On Compromise | Page 9

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 all day long,' has done much to deaden the small stock of individuality in public verdicts. It has done much to make vulgar ways of looking at things and vulgar ways of speaking of them stronger and stronger, by formulating and repeating and stereotyping them incessantly from morning until afternoon, and from year's end to year's end. For a newspaper must live,