As a school of political science and historical reflection, the study of these and similar classical historical works is of inestimable advantage. But independently of this, and considered merely in themselves, all those countless battles--those endless, and even, for the greater part, useless wars, of which the long succession fills up for so many thousand years the annals of all nations, are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny. The same, with a slight distinction, will hold good of so many celebrated treaties of peace in past ages, when these have lost all interest for real life and the present order of things;--treaties, which though brought about by great labour, and upheld by consummate art, were yet internally defective, and sooner or later, and often quickly enough, fell to pieces and were destroyed. From all these descriptions of ancient wars, and treaties of peace, no longer applicable or of interest to the present world or present order of things, historical philosophy can deduce but one, though by no means unimportant, result. It is this--that the internal discord, innate in man and in the human race, may easily and at every moment break out into real and open strife--nay, that peace itself--that immutable object of high political art, when regarded from this point of view, appears to be nothing else than a war retarded or kept under by human dexterity; for some secret disposition--some diseased political matter, is almost ever at hand to call it into existence. In the same way as a scientific physician regards the health of the body, or its right temperature, as a happy equipoise--a middle line not easy to be observed between two contending evils--we must ever expect in such an organic imperfection a tendency to, or the seeds of, disease in one shape or another. Political events form but one part, and not the whole, of human history. A knowledge of details, however great and various it may be, constitutes no science in the philosophic sense of the word, for it is in the right and comprehensive conception of the whole that science consists. As the greater part of the nine hundred millions of men on the whole surface of the earth, according to the highest estimate of a hazardous calculation, are born, live and die, without a history of them being possible, or without their reckoning a fraction in the general history--so that the extremely small number of those called historical men, forms but a rare exception--so there are nations and countries, which in a general comparative survey of nations, serve but as a mark or evidence of some particular stage of civilization, without of themselves holding any place in the general history of our species, or conducing to the social progress of mankind, or possessing any weight or importance in the scale of humanity.