i9o	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
In truth the two schools of latter-day Western scholars held quite in-
compatible views about the methods and aims that were necessary for
intellectual salvation in the study of the affairs of Man in Process of
Civilization during the last five or six thousand years; and, since in the
twentieth-century phase of their long and hitherto inconclusive con-
troversy the word 'scientific', like the word 'democratic', was a fig-leaf
which no Western savant could discard without falling foul of a cultural
watch committee, the ideological argument between Western scientists
and Western historians had to be conducted, like the argument between
Russian Communists and Western Old Believers, in the form of a dis-
pute about the meaning to be attached to a word whose sacrosanctity
neither party dared impugn. In the political forum the word 'demo-
cratic' meant in Russian parlance 'egalitarian' at the expense of liberty,
while in Western parlance it meant 'libertarian' at the expense of
equality. Neither usage ventured to discard completely either of the two
explosive ideas—Equality and Liberty—which the word 'democratic'
held together at high tension, but the difference in relative emphasis was
a difference of degree that went so far as to be tantamount to a difference
of kind for practical purposes. The no less blessed word 'scientific',
which was the football in the intellectual arena, likewise held together
two ideas—the idea of ascertaining the facts of Nature and the idea of
inferring the laws of Nature from an unprejudiced, accurate, and ex-
haustive study of the facts—and here the difference of doctrine was
uncompromisingly sharp.
In this twentieth-century Western intellectual disputation, the writer
of this Study was aware that he himself was a combatant and not a
neutral spectator; and therefore, in order to neutralize as far as possible
the effect of any personal bias that might have influenced his own con-
victions on the subject, he preferred to refrain from attempting to ex-
pound in his own words the doctrinal point at issue, and to lay before his
readers, instead, a pair of expositions—the one more favourable and the
other less favourable to the thesis which was orthodox for contemporary
Western historians—from the pens of two contemporary Western
scholars, one of whom was an historian as well as a philosopher, while the
other was an historian who had made a special study of the history of
Western science.
The philosopher-champion of the historians' thesis sums up and gives
judgement as follows:
'Every natural science, said the Positivists, began by ascertaining facts
and then went on to discover their causal connexions. Accepting this
assertion, Comte proposed that there should be a new science called
Sociology, which was to begin by discovering the facts about Human Life
(this being the work of the historians) and then go on to discover the
causal connexions between these facts. The sociologist would thus be a
kind of super-historian, raising History to the rank of a science by thinking
scientifically about the same facts about which the historian thought only
empirically. , . . The claims of Comtian Sociology were quietly set aside
by the abler and more conscientious historians, who came to regard it as
sufficient for them, to discover and state the facts themselves: in the famous