Various

“ From Aristotle to modern times, history (Lat. historia) has been a form of literature. It is only in the scientific environment of to-day that we recognize once more, with those earliest of the forerunners of Herodotus, that history involves two distinct operations, one of which, investigation, is in the field of science, while the other, the literary presentation, is in the field of art.
The history of history itself is therefore two-fold. History as art flourishes with the arts. It calls upon the imagination and the literary gifts of expression. ”

“ If the worship of Siva, despite the purport of his chief symbol, seems on the whole less liable to produce these undesirable effects than that of the rival deity, it is doubtless due partly to the real nature of that emblem being little realized by the common people, and partly to the somewhat repellent character of the “great god,” more favourable to evoking feelings of awe and terror than a spirit of fervid devotion. ”

“ At the same time, one could more easily understand how such a system could have found general acceptance all over the Dravidian region of southern India, with its merest sprinkling of Aryan blood, if it were possible to assume that class arrangements of a similar kind must have already been prevalent amongst the aboriginal tribes prior to the advent of the Aryan. Whether a more intimate acquaintance with the manners and customs of those rude tribes that have hitherto kept themselves comparatively free from Hindu influences may yet throw some light on this question, remains to be seen. ”

“ Numerous drawings in the spirit of this picture, and probably of the same period in his career, might have led Holbein’s contemporaries to believe that he would make his mark in the annals of Basel as a model for painters of altarpieces as well as a model for pictorial composition and portrait. The promise which he gave at this time was immense. He was gaining a freedom in draughtsmanship that gave him facility to deal with any subject. Though a realist, he was sensible of the dignity and severity of religious painting. His colour had almost all the richness and sweetness of the Venetians. ”

“ The permanent character of ancient or medieval buildings was fitted only to a society dominated by static ideals. Now the architect builds, not for all time, but for a set of conditions which will inevitably cease in the not distant future. Thus our whole society not only bears the marks of its evolution, but shows its growing consciousness of the fact in the most evident of its arts. In literature, philosophy and political science, there is the same historical trend. Criticism no longer judges by absolute standards ”

“ The scientific historian, deeply interested 528 in the search for truth, is generally but a poor artist, and his uncoloured picture of the past will never rank in literature beside the splendid distortions which glow in the pages of a Michelet or Macaulay. History the art, in so far as it is conditioned upon genius, has no single traceable line of development. Here the product of the age of Pericles remains unsurpassed still; the works of Herodotus and Thucydides standing along with those of Pheidias as models for all time. ”

“ Not that there is any evidence of Buddhists ever having been actually persecuted by the Brahmans, or still less of Sankara himself ever having done so; but the traditional belief in some personal god, as the principal representative of an invisible, all-pervading deity, would doubtless appeal more directly to the minds and hearts of the people than the colourless ethical system promulgated by the Sakya saint. Nor do Buddhist places of worship appear as a rule to have been destroyed by Hindu sectaries, but they seem rather to have been taken over by them for their own religious uses ”

“ The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and arts—a tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaph—si historiam requiris, circumspice. ”

“ So it came to pass that, while he was unable, by reason of imperfect training and too tardy development, with all his pains, to make any contribution to physical science or to mathematics as instrumental in physical research, he attempted a task which no other adherent of the new “mechanical philosophy” conceived—nothing less than such a universal construction of human knowledge as would bring Society and Man (at once the matter and maker of Society) within the same principles of scientific explanation as were found applicable to the world of Nature. ”

“ The 4th and 5th centuries saw a great revolution in the history of history. The story of the pagan past slipped out of mind, and in its place was set, by the genius of Eusebius, the story of the world force which had superseded it, Christianity, and of that small fraction of antiquity from which it sprang,—the Jews. Christianity from the first had forced thinking men to reconstruct their philosophy of history, but it was only after the Church’s triumph that its point of view became dominant in historiography. ”

“ No Englishman of that day stood in the same repute abroad, and foreigners, noble or learned, who came to England, never forgot to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect no progress of the years seemed able to quench. Among these was the grand-duke of Tuscany (Ferdinand II.) , who took away some works and a portrait to adorn the Medicean library.
His pastimes in the latest years were as singular as his labours. The autobiography in Latin verse, with its playful humour, occasional pathos and sublime self-complacency, was thrown off at the age of eighty-four. ”

“ But the tendency to look at things historically is not merely the attitude of men of science. Our outlook upon life differs in just this particular from that of preceding ages. We recognize the unstable nature of our whole social fabric, and are therefore more and more capable of transforming it. Our institutions are no longer held to be inevitable and immutable creations. We do not attempt to fit them to absolute formulae, but continually adapt them to a changing environment. Even modern architecture, notably in America, reflects the consciousness of change. ”

“ Nassau, now grown to man’s estate, began to display those military talents which were to gain for him the fame of being the first general of his time. But Maurice was no politician. He had implicit trust in the advocate, his father’s faithful friend and counsellor, and for many years to come the statesman and the soldier worked in harmony together for the best interests of their country (see Oldenbarneveldt, and Maurice, prince of Orange) . At the side of Maurice, as a wise adviser, stood his cousin William Louis, stadholder of Friesland, a trained soldier and good commander in the field. ”

