On Compromise | Page 9

consists in the
explanation of existing parts in the frame of society by connecting them with
corresponding parts in some earlier frame; in the identification of present forms in the
past, and past forms in the present. Its main process is the detection of corresponding
customs, opinions, laws, beliefs, among different communities, and a grouping of them
into general classes with reference to some one common feature. It is a certain way of
seeking answers to various questions of origin, resting on the same general doctrine of
evolution, applied to moral and social forms, as that which is being applied with so much
ingenuity to the series of organic matter. The historic conception is a reference of every
state of society to a particular stage in the evolution of its general conditions. Ideas of law,
of virtue, of religion, of the physical universe, of history, of the social union itself, all
march in a harmonious and inter-dependent order.

Curiosity with reference to origins is for various reasons the most marked element among
modern scientific tendencies. It covers the whole field, moral, intellectual, and physical,
from the smile or the frown on a man's face, up to the most complex of the ideas in his
mind; from the expression of his emotions, to their root and relations with one another in
his inmost organisation. As an ingenious writer, too soon lost to our political literature,
has put it:--'If we wanted to describe one of the most marked results, perhaps the most
marked result, of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made an antiquity.
When in former times our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as
occupied with coins and medals and Druids' stones. But now there are other relics; indeed
all matter is become such. Man himself has to the eye of science become an antiquity.
She tries to read, is beginning to read, knows she ought to read, in the frame of each man
the result of a whole history of all his life, and what he is and what makes him so.'[3]
Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities than as an interesting
scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals, inherited predispositions. Opinions are
counted rather as phenomena to be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood. Of
usages, we are beginning first of all to think where they came from, and secondarily
whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got to accept. In the
last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it true? We now ask, How did men come
to take it for true? In short the relations among social phenomena which now engage
most attention, are relations of original source, rather than those of actual consistency in
theory and actual fitness in practice. The devotees of the current method are more
concerned with the pedigree and genealogical connections of a custom or an idea than
with its own proper goodness or badness, its strength or its weakness.
Though there is no necessary or truly logical association between systematic use of this
method rightly limited, and a slack and slipshod preference of vague general forms over
definite ideas, yet every one can see its tendency, if uncorrected, to make men shrink
from importing anything like absolute quality into their propositions. We can see also,
what is still worse, its tendency to place individual robustness and initiative in the light of
superfluities, with which a world that goes by evolution can very well dispense. Men
easily come to consider clearness and positiveness in their opinions, staunchness in
holding and defending them, and fervour in carrying them into action, as equivocal
virtues of very doubtful perfection, in a state of things where every abuse has after all had
a defensible origin; where every error has, we must confess, once been true relatively to
other parts of belief in those who held the error; and where all parts of life are so bound
up with one another, that it is of no avail to attack one evil, unless you attack many more
at the same time. This is a caricature of the real teaching of the Historic Method, of which
we shall have to speak presently; but it is one of those caricatures which the natural sloth
in such matters, and the indigenous intellectual haziness of the majority of men, make
them very willing to take for the true philosophy of things.
Then there is the newspaper press, that huge engine for keeping discussion on a low level,
and making the political test final. To take off the taxes on knowledge was to place a
heavy tax on broad and independent opinion. The multiplication of journals 'delivering
brawling judgments unashamed on all things