Short Studies on Great Subjects

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SHORT STUDIES
ON
GREAT SUBJECTS.

LONDON
PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
NEW-STREET SQUARE

SHORT STUDIES
ON
GREAT SUBJECTS.

BY

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.

_SECOND EDITION._

LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1867.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY 1

TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
Lecture I 26
Lecture II 50
Lecture III 75

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER 102

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM 124

A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES 133

CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY 159

THE BOOK OF JOB 185

SPINOZA 223

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES 265

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES 294

HOMER 334

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 363

REPRESENTATIVE MEN 384

REYNARD THE FOX 401

THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE:
Part I 419
Part II 422
Part III 427
Part IV 430

FABLES:
I. The Lions and the Oxen 433
II. The Farmer and the Fox 434

PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE 436

COMPENSATION 439

THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

FEBRUARY 5, 1864.

Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on
what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and
there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of
such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the
colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so
difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in
matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
suit our purpose.

I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
hour without a note--never repeating himself, never wasting words;
laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,
himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.

Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.

Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything
remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
doing it again. He is feasted, feted, caressed; his time is stolen from
him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he
was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never
finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.

But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present
current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.

Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the
same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.

Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,
disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth
or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or
perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The
first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the
moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left
but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to
penetrate--the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.

There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
if he dared.

This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to
do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,
because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he
has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount
of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,
where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to
his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this
condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.

And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
relations of cause and effect.

If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
characters of Julius or Tiberius Caesar, but we could know well enough
the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.

And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
much the same.

As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old
battle of the Titans against the gods.

As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant
of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,
exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.

True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
are superstitious, because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we
remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most
frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief
in any supernatural agency whatsoever.

Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
obligations and responsibilities.

That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite
certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be
contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows
up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to
think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it
is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we
fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.

In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.

In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
complexion to their whole after-character.

When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but
half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means
which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
their existing moral and political condition.

In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future--in
the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
children from bad associations or friends we admit that external
circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.

But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science
of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the
relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as
in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for
in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are
palpable and ponderable.

When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what
is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a
man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
of place.

I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
individuals--History is but the record of individual action; and what is
true of the part, is true of the whole.

We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,
we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only
misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know
it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as
cool as we can.

I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us--if we were
taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and
were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the
best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown
quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of
those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
like ourselves.

The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and
the roaring loom of time--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him--'Thou art fellow with
the spirits which thy mind can grasp--not with me.'

Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'

What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to
resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly
vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the
help of them.

Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.
This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only
planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
practical treatment of the matter in hand.

Let us look at the history of Astronomy.

So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the
groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no
science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
stars retained their relative places--that the times of their rising and
setting varied with the seasons--that sun, moon, and planets moved among
them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,
then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained
in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian
mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all
that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,
and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.
Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and
philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The
periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to
account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,
the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty
by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect
stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one
true astronomical law had been discovered.

We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of
history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or
imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet
enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it
was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,
with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than
flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so
considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were
observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so
that they could collect large experience within the compass of their
natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable
periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated
themselves.

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