reek] of Polybius is that power which we
Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call it, of his history
is to point out the rational and human and natural causes which brought
this result, distinguishing, as we should say, between God's mediate and
immediate government of the world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of Man, he
will have nothing to do: still less with any idea of chance as a factor
in the phenomena of life. Chance and miracles, he says, are mere
expressions for our ignorance of rational causes. The spirit of
rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a vague uncertain
attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a consistent attitude of mind
never argued about or even explained, is by Polybius analysed and
formulated as the great instrument of historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet was
sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the supernatural. He did
not discuss it, but he annihilated it by explaining history without it.
Polybius enters at length into the whole question and explains its origin
and the method of treating it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's
dream. Thucydides would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it.
He is the culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic.
'Nothing,' he says, 'shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to
account for any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural
intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and there is
nothing in the world--even those phenomena which seem to us the most
remote from law and improbable--which is not the logical and inevitable
result of certain rational antecedents.'

Some things, of course, are to be rejected a priori without entering into
the subject: 'As regards such miracles,' he says, {199} 'as that on a
certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never falls though the statue
stands in the open air, or that those who enter God's shrine in Arcadia
lose their natural shadows, I cannot really be expected to argue upon the
subject. For these things are not only utterly improbable but absolutely
impossible.'

'For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain a
task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit the
possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at issue.'

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle is to
annihila