n the ferocity of the tiger, and praise the
devotion of the hen to her chickens. But it is obvious that in history,
as in every other subject, judgments of this kind are foreign to
science.

[208] Comparison between two facts of detail belonging to very different
aggregates (for example the comparison of Abd-el-Kader with Jagurtha, of
Napoleon with Sforza) is a striking method of exposition, but not a
means of reaching a scientific conclusion.

[209] This system is still followed by several contemporary authors, the
Belgian jurist Laurent in his _Etudes sur l'histoire de l'humanite_, the
German Rocholl, and even Flint, the English historian of the philosophy
of history.

[210] Thus Taine, in _Les origines de la France Contemporaine_, explains
the origin of the privileges of the _ancien regime_ by the services
formerly rendered by the privileged classes.

[211] A good criticism of the theory of progress will be found in P.
Lacombe, _De l'histoire Consideree Comme Science_.

[212] See the very clear declarations of one of the principal
representatives of linguistic science in France, V. Henry, _Antinomies
linguistiques_, Paris, 1896, 8vo.

[213] See above, p. 284.

[214] Lamprecht, in the article quoted, p. 247, after having compared
the artistic, religious, and economic evolutions of mediaeval Germany,
and after having shown that they can all be divided into periods of the
same duration, explains the simultaneous transformations of the
different usages and institutions of a given society by the
transformations of the collective "social soul." This is only another
form of the same hypothesis.

[215] The historians of literature, who began by searching for the
connection between the arts and the rest of social life, thus gave the
first place to the most difficult question.

[216] For the earlier epochs, consult good histories of Greek, Roman,
and mediaeval literature which contain chapters devoted to "historians."
For the modern period, consult the Introduction of M. G. Monod to vol.
i. of the _Revue historique_; the work by F. X. v. Wegde, _Geschichte
der deutschen Historiographie_ (1885), relates only to Germany, and is
mediocre. Some "Notes on History in France in the Nineteenth Century"
have been published by C. Jullian as an Introduction to his _Extraits
des historiens francais du xixe siecle_ (Paris, 1897, 12mo). The
history of modern historiography has still to be written. See the
partial attempt by E. B