ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 213

The prudent answer to this challenge, at the date at which it was
delivered, was King Agrippa's 'Almost thou persuadest me*.1 It is in-
disputable that the discovery of 'laws of Nature' by induction cannot be
attempted with any prospect of success unless the investigator has at his
command a minimum quantity of data to serve as instances for testing
hypotheses by the empirical method of trial and error. When the number
is less than the minimum—whatever this indispensable minimum may
be held to be in the particular field that happens to be under investiga-
tion—the margin of possible error in the findings of tentative inductions
becomes prohibitively wide; and, on this account, an importunately
scientific-minded student of history might have found himself con-
strained to admit that an unconditional surrender was the only honest
response to an agnostic-minded historian's challenge if this had been
delivered, not in the first century of a post-Modern Age of Western
history, but, let us say, some four hundred years earlier.

If in A.D. 1532, instead of in A.D. 1932 (the year in which Woodward's
book was actually published), a seeker after 'laws of Nature' governing
the history of Man in Process of Civilization had been taxed to declare
the number of the data of the highest order of magnitude in his chosen
field of study about which he could claim to possess effective knowledge,
a Western scholar at that earlier date would have had to confess an in-
ability to muster more than three data on the requisite scale; and this
insufficient figure of three2 could not have been bettered at the time by
the intellectual heirs to the cultural heritages of any of the other living
civilizations. A Western scholar's effective knowledge of civilizations
Dther than his own would have been confined in A.D. 1532 to the
Hellenic Civilization, to which the Western was affiliated, and the
Syriac Civilization, from which the spark of creativity in Christianity
aad been derived. A knowledge of the same two extinct civilizations of
:he second generation would likewise have constituted the entire intel-
ectual stock-in-trade of a contemporary scholar in Orthodox Christen-
iom, in its Ottoman and its Russian provinces alike, and in the Islamic
iVorld of the day. A contemporary Far Eastern scholar's knowledge of
ivilizations other than his own would similarly have been limited to the
3inic and the Indie, while a contemporary Hindu scholar would have
lad no knowledge of any civilizations except his own and its Indie pre-
lecessor. As for the living civilizations of the New World, they were at
hat moment losing consciousness through being brutally knocked on
he head by Castilian conqiiistadares.

On this showing, it is manifest that in A.D. 1532 an agnostic would
lave been justified in submitting that the data were at present not
ufficient to warrant an attempt to discover 'laws of Nature' governing
he history of Man in Process of Civilization; and at that date this
gnostic argument would have been unanswerable, not only in Western

i the 'Britain in Pictures' series), p. 48. The quotation from this book has been made
tfth the permission of the author and the publishers. See further the same historian's
Laleigh Lecture, 'Some Considerations on the Present State of Historical Studies', read
n the tyth May, 10.50, and published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xxxvi.

1 Acts xxvi. 28.

2 See the passage of Sir Charles Darwin's work quoted on p. 306, n. a, above.