al, because all
harsh and hasty wholesale judgments are immoral; unphilosophical, because
the only philosophical method of looking at the strangest of phaenomena
is to believe that it too is the result of law, perhaps a healthy result;
that it is not to be condemned as a product of disease before it is
proven to be such; and that if it be a product of disease, disease has
its laws, as much as health; and is a subject, not for cursing, but for
induction; so that (to return to my example) if every man who ever took
part in the Crusades were proved to have been simply mad, our sole
business would be to discover why he went mad upon that special matter,
and at that special time. And to do that, we must begin by recollecting
that in every man who went forth to the Crusades, or to any other strange
adventure of humanity, was a whole human heart and brain, of like
strength and weakness, like hopes, like temptations, with our own; and
find out what may have driven him mad, by considering what would have
driven us mad in his place.

May I be permitted to enlarge somewhat on this topic? There is, as you
are aware, a demand just now for philosophies of History. The general
spread of Inductive Science has awakened this appetite; the admirable
contemporary French historians have quickened it by feeding it; till, the
more order and sequence we find in the facts of the past, the more we
wish to find. So it should be (or why was man created a rational being?)
and so it is; and the requirements of the more educated are becoming so
peremptory, that many thinking men would be ready to say (I should be
sorry to endorse their opinion), that if History is not studied according
to exact scientific method, it need not be studied at all.

A very able anonymous writer has lately expressed this general tendency
of modern thought in language so clear and forcible that I must beg leave
to quote it:--

'Step by step,' he says, 'the notion of evolution by law is transforming
the whole field of our knowledge and opinion. It is not one order of
conception which comes under its influence: but it is the whole sphere of
our ideas, and with them the whole system of our action and conduct. Not
the physical world alone is now the domain of inductive science, but the
moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual are being added to its empire.
Two co-ordinate ideas pervade the vision of every thinker, physicist or
moralist, philosopher or priest. In the