ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 195

which its distinguished author manifestly felt to be an effective declara-
tion of intellectual independence:

^One intellectual excitement has . . . been denied me. Men wiser and
more learned than I have discerned in History a plot, a rhythm, a pre-
determined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see
only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave;
only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be
no generalisations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should
recognise in the development of human destinies the play of the con-
tingent and the unforeseen.'1

This declaration had become a locus classicus within seventeen years
of the date of its publication;2 yet, before it was published, it had already
been put out of court by its author's choice of his title for the book in
which this prefatory passage was intended to strike the key-note. An
historian who had thus publicly declared his allegiance to the dogma
that 'Life is just one damned thing after another' might have been ex-
pected to give his work some such conformably non-committal title
as * A History of Some Emergencies in Some Human Affairs'; but, in
calling it, as he did, 'A History of Europe*, he was recanting in his title
his own denial in his preface that he had 'discerned in History a plot, a
rhythm, a pre-determined pattern'; for the portmanteau word3 'Europe'
is a whole Corpus Juris Naturae in itself.

In writing into his title this one word 'Europe', the historian was
compromising himself inextricably by subscribing implicitly to at least
thirty-nine articles of a submerged Western religio historici.

Article One of this traditional Act of Faith is an endorsement of a
glaring pattern of cultural geography in which the OikoumenS is dis-
membered, by a Procrustean operation, into fragments labelled 'Europe'
and the rest of 'the continents*.4 Article Two is an act of homage to an
egocentric illusion which was shared by the children of a Western
Society with the children of all other societies known to History, and
which had misled them all into the identical, and therefore in every case
incongruous, assumption that each society's own culture was 'Civiliza-
tion' with a capital 'C'.5 Article Three is the detection of a plot in which
the emergencies that follow 'upon one another as wave follows upon

1 Fisher, H. A. L.: A History of Europe (London 1935, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 3 vols.),
vol. i, p. vii, quoted in the present Study, V. v. 414.

2 The brilliance with which, in this passage, the Weltanschauung of an antinomian
school of Late Modern Western historians is propounded by a master of the art of His-
tory, and the force of the impression made on the minds of contemporaries by so
challenging an exposition of a sharply controversial thesis by an eminent authority, were
the considerations that moved the present writer at this point in his argument to illus-
trate his theme by citing an historian of an older generation for whom he felt an abiding
professional respect and personal regard. Herbert Fisher's kindness to him as a young
man had been one of the happy circumstances in his life, and one of the milestones in his
education had been Napoleonic Statesmanship in Germany—a book that, in his judgement,
was a masterpiece in the practice of the delicate art of distilling History out of public
archives.

s 'You see, it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word'
(Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll).

4 A critique of this traditional pattern of cultural geography will be found in DC. viii.
708-29. For the purposes of the present argument, it makes no difference whether this
pattern is, or is not, a reflection of historical realities.

s This egocentric illusion had been examined in I. i. 157-64.