otle, whose application of the inductive method to
history, and whose employment of the evolutionary theory of humanity,
show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history is nothing
separate from the facts of history but is contained in them, and that the
rational law of the complex phenomena of life, like the ideal in the
world of thought, is to be reached through the facts, not superimposed on
them-- [Greek] not [Greek].

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of
historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his
attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a
philosophy of history on which I have touched above. I mean the
assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development of
the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the power of
free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it entirely.
The special acts of providence proceeding from God's immediate government
of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty landmarks in history, would
have been to him essentially disturbing elements in that universal reign
of law, the extent of whose limitless empire he of all the great thinkers
of antiquity was the first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper
conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of
God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face haunting wood and
glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge continually interfering in
the world's history to bring the wicked to punishment and the proud to a
fall. God to him was the incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being
whose activity was the contemplation of his own perfection, one whom
Philosophy might imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the
sublime indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of
men, their desires or their sins? While, as regards the other difficulty
and the formation of a philosophy of history, the conflict of free will
with general laws appears first in Greek thought in the usual theological
form in which all great ideas seem to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of OEdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying the
struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force of
circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks those same
lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less arti