answer to these questions, it will lead us nearer the immediate presence of the old and invincible problems, What is the meaning of man, of history? Whence, O Heaven! Whither? Does law or chance, order or accident, mind or mechanism, rule in the world? How do the earliest men and nations stand related to the latest? Did they come aimless and vanish trackless? or do they survive in us and find there the reward of their works? Many questions in science and philosophy lie at this moment hot beneath the feet. But we must pass over the burning and blistering ground as softly and silently as possible. We must be innocently oblivious that— ἐπὶ ἔθνε ̓ ἀγείρετο μυρία νεκρῶν and, without word or nod of recognition, pass the ghosts of Kant and Herder, Buckle and Comte, Schelling and Hegel, Cousin and Guizot, Krause and Bunsen, fearful lest by the smell or taste of the blood sure to be shed in controversy they should grow so substantial as to forbid further search. Enough to say, it is here assumed that no Philosophy of History is possible without a patient and sufficient study of the facts and phenomena of mind, individual and collective. Speculation must build on the solid rock of reality if it is to build into heaven and for eternity. Man must be known before his being can be understood, or the laws that have governed his develop ment formulated. So far as the Philosophy of History seeks to explain the becoming of civilization, or the past of man, Comparative Psychology helps it in two ways, by discovering the causes and conditions that created the distinct civilizations in the various ages and countries of the world; and by supplying the data that can determine the influence they respectively exercised on the progress of humanity, the value, number, and quality of the elements they severally contributed to the civilization, modern and permanent. For the nation exists for the race, as the individual for the nation. The best work of the unit is universal, lives longer and does more than its author designed. Genius, when it speaks the true in forms that are beautiful, speaks not to its own age and people simply, but to all peoples and times. And the nation that achieves a victory over barbarism, or ignorance, or wrong achieves it for the world. In solving the great problem humanity has been set to work out, every people with a history has had a share. None have lived or died in vain. If, indeed, in the life of humanity, as in our competitive examinations, many had fought, but only one had won, what should we say? That the unsuccessful had been useless competitors? or that it was better for them to fight and lose than never to win the skill and weapons necessary for the contest? If the many, whose nonsuccess was no failure, not only contributed to the magnificence of the battle and the splendour of the victory, one. but made themselves in the struggle better than they otherwise could have been, shall we not say that as their being was good the conflict that so served it was not ill? And here the victory belongs to the many, not to the Whatever principle of order a people conquers, the conquest becomes in the long run that of the race. If history means progress, there has been in it, perhaps, many blunders, and follies, and crimes, but yet, in spite of all, victory for humanity. Civilization as it rises universalizes, and as it becomes universal unifies man, lifts the race to a higher level. When we look to the past man's progress seems marked only by the graveyard, buried cities, fallen empires, civilizations decayed and dead. Of once wise and busy Egypt only broken water-courses, imperishable pyramids, waste temples and tombs survive. On the banks of the Euphrates and her sister stream, where once famed armies marched, are now only the shapeless and melancholy mounds, which have been made but of late to tell the story of the splendour and decadence of the empires whose sites they mark. Phoenicia, once Queen of the seas, is desolate, and her industrial, commercial, and colonizing genius gone down for ever. Greece, the beautiful, the land that sanctified by idealizing humanity; Rome, the once universal Mistress, the once Eternal City, of the world, are but names, loved, visited, studied for the memories they preserve, the shadows of the glorious past that sleep in their valleys and R on their hills. Does it not seem as if Nature, as careless of men and peoples as of "the fifty seeds," of which "She brings but one to bear," cried to us from the past, "I care for nothing, all shall go "? But the carelessness is only in our eyes, not in her hands or heart. The less perfect dies that the more perfect may live. In man, as in nature, except the one die, it abideth alone; if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The conquests of humanity are permanent. As the mother-speech of our family died that her daughters might be born, died that she might impart herself equally to each, and descend into her remotest posterity, so the ancient civilizations died, that their ideal elements, universalized and immortalized, might build up and be built into the modern. The narrow spirit that in ancient Hellas divided men into Greeks and barbarians perished, but her bright genius lives and speaks in the language and art, the poetry and philosophy that must be beautiful for evermore. The ambition, the brutal pleasures, the exhausting exactions of Rome are buried under the ruins of her cities; but the sense of law, of order, of unity, she created has passed from expediency and policy into the very blood of our highest religious and philosophical thought. So men die that man may live; peoples perish that humanity may endure. II, Our discussion has tended to show the necessity of Comparative Psychology to the Philosophy of History. Our purpose can now be better served by an attempt to apply to history its principles and method. All that is possible is to present the subject in hurried and imperfect outline, but the outline may be meanwhile more significant than a more abstract and abstruse discussion. What is intended is, by the analysis and exhibition, in forms more or less concrete, of their psychical qualities and capacities, to indicate the place and work in universal history of two great races, the Indo-European and Semitic. These qualities and capacities fitted each of the races for the part it has played in the development of man. Ever modifying, yet ever modified by, the rise of new conditions or changes in the old, weakened, or intensified by the generation of new forces, intellectual and religious, or the formation of new relations, social and political, they have never failed, at decisive moments, to embody themselves in distinctive acts, events, or works. The races form, therefore, a field where Comparative Psychology can be well enough tested alike as to principles, method, and results. The Indo-European and Semitic races are two distinct families that have branched into many nations, and spread over a great portion of the earth's surface. The first |