lies in _understanding_ what has
happened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern social
evolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upon
a region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius for
quick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause why
Borne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or to
expound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate in
limpid sentences the essence of Greek culture--what could be more
tempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of this
book to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion of
dismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. We
must have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be taken
imaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at his
own risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he was
designing the _School of Athens_, had said to himself that Aristotle
should point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designing
the _Disputa_ had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary of
argument and learning, should throw down his books and turn to
revelation for guidance, there would have been much historical
pertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have been
allegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had been
dispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up here
and there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particular
natural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might be
spoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, and
something might be added about the troubles of their home life; but
would it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these units
were verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at work
had been multitudinous and infinitesimal?

[Sidenote: It is arbitrary.]

In fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have no
dynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not at
bottom physical, like the laws of habit--those expressions of Newton's
first law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperception
as long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering the
ideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts.
The truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations