Historical sense

“ In the first place it must be remembered that History itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of facts. Of course, I am aware that the ideal of the Historian is Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination, but, as with all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised, and there is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration to which I just now alluded. ”

“ When the few remaining pioneers meet together each passing year, and witness their broken ranks, recount their early sorrows and suffering, and treasure the precious memory of those who have fallen in the great struggle, there must come to them an affection- ate recollection of those times and a sense of pain that these reunions will soon cease. ”

“ All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historical spirit. ”

“ It is of almost infinite importance to our history to secure, in their own language and conceptions, and even with their own predilections or prejudices from pioneers still living, all the reminiscent history available. ”

“ The passions, influences and conditions which generate, shape and control events, lend a coloring to their recital, which deep-hued or faint as painted by the writer at the time, are toned down or made stronger by the historian of a future generation, who, unmindful of passions, influences or conditions, and with an eye single to the preservation of history by means of the truth, makes past occurrences stand out in their true light. ”

“ It is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the realm of ecclesiastical than of secular history; and this school of writers are doing their best to harm the cause of true Rationalism. They only afford amusement to the obscurantists of orthodoxy, and render doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win people over to a common-sense and historical envisagement, unencumbered by tradition and superstition, of the problems of early Christianity. ”

“ But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be—with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line. ”

“ The more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. ”

“ Then, too, there is no small danger of failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that, although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow that unpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediency of his measures. ”

“ These subordinate peculiarities will depend first on the peculiar genius, idea and work of the nation, and next on the transient circumstances, geographical, climactic, historical and secular, to which the nation has been exposed. The past helped form the circumstances of the present age, and they the character of the men now living. ”

“ Robertson is humbly following in their steps, but à rebours, or in an inverse sense. They insist on getting more out of the New Testament than any historical testimony could ever furnish; he on getting less. In other respects also he imitates their methods. Thus they insist on regarding the New Testament, and in particular the four Gospels, as a homogeneous block, and will not hear of the criticism which discerns in them literary development, which detects earlier and later couches of tradition and narrative. ”

“ Statesmen meeting with students to discuss the character and political acts of Washington marvel at his wisdom in great things and his patience in small things, at the dignity and good sense with which he established the etiquette of his office, at the tact which retained in his service two such irreconcilable men as Jefferson and Hamilton. The importance of a good start for an infant government is well understood. ”

“ We are writing this introduction in an effort to make our word pictures of mankind and its doings correspond with the facts of social history. With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it is high time for us to exchange the clouds of fancy and the flowers of rhetoric for the solid ground of historical reality. The word "civilization" must generalize what has been and what is, as nearly as the past and present can be embodied in language. ”

“ SCOPE OF HISTORY.—The rise and progress of culture and civilization in their various constituents is the theme of history. It does not limit its attention to a particular fraction of a people, to the exclusion of the rest. Governments and rulers, and the public doings of states,—such as foreign wars, and the struggles of rival dynasties,—naturally form a prominent topic in historical writings. But this is only one department in the records of the past. More and more history interests itself in the character of society at large, and in the phases through which it has passed. ”

“ Godkin took a broader view in 1868, which he forcibly expressed in a letter to the London Daily News. “There is no careful and intelligent observer,” he wrote, “whether he be a friend to democracy or not, who can help admiring the unbroken power with which the popular common sense—that shrewdness, or intelligence, or instinct of self-preservation, I care not what you call it, which so often makes the American farmer a far better politician than nine tenths of the best read European political philosophers—works under all this tumult and confusion of tongues. ”

“ The marvelous story of humanity is enacted again for our edification, instruction, and delight. We behold civilizations begin, struggle, triumph, and decay, giving place to higher and nobler as they pass away. Poet, lawgiver, and soldier sing their songs, make their codes, and fight their battles again, while we follow the never-dying effects of song, of law, and of battle. We sit down with 'princes, potentates, and powers,' watching them, as they think, governing the world.... Shut up in a little room we can witness the whole drama of man's history played on the vast stage of the world. ”

“ Such a method of reading the history of a complicated period may, of course, be open to objection from the point of view of absolute historical truth. The effort to give unity to a period of history may easily fall into the inaccuracy of exaggeration. ”

“ First of all, the whole problem of cultural history appears to us as a historical problem. In order to understand history it is necessary to know not only how things are, but how they have come to be. ”

“ The historian points out the past to the present and future. He puts aside the veil that has gathered about the dim past, opens up to the gaze of the bright present the panorama of human achievement, and blazes the way for his successor in the rosy future. ”

