202 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

(J) THE GROUNDS OF THE LATE MODERN WESTERN

HISTORIANS' AGNOSTICISM

The antinomian latter-day Western historians' dogma that the history
of Man in Process of Civilization is an unintelligibly chaotic congeries
of brute facts thus proves to be a heresy from the standpoint, not merely
of Western science, but of Human Thought itself; and this spectacle of
'the laws of Nature' standing entrenched and embedded in the very
structure of Man's intellect forces us to ask ourselves what can have
possessed any—even antediluvian—breed of Man to make him nail
these heretical colours to his mast. The antinomian historians' response
to the challenge of a decisive change of intellectual climate in their cul-
tural environment was not merely reactionary but truculent. So far from
seeking to earn an erasure of the stigma with which they had been
branded by eighteenth-century Western philosophers,1 they retorted by
telling the world that 'their glory' was 'in their shame'.2 Their response
to the challenge of outlawry was to proclaim themselves to be the An-
tinornians that they were. Constituting themselves the grand jury in
their own case, they found that the charge indicting them of maiding
nonsense of History was a true bill, and then, proceeding to constitute
themselves, in turn, the jury, they acquitted themselves with a self-
indulgent verdict of 'not guilty', on the plea that to be convicted of
making nonsense was as good as to be warranted 'scientific'.

On this point our comparison of the historians with the ducks in the
Round Pond will hardly help us out; for the ducks, as we have seen, were
not truculent; they were supine; and, in proudly refraining from fighting
with the vagrant gulls for the crusts that were tossed to the birds by the
general public, the ducks were rationally discounting in advance a never
yet disappointed expectation that the subsistence allowance, annually
voted to them by a benevolent Parliament, would continue to be issued
to them by a dutiful Ministry of Works. By contrast, the historians had
no such comfortable assurance that, if they allowed the affairs of Man in
Process of Civilization to be snatched from under their noses, morsel by
morsel, by their predatory rivals the social scientists, any providence,
human or divine, was going to dish out to them any alternative means of
subsistence. Indeed, on any rational calculation the chances were that,
on the contrary, the historians' policy of non-violent non-co-operation
with the social scientists' depredations at their expense would result in
leaving them destitute. Thus for the historians, unlike the ducks, the
attitude of being 'too proud to fight' was a luxury that they could not
afford; yet, nevertheless, they were indulging in it. Like the ducks, they
were refusing to scramble for bread falling like manna from Heaven.
They were declining to defend their own birthright by taking a leaf out
of their rivals' book. What had prompted these latter-day Western his-
torians to play this foolhardily dangerous game of challenging the
validity of the ineluctable laws of thought by refusing to entertain the
contemporary Western scientists' hypothesis that there were laws of
Nature' governing the history of Man in Process of Civilization ? They

1 See Teggart, in the passages quoted on p. 183, above, * Phil. in. 19.