i84 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

century changes in the climate of thought in their own Western intellec-
tual milieu.

The first of these changes was a revolutionary improvement in the
intellectual status of the historians' own mental activity. In the eigh-
teenth century the depreciation of History in theory for the metaphysical
reasons expounded by the latter-day student of History whom we have
just cited had been accompanied, as was to be expected, by a contempt
for, and neglect of, the pursuit of History in practice; and the acclama-
tion with which Gibbon's work of genius (edebatur A.D. 1776-88) was
greeted by that great eighteenth-century historian's contemporaries was
the exception that proved the eighteenth-century rule. Gibbon's con-
temporary fame and vogue were, however, also portents of an approach-
ing avalanche into a new geological age; for, within twenty-five years of
the publication of the last instalment of The History of the Decline and
Fall of The Roman Empire in A.D. 1788, the valuation of History had
begun to appreciate on the Western intellectual stock exchange, and
thereafter the boom had been buoyed up progressively to ever higher
levels until, at the time of writing mid-way through the twentieth cen-
tury of the Christian Era, a school of post-Modern Western scientists,
whose own prestige was then perhaps only just passing its zenith, had
paid their tribute of sincere flattery to the still rising prestige of the
history of human affairs by condescending to take observations of their
non-human objects of study in an historical perspective.

The latter-day Western physical scientists who were thus courteously
dipping their flag to latter-day Western historians of human affairs, as
their ships glided past one another, were, however, at the same time slyly
committing against their fellow mariners a series of acts of piracy on
high seas that had been left lawless through having been released from
the jurisdiction of God without having been brought within the three-
mile limit of any human intellectual discipline's territorial waters.

Eighteenth-century metaphysical cartographers had partitioned the
Universe on the one side into an orderly province of non-human affairs
in which fthe laws of Nature' were believed to be in force, and which was
therefore held to be accessible to progressive exploration by the cumula-
tive enterprise of a Collective Human Intellect, and on the other side
into a chaotic province of human history which was dogmatically de-
clared to be intrinsically unchartable. This arbitrary division of the
Apple of Life was as pretentious a gesture as the disreputable Early
Modern Western Pope Alexander VI's pretension to divide the surface
of one planet between the Borgia's Castilian fellow-countrymen and
their Portuguese competitors; and the eighteenth-century metaphysical
operation also suffered from two incurable flaws which had made Pope
Alexander's cartographical bulls a dead letter. Like these, it was in-
fluenced by a human bias and, like these again, it failed to allow for
the extent and configuration of still undiscovered seas and lands, The
eighteenth-century Western partition of the Universe did not, in fact,
account for all that therein is.1 It did not cover the whole area of even
the single province of human affairs. There were branches or aspects of

* Ps. cxlvi. 6.