us number of young men there
are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect
profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

The first portion of this essay is given at the end of the volume
containing Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Prose Pieces. Recently
the remainder of the original manuscript has been discovered, and is here
published for the first time. It was written for the Chancellor's
English Essay Prize at Oxford in 1879, the subject being 'Historical
Criticism among the Ancients.' The prize was not awarded. To Professor
J. W. Mackail thanks are due for revising the proofs.

IV.

It is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of
manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings on the
uniform character of the nature of man. Yet, after all is said, these
are perhaps but very general statements: the ordinary effects of peace
and war are dwelt on, but there is no real analysis of the immediate
causes and general laws of the phenomena of life, nor does Thucydides
seem to recognise the truth that if humanity proceeds in circles, the
circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is partly in
the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this idea from
Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian law of the
three stages of thought, the theological, the metaphysical, and the
scientific: for truly out of the vagueness of theological mysticism this
conception which we call the Philosophy of History was raised to a
scientific principle, according to which the past was explained and the
future predicted by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of
humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first explicit
attempt to found a universal philosophy of history upon wide rational
grounds. Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher
proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce
revolutions of the moral effects of various forms of government and
education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with
pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and
to proceed from a priori psychological principles to discover the
governing laws of the apparent c