himself to indulge in such intellectualbeating of the air as to
admit the possibility of the violation of inviolable laws, or to

argue in a spherewhereinargument is A PRIORI annihilated. He is
to be free from all bias towards friend and country; he is to be

courteous and gentle in criticism; he is not to regard history as a
mere opportunity for splendid and tragicwriting; nor is he to

falsify truth for the sake of a paradox or an epigram.
While acknowledging the importance of particular facts as samples

of higher truths, he is to take a broad and general view of
humanity. He is to deal with the whole race and with the world,

not with particular tribes or separate countries. He is to bear in
mind that the world is really an organismwherein no one part can

be moved without the others being affected also. He is to
distinguish between cause and occasion, between the influence of

general laws and particular fancies, and he is to remember that the
greatest lessons of the world are contained in history and that it

is the historian's duty to manifest them so as to save nations from
following those unwise policies which always lead to dishonour and

ruin, and to teach individuals to apprehend by the intellectual
culture of history those truths which else they would have to learn

in the bitter school of experience,
Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian's

being contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the
historian is a mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true. But

to appreciate the harmony and rational position of the facts of a
great epoch, to discover its laws, the causes which produced it and

the effects which it generates, the scene must be viewed from a
certain height and distance to be completely apprehended. A

thoroughly contemporaryhistorian such as Lord Clarendon or
Thucydides is in reality part of the history he criticises; and, in

the case of such contemporaryhistorians as Fabius and Philistus,
Polybius in compelled to acknowledge that they are misled by

patriotic and other considerations. Against Polybius himself no
such accusation can be made. He indeed of all men is able, as from

some lofty tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient
world, the triumph of Roman institutions and of Greek thought which

is the last message of the old world and, in a more ritual" target="_blank" title="a.精神(上)的；神圣的">spiritual
sense, has become the Gospel of the new.

One thing indeed he did not see, or if he saw it, he thought but
little of it - how from the East there was spreading over the

world, as a wave spreads, a ritual" target="_blank" title="a.精神(上)的；神圣的">spiritual inroad of new religions from
the time when the Pessinuntine mother of the gods, a shapeless mass

of stone, was brought to the eternal city by her holiest citizen,
to the day when the ship CASTOR AND POLLUX stood in at Puteoli, and

St. Paul turned his face towards martyrdom and victory at Rome.
Polybius was able to predict, from his knowledge of the causes of

revolutions and the tendencies of the various forms of governments,
the uprising of that democratic tone of thought which, as soon as a

seed is sown in the murder of the Gracchi and the exile of Marius,
culminated as all democratic movements do culminate, in the supreme

authority of one man, the lordship of the world under the world's
rightful lord, Caius Julius Caesar. This, indeed, he saw in no

uncertain way. But the turning of all men's hearts to the East,
the first glimmering of that splendid dawn which broke over the

hills of Galilee and flooded the earth like wine, was hidden from
his eyes.

There are many points in the description of the ideal historian
which one may compare to the picture which Plato has given us of

the ideal philosopher. They are both 'spectators of all time and
all existence.' Nothing is contemptible in their eyes, for all

things have a meaning, and they both walk in august reasonableness
before all men, conscious of the workings of God yet free from all

terror of mendicant priest or vagrantmiracle-worker. But the
parallel ends here. For the one stands aloof from the world-storm

of sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and sunlit heights,
loving knowledge for the sake of knowledge and wisdom for the joy

of wisdom, while the other is an eager actor in the world ever
seeking to apply his knowledge to useful things. Both equally

desire truth, but the one because of its utility, the other for its
beauty. The historian regards it as the rational principle of all

true history, and no more. To the other it comes as an all-
pervading and mysticenthusiasm, 'like the desire of strong wine,

the craving of ambition, the passionate love of what is beautiful.'
Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more

ritual" target="_blank" title="a.精神(上)的；神圣的">spiritual qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of
all men possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of

that great rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very
latest words of modern science. Nor yet is he to be regarded

merely in the narrow light in which he is estimated by most modern
critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more.

For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as
the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which,

springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength
and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of

Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.
For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the

seven-hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his
history, which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed

of an Empire where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the
Pope for the souls of men, and so has passed into the conception of

God's ritual" target="_blank" title="a.精神(上)的；神圣的">spiritual empire and the universalbrotherhood of man and
widened into the huge ocean of universal thought as the Peneus

loses itself in the sea.
Polybius is the last scientifichistorian of Greece. The writer

who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer
of biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's

employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of
inscription and statue, of public document and building and the

like, because it involves no new method. It is his attitude
towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a
violation of the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is

absurd, he says, to imagine that the statue of a saint can speak,
and that an inanimate object not possessing the vocal organs should

be able to utter an articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he
protests against science imagining that, by explaining the natural

causes of things, it has explained away their transcendental
meaning. 'When the tears on the cheek of some holy statue have

been analysed into the moisture which certain temperatures produce
on wood and marble, it yet by no means follows that they were not a

sign of grief and mourning set there by God Himself.' When Lampon
saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen of the supreme

rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the abnormal
development was the rational resultant of the peculiarformation of

the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it
was the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came

about, of the former to show why it was so formed and what it so
portended. The progression of thought is exemplified in all

particulars. Herodotus had a glimmering sense of the impossibility
of a violation of nature. Thucydides ignored the supernatural.

Polybius rationalised it. Plutarch raises it to its mystical
heights again, though he bases it on law. In a word, Plutarch felt

that while science brings the supernatural down to the natural, yet
ultimately all that is natural is really supernatural. To him, as

to many of our own day, religion was that transcendental attitude
of the mind which, contemplating a world resting on inviolable law,

is yet comforted and seeks to worship God not in the violation but
in the fulfilment of nature.

It may seem paradoxical to quote in connection with the priest of
Chaeronea such a pure rationalist as Mr. Herbert Spencer; yet when

we read as the last message of modern science that 'when the
equation of life has been reduced to its lowest terms the symbols

are symbols still,' mere signs, that is, of that unknown reality
which underlies all matter and all spirit, we may feel how over the

wide strait of centuries thought calls to thought and how Plutarch
has a higher position than is usually claimed for him in the

progress of the Greek intellect.
And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch

himself but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of
Greek civilisation has been passed over by modern critics. To us,