g events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order to
abstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as he
might look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would become
a perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left for
scientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testify
to them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theory
of natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledge
attained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presence
of the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicate
their rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of
events in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed,
might supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution might
well be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higher
operation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needful
basis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay in
that direction.

[Sidenote: How it might be just.]

The ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone for
estimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its own
natural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under other
conditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and may
have been made the standard for a different judgment on the world.
Historical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal to
us what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, and
whenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have known
how to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals could
not have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, the
irremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. In
estimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian,
who does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate it
from _all_ these points of view, considering all real interests
affected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant by
putting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma but
in a variegated omnipresent happiness.

It is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life of
Reason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, much
less to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his tim