ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 203

would hardly thus have followed the Pharisees' forbidding example of
passing sentence of ostracism on themselves1 if they, in their turn, had
not been moved by Pharisaically compulsive motives. Can we account
for the idiosyncrasy of these antinomian historians by laying bare its
intellectual grounds ?

One argument that was sometimes propounded by latter-day Western
historians to prove the impracticability of applying to human affairs
those methods by which non-human affairs had been successfully
brought under the jurisdiction of laws of Nature was to point out that,
in the study of human affairs, hypotheses could not be verified by
mounting 'controlled* experiments, since in real life, in sharp contrast
to the Utopian conditions of an Huxleian Brave New World> Man had
never yet been conditioned to the amenability of a guinea-pig, but was
still exhibiting all the contrariness of a most recalcitrantly wild animal.2
This observation was, of course, correct, but the agnostic conclusion
drawn from it was put out of court by the following considerations. In
the first place a human wild animal that was fiercely refractory to the
personal wills of other representatives of its kind might at the same time
turn out to be tamely submissive to the impersonal yoke of custom and
impressionably amenable to spells cast upon the conscious personality by
both a personal and an impersonal layer of a subconscious psychic
underworld. The second weakness of the argument was the postulate
that a law of Nature* could never properly be certified as having been
duly ascertained unless it had been verified by experiments arranged and
executed so as to insulate the particular phenomena in which the regu-
larities and recurrences constituting this hypothetical pattern, rhythm,
plot, or law were alleged to reveal themselves. The acceptance of this
postulate would have entailed the disfranchisement of a number of
sciences which had been recognized, by the general consensus of a Col-
lective Human Intellect, to have won a legitimate title to the name
by having put their ringer on systems of laws of Nature' that were
generally admitted to be valid.

Since Primitive Man was no more amenable to being made a victim of
controlled experiments than was Man in Process of Civilization, the
science of Anthropology would have been the first to lose its franchise on
the postulated test; and no doubt the historians would not have been
sorry to find this opportunity of disallowing retrospectively a title to
which they had implicitly given a grudging recognition by maintaining a
disapprobatory silence. Fortunately, however, for the vulnerably human
science of Anthropology, the impeccably inhuman science of Astronomy
happened to be in the same boat. The courses of the stars3 were no more
amenable to the test of controlled experiments4 than were the tides in
the affairs of men;5 and Astronomy and Anthropology must therefore
either sink or swim together—sharing the same watery grave if an ability
to insist on registering its subjects' finger-prints was to be taken as the

1 For the etymology of the word 'Pharisees', see V. v. 73, with n. 4.

2 See Darwin, Sir Charles: The Next Million "Years (London 1952, Hart-Davis), chap,
vii: 'Man—A Wild Animal* (pp. 115-33).

3 Judges v. 20. •* See p. 172, above.
s Shakspeare: Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iii, L 217.