her of adequate knowledge or of clear
ideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into
epics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from
all allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be an
imperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisional
discipline; its values, with the mind's progress, would empty into
higher activities. The function of history is to lend materials to
politics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, the
better to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good book
of history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry out
his plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is most
glorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance are
now mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods by
which history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary,
since the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will be
necessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinence
to public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; and
romance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities of
the mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and a
dramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when all
the elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind.

[Sidenote: Its great role.]

Fragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions must
remain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousness
the indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is the
foundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false and
useless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnant
acceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardly
distinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, and
the present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derived
from memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memory
artificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has and
is riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out.
Inference has gone a step farther, thought is more largely
representative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others or
found in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that must
have filled the remotest ages. This informa