USTTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 193
:r the antinomian historians were to be 'put on the spot', an explicit
}lic confession of their shocking atavistic eighteenth-century belief
t the life of Man in Process of Civilization was 'a tale told by an idiot,
lifying nothing',1 would inevitably provoke a conviction on the
.rge of heresy and a sentence to whatever punishment might await a
victed heretic in a post-Modern Western World in which the Late
>dern Western virtue of tolerance had fallen back several degrees below
eighteenth-century standard of 'politeness'.

It could be predicted with no less confidence that, if, in our imaginary
oecumenical council, some trick of oratory or freak of fortune were to
win a majority of the votes for the antinomian historians, the sociologists
on whom the tables would then be turned would be no less rightly com-
bustible heretics according to the verdict of an historian-inquisitor. In-
deed, if the historians had not yet asked for trouble by taking the
offensive against the social scientists and denouncing them on the very
charge of heresy that was hanging over the historians' own heads, this
tactful tolerance of theirs seemed to be the genial product of an infinite
capacity, not for holding their own passions in check, but for ignoring
their aggressive adversaries' existence. Mid-way through the twentieth
century of the Christian Era, most Western historians seemed still to
be contriving to turn as blind an eye to the social scientists' successive
trespasses on the historians' pointedly placarded preserve as a Neville
Chamberlain had turned in A.D. 1938 to the Third Reich's successive
aggressions in the Western World's political arena. In an era of appease-
ment the historians were allowing the economists to rob the Antinomian
World of an Austria, and the sociologists to rob it of a Czechoslovakia,
from under the Antinomians' very eyes, without betraying, by even the
flicker of an eyelid, any consciousness of these impudent depredations
that were being committed at the historians' expense.

One day in the winter of A.D. 1949-50, when the writer of this Study,
with the present chapter in mind, was meditating in his native city of
London on this strange comedy that was being played within his sight
on a contemporary human stage, his legs carried him to the brink of the
Round Pond in Kensington Gardens to enjoy a spectacle of which he had
never grown tired since the abnormally severe weather in the early
months of the year A.D. 1894 had taught the sea-gulls bred in the pro-
vinces and abroad to spend their winters in the London parks as the
uninvited but pampered guests of the human inhabitants of the metro-
polis. While he was listening, on this particular afternoon, to the familiar
screaming of the excited gulls, as they wheeled and dived, like fighter
planes, and jostled with one another to catch in the air the morsels of
bread that their human benefactors were, as usual, tossing to them, his
eye was caught by the comically 'know-nothing' air of the domesticated
ducks, officially domiciled in the Royal Parks and Gardens, who were
placidly riding on the water just below the scene of the gulls' frantic
aerial manoeuvres. 'Too proud to fight',2 these lawful denizens of the

1 Shakspeare: Macbeth, Act. V, scene v.

2 'There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight' (President Woodrow Wilson
at Philadelphia on the loth May, 1915).

B 2915. EC H