FATHER OF LIGHTS, whether they be in the world of matter or of mind, there is no parallax of light, no shadow of change; and he feels that he can say with Spenser, in the Fairy Queen:

"When I bethink me on that speech whylear,

Of mutability,—and well it weigh;

Me seems, that though she all unworthy were
Of the heaven's rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she bears the greatest sway.

Of that same time when no more change shall be,
But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stay'd

Upon the pillars of eternity,

That is contrayr to mutability:

For all that moveth doth in change delight,
But thenceforth all shall rest eternally
With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE UTILITY OF HISTORY.

"Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples; and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come."-1 Cor. ch. x. "History is philosophy teaching by example.”—Bolingbroke.

THE definition by Bolingbroke has received the assent of society, by its universal reception without denial. But history is extended even beyond that definition. As time advances, the laws of social growth and decay begin to assume the regularity of

a science; and the divine government is developed in the same order and uniformity, in human action, as in the movements of the material bodies.

Science, too, has extended this instruction, by example, much beyond the boundaries of mere human transactions. It has shown us history in every thing. The tree, it is said, records its own age by the successive strata of its growth. The stars also measure the spaces of time, and there is an astronomical history which goes back to the morning of creation. The very elements and affinities of matter have undergone changes, and there is a record of them written on the features of nature. The fountains of the

great deep have been broken up-islands have been cast up by fire out of its waters, and the memorials of its secret history scattered on the mountain tops. Chemical agencies have been employed, till the living animal and the decaying wood, petrified in stone, preserved in caverns, or imbedded in rocks, remain, and shall forever remain, historical monuments to the changes wrought by Almighty power, as well as to the unchanging truth of his word.

But man is at last the chief subject of history; for his restoration to a lost estate were the fountains of nature broken up, and that very registry of time, kept by the bright orbs of heaven, is a ministering agent to the record of human events.

Yet upon all this history of man, mutability, apparently the most wayward and destructive, is written with a pen of iron. Philosophy, viewing it as a dis

connected series, has made little out of it; and the good and the wise have turned with sorrow from what seemed a dark picture of depravity.

While, however, there rests this apparent uncertainty on the great mass of human history, there stands out the fact, that there is no evidence of uncertainty found in the relations of the social system. Human nature has fixed principles, and when we observe it in society around us, we never doubt that the same effects will follow the same causes: and the legislator, as the author of the spirit of laws, never fails to derive lessons of instruction from the relations of institutions to society, and of manners to institutions. Hence it is only when we view events without principles that history becomes confused, and uncertainty rests upon its results. We conclude, then, that as human nature has a constitution, and as the physical world has laws, so the social system has not moved on through ages of various being, under organized forms, without principles proper to itself, and without acknowledging the relation of cause and effect.

To trace out these principles, and to establish this immutable connection of cause and effect, as they have been developed in the successive modes of human society, constitutes what should properly be called, the science of history.

1. Our first object, now, is to show what this science of history is;

2. And our second, to show its uses.

WHAT THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY IS.

Science is systematized truth.*

It is built up

by three several processes. 1st. The observation of facts. 2d. The deduction of principles from the continuity and uniformity of facts. 3d. The classification of these principles into systems of laws having reference to some common object. Facts are first observed; next, it is observed that a certain class of facts or phenomena always occur under a fixed condition of things; this condition being observed, it is proved by experience or demonstration, and henceforth set down as an immutable principle: new facts. are observed, and new principles deduced, as time and observation extend: at length these principles are classified, and a system is formed, based upon a common class of objects, which takes its form as a science. There is first the particular facts; next the general fact, which constitutes the principle; and lastly, a system of truths.

In this manner are all sciences begun and finished; so geometry was built up in Grecian antiquity; so chemistry has been formed within the last two centuries; so political economy is now forming; and so history, to be valuable as knowledge, must be a system of principles drawn from the phenomena of social life, observed and recorded during accumulated ages.

* For a more extended definition of science, see chapter 5th.

To know what the system of truths is, which is asserted and illustrated by history, we must note the fact that it comprehends the whole progression of the human race, physical and intellectual. Indeed, the very universality of its topics has caused its uncertainty, and will cause it to be the last subject which philosophy brings into the circle of the sciences, and reduces, as it has done more tangible things, into the simplicity of demonstrative systems. History has usually been regarded as relating to nations or eras, in the entirety of their multifarious transactions; but this is not the philosophy of history, and does not exhibit the progress of mankind at any period of its existence. It fixes the eye upon the tumults of human passion, as the mariner looks out in the storm upon the billows of the ocean cast up by the tempest, but leaves out of view that distant influence which rolls a tide through the affairs of men, as it does through the waters of the deep: and it contemplates man from wrong points of view; for, while twenty dynasties have risen and fallen, and a thousand battles been fought without changing even a boundary, some poor journeyman has invented the art of printing; some Florentine merchant has poured the dews of wealth upon the parched plants of literature; some Descartes has improved the mathematical analysis ; or some Whitney introduced a new staple into the resources of nations. Thus the great moving causes of social progress lie beyond the mass of confused