Now at the birth of this great conception science, it is true,
presided, yet religion it was which at the outset clothed it in its
own garb, and familiarised men with it by appealing to their hearts
first and then to their intellects; knowing that at the beginning
of things it is through the moral nature, and not through the
intellectual, that great truths are spread.
So in Herodotus, who may be taken as a representative of the
orthodox tone of thought, the idea of the uniform sequence of cause
and effect appears under the theological aspect of Nemesis and
Providence, which is really the scientific conception of law, only
it is viewed from an ETHICAL standpoint.
Now in Thucydides the philosophy of history rests on the
probability, which the uniformity of human nature affords us, that
the future will in the course of human things resemble the past, if
not reproduce it. He appears to contemplate a recurrence of the
phenomena of history as equally certain with a return of the
epidemic of the Great Plague.
Notwithstanding what German critics have written on the subject, we
must beware of regarding this conception as a mere reproduction of
that cyclic theory of events which sees in the world nothing but
the regular rotation of Strophe and Antistrophe, in the eternal
choir of life and death.
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