The highest generalisations of history

Therefore, if we are desirous of keeping in the highest generalisations of history, and indeed for many practical purposes, the six great epochs of universal history may be reduced to these four: —

1. The Ancient Monarchies—or the Theocratic age.

2. The Gmeo-Roman world—or the Classical.

3. The Catholic and Feudal ivorld—or the Medieval.

4. The Modern — or the Revolutionary ivorld of Free Thought and Free Life.

These dominant epochs (whether we treat them as six or as grouped into four) should each be kept co-ordinate and clear in our minds, as mutually dependent on each other, and each as an inseparable part of a living whole. No conception of history would be adequate, or other than starved and stunted, which entirely kept out of sight any one of these indispensable and characteristic epochs. They are all indissoluble; yet utterly different, and radically contrasted, just as the child is to the man, or the man to the woman; and for the same reason — that they are forms of one organic humanity.

It follows, that it is not at all the history of our own country which is all-important, overshadowing all the rest, nor the history of the times nearest to our own. From the spiritual, and indeed the scientific, point of view, if history be the continuous biography of the evolution of the human race, it may well be that the history of remoter times, which have the least resemblance to our own, may often be the more valuable to us, as correcting national prejudices and the narrow ideas bred in us by daily custom, whilst it is the wider outlook of universal history that alone can teach us all the vast possibilities and latent forces in human society, and the incalculable limits of variation which are open to man’s civilisation. The history of other races, and of very different systems, may be of all things the best to correct our insular vanities, and our conventional prejudices. We have indeed to know the history of our own country, of the later ages. But the danger is, that we may know little other history private tour istanbul.

Successive phases of civilisation

Thus one who had a grasp on the successive phases of civilisation from the time of Moses until our own day; vividly conceiving the essential features of Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian society; who felt the inner heart of the classical world, and who was in touch with the soul of the mediaeval religion and chivalry — would know more of true history than one who was simply master of the battles of the seventeenth century, and could catalogue, with dates and names, the annals of each German duchy, and each Italian republic. No doubt, for college examinations, they wring from raw lads, as Milton says, ‘ like blood from the nose,’ the details of the Saxon coinage, and the latest German theory of the mark-system.

These things are essential to examinations and prizes, and the good boy will give his whole mind to them. But they are far from essential to an intelligible understanding of the course which has been followed in the marvellous . unfolding of our human destiny. To see this, in all the imposing unity of the great drama, it is not enough to be crammed with catalogues of official and military incidents. It is needful to have a living sense of the characteristic types of life which succeeded each other in such glaring contrast, and often with such deadly hatred, through the dominant phases of man’s society on earth.