ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 211

dant, but awkwardly scarce;1 and the question on which the possibility
of ascertaining 'laws of Nature1 in this episode of history turned was the
question whether the significant known integral events were actually
numerous enough to provide a basis for generalizations.

This experience is described in the following testimony from the pen
of a practised investigator of the working of 'laws of Nature' on the
economic plane of latter-day Western social life :

'The volume of economic statistics is certainly imposing—it is even
intimidating at first sight. But on closer inspection the mass proves to
consist less of a multiplication of independent observations upon parti-
cular phenomena than of observations upon a vast variety of phenomena,
and of the infinite detail in which certain processes must be observed.. . .
As an investigator gets deeper into a quantitative analysis of business
cycles, his first impression that the statistical data to be dealt with are
embarrassingly abundant turns into a conviction that they are painfully
inadequate.'2

The agnostics who put their finger on the scarcity of significant known
events as their ground for denying the possibility of discerning 'laws of
Nature' in the history of Man in Process of Civilization were thus at any
rate nearer the mark—mistaken though they too might be—than their
fellow agnostics whose identical denial was based on the contradictory
thesis that the hoppers in their factory had been choked by a plethora of
overproduction.

This case for agnosticism on the ground, not of a redundancy in the
data, but of an insufficiency, is judiciously presented in the following
passage from the pen of a distinguished twentieth-century Western
historian:

'The reading public asks for a final interpretation of History, and for an
answer to the question why civilisations rise and fall. Is there, as Hume
thought, a tidal movement in human affairs and nothing more than this
tidal ebb and flow ? Is there no hope of stability or of unmixed achieve-
ment in the temporal sphere ? Or can it be said that, in spite of ages of
regression towards barbarism, historians are able to bring evidence of
progress towards a desirable end ?

*To these questions British historians are not very ready to give an
answer, and, in general, the answers which are given are not put forward
by the most learned or the most profound scholars. In the preface to his
History of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher wrote that he had no ultimate philo-
sophy of history. Such a view does not imply scepticism, or even lack of
belief in the possibility of a final synthesis. The difficulty at present is
that the data are insufficient.3 To a historian the history of the World of
Man is a very short history. The years of the astronomers and the geolo-
gists reach beyond a historian's reckoning; a small fraction only of these
vast epochs is covered by the period during which Man, with knowledge

* See I. i. 455-6.

* Mitchell, W. C.: Business Cycles: The Problem and Its Setting (New York 1927,
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.), pp. 203 and 205.

3 'It is not—to my mind—altogether paradoxical to say also that we know too much.
I mean, we know so many facts which lend themselves to arrangement in patterns that

of this Study).