to rectitude the warped system of
things.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Born in 1818, died in 1894; educated at Oxford; Fellow of
Exeter in 1842; associated with John Henry Newman in the
high church movement; owing to change in his religious
views, took up literature as a profession; came to the
United States in 1872, where he lectured; visited Africa and
Australia afterward; made Professor of Modern History at
Oxford in 1892 as successor to Freeman; published his
"History of England" in 1856-70, "Short Studies on Great
Subjects" in 1867-77, "Caesar" in 1879, "Reminiscences of
Carlyle" in 1881 and "Life of Carlyle" in 1882 and following
year.

I

OF HISTORY AS A SCIENCE[32]

"What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" "My
friend," said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
the spirit of past ages,--"my friend, the times which are gone are a
book with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is
but the spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those
ages are reflected."

[Footnote 32: From the first chapter in Volume I of the "Short Studies
on Great Subjects," the same being a lecture delivered at the Royal
Institution in London, November 5, 1864.]

One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the
old doctrine taught long-ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of
M. Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond
the trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they
are at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to
the conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about
them, so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his
digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are
supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a
world where it would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws
like those of positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune
with a foot rule, or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.

And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first
principle, on which