go beyond and below the patent facts of local civilization, to
the analysis of character, and, through it, of destiny, few and far
between are the satisfactory records whence we can draw legitimate
materials for inference and conjecture.
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