“ No year had passed since the appearance of Leviathan without some indignant protest against the influence which its trenchant doctrine was calculated to produce upon minds longing above everything for civil repose; but after the Restoration “Hobbism” became a fashionable creed, which it was the duty of every lover of true morality and religion to denounce. Two or three days after Charles’s arrival in London, Hobbes drew in the street the notice of his former pupil, and was at once received into favour. ”

“ From such records of him as survive, Hogarth appears to have been much what from his portrait one might suppose him to have been—a blue-eyed, honest, combative little man, thoroughly insular in his prejudices and antipathies, fond of flattery, sensitive like most satirists, a good friend, an intractable enemy, ambitious, as he somewhere says, in all things to be singular, and not always accurately estimating the extent of his powers. ”

“ It is easy for the student now to show the inadequacy of his sources, and his failure here or there to discriminate between fact and fable. But given the imperfect medium for investigation and the absence of an archaeological basis for criticism, the work of Herodotus remains a scientific achievement, as remarkable for its approximation to truth as for the vastness of its scope. Yet it was Herodotus’ chief glory to have joined to this scientific spirit an artistic sense which enabled him to cast the material into the truest literary form. ”

“ History enters into every phase of activity, and the economic forces which urge society along are as much its subject as the political result.
In short the historical spirit of the age has invaded every field. The world-picture presented in this encyclopaedia is that of a dynamic universe, of phenomena in process of ceaseless change. ”

“ As a draughtsman his skill has sometimes been debated, and his work at times undoubtedly bears marks of haste, and even carelessness. If, however, he is judged by his best instead of his worst, he will not be found wanting in this respect. But it is not after all as a draughtsman, an engraver or a painter that he claims his unique position among English artists—it is as a humorist and a satirist upon canvas. ”

“ Throughout the revolted provinces there was a general determination to continue the struggle to the bitter end. To make head, however, against the victorious advance of Parma, before whose arms all the chief towns of Brabant and Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and lastly—after a valiant defence—Antwerp itself had fallen, it was necessary to look for the protection of a foreign ruler. The government, now that the commanding personal influence of William was no more, was without any central authority which could claim obedience. ”

“ Since by the universally accepted doctrine of karman (deed) or karmavipaka (“the maturing of deeds”) man himself—either in his present, or some future, existence—enjoys the fruit of, or has to atone for, his former good and bad actions, there could hardly be room in Hindu pantheism for a belief in the remission of sin by divine grace or vicarious substitution. And accordingly the “descents” or incarnations of the deity have for their object, not so much the spiritual regeneration of man as the deliverance of the world from some material calamity threatening to overwhelm it. ”

“ He was the head and the spokesman of the deputation of the states to the States-General of the union; and in the stadholderless period the influence of such grand pensionaries of Holland as John de Witt and Anthony Heinsius enabled the complicated and intricate machinery of government in a confederacy of many sovereign and semi-sovereign authorities without any recognized head of the state, to work with comparative smoothness and a remarkable unity of policy. This was secured by the indisputable predominance in the union of the province of Holland. ”

“ In six scenes the miserable career of a woman of the town is traced out remorselessly from its first facile beginning to its shameful and degraded end. Nothing of the detail is softened or abated; the whole is acted out coram populo, with the hard, uncompassionate morality of the age the painter lived in, while the introduction here and there of one or two well-known characters such as Colonel Charteris and Justice Gonson give a vivid reality to the satire. ”

“ In the Vaishnava camp, on the other hand, the cult of Krishna, and more especially that of the youthful Krishna, can scarcely fail to exert an influence which, if of a subtler and more insinuating, is not on that account of a less demoralizing kind. Indeed, it would be hard to find anything less consonant with godliness and divine perfection than the pranks of this juvenile god; and if poets and thinkers try to explain them away by dint of allegorical interpretation, the plain man will not for all their refinements take these amusing adventures any the less au pied de la lettre. ”

“ It is seldom that we find a painted likeness worthy of the name. The drawings of which numbers are still preserved in the galleries of Basel, Berlin and Copenhagen show extraordinary quickness and delicacy of hand, and a wonderful facility for seizing character; and this happily is one of the features which Holbein bequeathed to his more famous son, Hans the younger. It is between 1512 and 1522 that Holbein tempered the German quality of his style with some North Italian elements. ”

“ HIRING (from O. Eng. hýrian, a word common to many Teutonic languages cf. Ger. heuern, Dutch huren, &c.) , in law, a contract by which one man grants the use of a thing to another in return for a certain price. It corresponds to the locatio-conductio of Roman law. ”

“ In Vedic times, at the Rajasuya, or inauguration of a king, some water from the holy river Sarasvati was mixed with the sprinkling water used for consecrating the king. Hence also sick persons are frequently conveyed long distances to a sacred river to heal them of their maladies; and for a dying man to breathe his last at the side of the Ganges is devoutly believed to be the surest way of securing for him salvation and eternal bliss.
Such probably was the belief of the ordinary Hindu two thousand years ago, and such it remains to this day. ”

“ In Thucydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science. He scorned the story-teller “who seeks to please the ear rather than to speak the truth,” and yet his rhetoric is the culmination of Greek historical prose. He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered “disappointing to the ear,” yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature. Speeches, letters and documents are reworded to be in tone with the rest of the story. ”