“ I was up nearly all night, and saw Generals Howard, Logan, Woods, and others, laboring to save houses and protect families thus suddenly deprived of shelter, and even of bedding and wearing apparel. I disclaim on the part of my army any agency in this fire, but, on the contrary, claim that we saved what of Columbia remains unconsumed. And without hesitation I charge General Wade Hampton with having burned his own city of Columbia, not with a malicious intent or as the manifestation of a silly ‘Roman stoicism,’ but from folly, and want of sense, in filling it with lint, cotton, and tinder. ”

“ But the feelings of nationality against imperial control by Church or State, the growth of the towns and commerce, the gradual development of representative government, the struggles against despotism—these are things he can understand and appreciate and in connection with which he can see the present emerging from the past. Nor should the great personalities of medieval and modern history be neglected, for they have historical interest and importance and serve to give greater interest and definiteness to movements of which they are a part. ”

“ If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. ”

“ By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand but a continuous development, not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul. ”

“ Let us then regard the study of History, not as something wholly objective but as an unfolding panorama of the human self-consciousness, for history is merely the reflecting spirit of mankind in which we ourselves may have an immediate share, which we all may help to perpetuate and in some way enlarge. ”

“ The various springs from which human action flows, the various types which human crises produce, the virtues and the vices which great historic conflicts heat into activity—all these features of social motion, never jointly reproduced in works of history, are here drawn in vivid colors and present a historic canvas that is prime in the domain of literature. ”

“ Historical particulars can only serve to characterize the inward motives, the prevailing opinions, the decisive moments, the critical points in the progress of human society; and thus place more vividly before our eyes the peculiar character of every age—each step of mankind in intellectual refinement and moral improvement. ”

“ Each human soul in which this power of life is has “its secrets and histories and marvels of destiny, heaven's splendors are over its dead, hell's terrors are under its feet, tragedies and poetries are in it, and a history for eternity.” Every social organism, every grand national aggregation of lives but generalizes the history of the individual, and thus the history of all life and of all living, whether in individuals, families, societies or nations, is one history, and that history the record of its conflicts, its defeats, its victories. ”

“ All the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science, letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society, was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. ”

“ Our own brief history as a nation, and our finding and founding and maintaining of it, left our forefathers little time indeed for the delicate cultivation of the arts and graces of refined and scholarly attainments. ”

“ In the light of this idea, the historian felt that he had come to understand all the better ancient civilisation and our own, and that his eyes were able to pierce more deeply into the shadowy depths of human destiny. ”

“ The whole depth of your being does not reach so far, and reaches no farther than historical acceptance, your business being to further analyze the traditions of this historical faith by means of argument. ”

“ Modern History is the history of ourselves, of the way in which we came to be what we are, of the education of our nation, of the development of our government, of the fortunes of our fathers, that caused us to be taught and governed and placed as we are, and formed our minds and habits by that teaching, government, and position ”

“ True, the real Science of History—the sifting of evidence, and the discovery and unravelling of ancient documents—may be described as an essentially modern attainment, so it would be unreasonable to blame our older historians for errors which it was largely, if not wholly, beyond their power to overcome. And it is just here that I would emphasise my defence of the Romancist. ”

“ The modern historian has come to realize that the qualities of a people, the characteristics of an epoch, the motives of a great struggle or movement, are by no means the clear-cut, sharply defined matters sketched by the patriotic writers of a simpler day. ”

“ Though a work of fiction, it aims at painting the historical features, and such works if faithfully executed throw more light than many so-called histories on the true roots and causes of the Revolution, which are so widely and so gravely misunderstood. ”

“ Our national history, of course, has its own great and spreading pattern, which can be seen in its full form and completeness only when the stuff of our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces and upon an ample scale. ”

“ What is historical can only truly be said to belong to us when it is the possession of the nation, to which we ourselves belong, or when we are able to regard the present as in a general way casually connected with the events in question, to whose continuous series the characters or actions represented are united by a bond of essential membership. ”

“ According to such definitions history consists of exceptional things, of celebrated or notorious events, of the lives and actions of great and exalted men, of conspicuous achievements in war and politics, in science and art, in religion and literature. But this is a narrow and superficial conception of history. History is made up of what is little as well as of what is great, of what is common as well as of what is strange, of what is counted mean as well as of what is counted noble. ”

“ Nor should we permit ourselves to be deflected in our thought, and from our purpose, by the emphasis which the historian puts, almost exclusively, upon results and by the historian's definition—not merely his interpretation—of facts in the life of men in society. ”

“ Vary the theme as you may in the countless histories of countless peoples; subdivide the course of its progress as you will, allowing for different local causes and different local phenomena, the true philosophy of history teaches that no real departure from this natural development is possible. But what if by the violent intervention of some new and entirely foreign force, another development and another life is given to the inanimate ashes of the old? ”