the genius of History lies, not simply in 'not trying', but actually in
'trying not', to make sense of historical facts. Ignoring the consensus of
sociologists, economists, psychologists, epistemologists, and logicians,
whose scientific activities all alike presupposed the feasibility of studying
scientifically the affairs of Man in Process of Civilization, as well as those
of a Homo Sapiens Pristinus who was the anthropologists' target, most
twentieth-century Western historians were in truth still maintaining that
anyone who might venture to profess any such science of Man in Process
of Civilization would be at best a heretic and at worst a charlatan.

For an interested spectator of this contest, it might be a delicate opera-
tion to declare which of the two parties was in the right, but it was not
a difficult forecast to foretell which of the two, rightly or wrongly, would
be approved as orthodox, and which condemned as heretical, if the case
were ever to be brought before the bar of an oecumenical council of the
Western Republic of Letters by some controversialist who had the
courage of his convictions. It could be predicted with confidence that in
that event the anathema would fall upon the historians, for it was mani-
fest that the main line of Western thought was represented, not by
them, but by the believers in the possibility of a scientific study of the
affairs of Man in Process of Civilization in the sense'of an attempt, in
this province of Reality as in others, to discover 'laws of Nature' by in-
ference from ascertained facts.

The fundamental faith of Western Man had always been a belief that
the Universe was subject to Law and was not given over to Chaos, and a
deist or atheist Late Modern Western Man's version of this Western
faith was (as we have seen) that the Law of the Universe was a system of
'laws of Nature' which were accessible to progressive investigation, dis-
covery, and formulation by a Collective Human Intellect. Grand dis-
coveries of hitherto latent 'laws of Nature' had been the essential
triumphs of a Late Modern Western Civilization's intellectual heroes:
Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier,1 Darwin, Einstein
—to cite eight of the more famous names. Who would presume to draw a
line beyond which these intellectual conquistadores must not extend their
operations, or, in other words, presume to confine the jurisdiction of 'the
laws of Nature' within some conventional limit? A proclamation that
one province of the Universe—and this the metropolitan province
occupied by Man in Process of Civilization—had been reserved once for
all, by some undesignated higher authority, as a sanctuary for Chaos
which was to be for ever immune from the jurisdiction of all law, natural
or divine, would be odious treason and horrible blasphemy in the judge-
ment of all scientifically bien pens ants twentieth-century minds; and, if

1 Any reader of Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modem Science 1,700-1500
(London 1949, Bell) will observe that, in the notices of the work of ih«»c first six heroes
on pp. 6t, 125, 186, 203, 207, and 208-9, there is a common feature which in every case
is the hero's essential feat. In every case his life-work is the vindication of the reign of
laws of Nature' in provinces of Reality in which the evidences of Nature's jurisdiction
had hitherto been invisible to Mankind's mental vision. While some of these aix men of
scientific genius did also distinguish themselves by ascertaining or verifying facts, they
•were famous, not for this, but for 'the discovery of causal laws, connecting certain con-
stant types of ... phenomena', .which, in the province of historical phenomena, was, as
we have seen, an illegitimate activity in the eyes o£ twentieth-century Western historians.