but a descriptive formula
which the careless have sometimes personified." It used to be
said that "the laws of Nature are the thoughts of God"; now we
say that they are the investigator's formulae summing up
regularities of recurrence.[13]

If natural law aims at prediction it tells us what we can do. Moral
laws, on the other hand, tell us, not what we can, but what we ought to
do. The civil or municipal law, finally, tells us not what we can, nor
what we ought, but what we must do. It is very evident that these three
types of law may be very intimately related. We do not know what we
ought to do until we know what we can do; and we certainly should
consider what men can do before we pass laws prescribing what they must
do. There is, moreover, no likelihood that these distinctions will ever
be completely abolished. As long as the words "can," "ought," and "must"
continue to have any meaning for us the distinctions that they represent
will persist in science as well as in common sense.

The immense prestige which the methods of the natural sciences have
gained, particularly in their application to the phenomena of the
physical universe, has undoubtedly led scientific men to overestimate
the importance of mere conceptual and abstract knowledge. It has led
them to assume that history also must eventually become "scientific" in
the sense of the natural sciences. In the meantime the vast collections
of historical facts which the industry of historical students has
accumulated are regarded, sometimes even by historians themselves, as a
sort of raw material, the value of which can only be realized after it
has been worked over into some sort of historical generalization which
has the general character of scientific and ultimately, mathematical
formula.

"History," says Karl Pearson, "can never become science, can never be
anything but a catalogue of facts rehearsed in a more or less pleasing
language until these facts are seen to fall into sequences which can be
briefly resumed in scientific formulae."[14] And Henry Adams, in a
letter to the American Historical Association already referred to,
confesses that history has thus far been a fruitless quest for "the
secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one
self-evident, harmonious, and complete system."

You may be sure that four out of five serious students of
history who are living today have, in the course of their