ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS '^5

historians neglected what was susceptible of scientific study in order *feQ .
attend exclusively to events that interfered with "the natural order' by
being 'unnatural', 'monstrous', 'accidental', and 'unusual';1 and the
sting of truth in this charge had been retrospectively pressed home
under the historians' thin skin by the witty authors of 1066 and All
That2 in their parody of a presentation of History which had actually
once held the field. In dissociating themselves from History as it was
being written by Western historians in the eighteenth century, the
Western philosophers of that age had in effect been praying to be
delivered 'from battle and murder and from sudden death' (in the words
of the Litany in The Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the
Church of England). Sudden death, murder, and battle, however, were
the dominant theme not only of a pre-Rankean Western historiography
but likewise of the documents that the nineteenth-century Western
historians had been extracting from Western public archives; and the
'unnaturalness' and 'monstrousness' of this 'penny dreadful', 'Sunday
paper' streak in human affairs were not mitigated by bringing the stuff
out of the wholesalers' warehouses in bulk and retailing it to the public
in an infinite number of infinitesimally small samples.

On the other hand the nineteenth-century historians were genuinely
breaking new ground—and thereby effectively converting their shame
into glory—when they broke their way out of the madhouse of sensa-
tional public events, in which their predecessors had been 'cabined,
cribbed, confined, bound in'3 by a conventional limitation of the usage of
the word 'historic', and thereby won for themselves the freedom of the
great open spaces of private life, in which ordinary people demonstrated
daily to intellectual sight-seers that, when the human animal was given
the run of a Yellowstone Park, he could wear a less repulsive coun-
tenance than he was condemned to exhibit in his public life, where he had
to live under the pathological slum conditions of the zoological gardens
in a metropolis. In claiming for History this wholesomely spacious park-
land of private life, the historians were legitimately appropriating for
their own purposes a field of human affairs which the economists and the
sociologists were cultivating contemporaneously with fruitful results. It
was a pity, as well as a paradox, that the historians should feel them-
selves inhibited from joining in the search for a 'natural order' by their
acquisition of the very data that were enabling the sociologists and the
economists to make some sense out of a human chaos by establishing two
new sciences through the discovery of laws of Nature' reigning over
virgin soil.

The historians' inhibition was paradoxical because, in all fields of
study, both human and non-human, it had been the experience of a
Collective Human Intellect that, the greater the quantity of the data, the
greater was the precision with which laws of Nature' were ascertainable.4
This finding holds good, as we have seen, wherever the quantity of the
data is not either so small that nothing can be made of them beyond the

1 See Teggart, quoted on p. 183, above.

2 Sellar, W. C., and Yeatman, R. J.: 1066 and All That, A Memorable History of Eng-
land (London 1930, Methuen).

3 Shakspeare: Macbeth, Act III, scene iv, 1. 24. * See I. i. 452-7.