Physicians and surgeons of the last generation / by a man on the shady side of fifty.

Date:
[between 1860 and 1869]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physicians and surgeons of the last generation / by a man on the shady side of fifty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    debate. If the word ‘‘science” had been used only in the restricted sense in which it is sometimes employed by some of the most distinguished of the disputants, there would have been less question as to its applicability to history. No , one doubts that from an extensive historical survey may be drawn large general deductions on which reasonable expectations may be founded. No one denies that the experience of the past may teach lessons of political wisdom for the guidance of the future. If it were not so, history would be as unin- structive as fairy lore; its chief use would be to amuse the fancy ; and little more practical advantage could result from investigating the causes of the failure of James II.’s designs on civil and religious liberty, than from an inquiry into the artifices by which Jack- the-Giant-killer contrived to escape the maw of the monsters against whom he had pitted himself. What is commonly understood, however, by a Science of History is something far beyond the idea entertained of it by such temperate reasoners as Mr. John Stuart Mill and Mr. Fitzjames Stephen. The science, for the reality of which M.’Comte in France and Mr. Buckle in England have been the foremost champions, would bear the same relation to political events as Optics and Astronomy do to the phenomena of light and of the solar and sidereal systems. It would deal less with the conjectural and probable than with the predicable and positive. “ In the moral as in the physical world,” say its leading advocates, “are invariable “ rule, inevitable sequence, undeviating “ regularity,” constituting “ one vast “ scheme of universal order.” “ The “ actions of men, and therefore of so- “ cieties, are governed by fixed eternal “laws,” which “assign to every man “his place in the necessary chain of “ being,” and “ allow him no choice as “to what that place shall be.” One such law is that, “in a given state of “society, a certain number of persons “ must put an end to their own lives : ” another, that a certain number of persons must commit minder : a third, that when wages and prices are at certaii points, a certain number of marriage; must annually take place, “the nuro “her being determined not by th “ temper and wishes of individuals, bu “ by large general facts, over which ir “ dividuals can exercise no authority. These are general laws ; but the specie question as to who shall commit th crimes or the indiscretion enjoined b them, “depends upon special laws, whic' “ however, in their total action mm “ obey the large social law to which the “ are all subordinate.” A Science ( History would consist of a collection c “ social laws,” duly systematized an codified, by the application of which t given states of society the histories student might predict the future cours of political events, with a confident similar to that with which he coul foretell the results of familiar chemics combinations, or the movements of tl planets.1 This is the theory which has late] been so much discussed, and agaim which, notwithstanding the singuls fascination it evidently possesses ft some minds, the moral sense of a muc larger number indignantly revolts, right] apprehending that its establislimei would be subversive of all moralit; For, if the actions of men are governe by “ eternal and immutable laws,” me cannot be free agents ; and where the] is not free agency there cannot be mon responsibility. Nor are the apprehei sions entertained on this score to 1 allayed by the answer, ingenious as is, which has been given to them* l one of the ablest and- most judicioi apologists for the new creed. It is tn that human actions can be said to 1 “governed” only in the same metaph rical sense as that in which we spea of the laws of nature, which do n< really govern anything, but mere, describe the invariable order in whic natural phenomena have been observe to occur. It is true that the discovei of invariable regularity in human affair 1 Mr. Buckle’s first chapter, passim. 2 Comhill Magazine, for June and Jul 1861.