tory turns
far more on certainty than on abundance of acquired information.

Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment. The
process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other
than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred
and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil
regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active
life.[4] For a man is justly despised who has one opinion in history
and another in politics, one for abroad and another at home, one for
opposition and another for office. History compels us to fasten on
abiding issues, and rescues us from the temporary and transient.
Politics and history are interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is
a domain that reaches farther than affairs of state, and is not
subject to the jurisdiction of governments. It is our function to keep
in view and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the
effect but the cause of public events;[5] and even to allow some
priority to ecclesiastical history over civil, since, by reason of the
graver issues concerned, and the vital consequences of error, it
opened the way in research, and was the first to be treated by close
reasoners and scholars of the higher rank.[6]

[Sidenote: NOT GOVERNED BY NATIONAL CAUSES]

In the same manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which
always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as
one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery
is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the
theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term
to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of
the race from which we are sprung.[8] If we are to account mind not
matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity,
and grace, and intellectual value to history, and its action on the
ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the
universal by the national, and civilisation by custom.[9] A speech of
Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates, a few lines that were
inscribed on an Indian rock before the Second Punic War, the footsteps
of a silent yet prophetic people who dwelt by the Dead Sea, and
perished in the fall of Jerusalem, come nearer to our lives than the
ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian
acorns.

[Sidenote: MEDIAEVAL LIMIT OF MODERN HISTORY]