of historical study in the nineteenth century has been determined and
characterised by the same general principle which has underlain the
simultaneous developments of the study of nature, namely the _genetic
idea_. The "historical" conception of nature, which has produced the
history of the solar system, the story of the earth, the genealogies
of telluric organisms, and has revolutionised natural science, belongs
to the same order of thought as the conception of human history as a
continuous, genetic, causal process--a conception which has
revolutionised historical research and made it scientific. Before
proceeding to consider the application of evolutional principles, it
will be pertinent to notice the rise of this new view.

2. With the Greeks and Romans history had been either a descriptive
record or had been written in practical interests. The most eminent
of the ancient historians were pragmatical; that is, they regarded
history as an instructress in statesmanship, or in the art of war, or
in morals. Their records reached back such a short way, their
experience was so brief, that they never attained to the conception of
continuous process, or realised the significance of time; and they
never viewed the history of human societies as a phenomenon to be
investigated for its own sake. In the middle ages there was still less
chance of the emergence of the ideas of progress and development. Such
notions were excluded by the fundamental doctrines of the dominant
religion which bounded and bound men's minds. As the course of history
was held to be determined from hour to hour by the arbitrary will of
an extra cosmic person, there could be no self-contained causal
development, only a dispensation imposed from without. And as it was
believed that the world was within no great distance from the end of
this dispensation, there was no motive to take much interest in
understanding the temporal, which was to be only temporary.

The intellectual movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge
immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted
to the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for
Thucydides and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction
in the art of politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of a
new culture, different from anything that had gone before; but at the
time men were not conscious of this