h,
he says, were the man who on this matter would pray to God. We must
search for the rational causes, and the causes are seen to be clear, and
the method of prevention also. He then proceeds to notice how all this
arose from the general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense
of educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and
avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational
principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as
violation of inviolable laws is entirely a priori--for, discussion of
such a matter is, of course, impossible for a rational thinker--yet his
rejection of supernatural intervention rests entirely on the scientific
grounds of the necessity of looking for natural causes. And he is quite
logical in maintaining his position on these principles. For, where it
is either difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for
phenomena, or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the
alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his
essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically forced
on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the express
ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been ascertained. He
would, of course, have been the first to welcome our modern discoveries
in the matter. The passage in question is in every way one of the most
interesting in his whole work, not, of course, as signifying any
inclination on his part to acquiesce in the supernatural, but because it
shows how essentially logical and rational his method of argument was,
and how candid and fair his mind.

Having now examined Polybius's attitude towards the supernatural and the
general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to examine the
method he pursued in his scientific investigation of the complex
phenomena of life. For, as I have said before in the course of this
essay, what is important in all great writers is not so much the results
they arrive at as the methods they pursue. The increased knowledge of
facts may alter any conclusion in history as in physical science, and the
canons of speculative historical credibility must be acknowledged to
appeal rather to that subjective attitude of mind which we call the
historic sense than to any formulated objective rules. But a scientific
method is a gain for all time