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 thickset 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 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.[15]

The truth is, however, that the concrete facts, in which history and
geography have sought to preserve the visible, tangible, and, generally
speaking, the experiential aspects of human life and the visible
universe, have a value irrespective of any generalization or ideal
constructions which may be inferred from or built up out of them. Just
as none of the investigations or generalizations of individual
psychology are ever likely to take the place of biography and
autobiography, so none of the conceptions of an abstract sociology, no
scientific descriptions of the social and cultural processes, and no
laws of progress are likely, in the near future at any rate, to
supersede the more concrete facts of history in which are preserved
those records of those unique and never fully comprehended aspects of
life which we call _events_.