History, like every other branch of intellectual activity, has responded to the doctrines of Evolution. That most fertile working hypothesis has proved, when applied here, not less fruitful than in other fields. It has caused the annals of the past to be reinvestigated, every document, record, and monument to be gathered up, and the results have been set forth from the new point of view. Evolutionary science, as we saw above, fixes its attention primarily on the processes of development, and regards the individual, in comparison with a species or the race, as a negligible quantity. A similar spirit has guided historical students. They have turned away from “great captains with their guns and drums,” away from figure-head monarchs, away from the achievements of even the mightiest individuals, to scrutinize human action in its collective forms, the rise and supremacy and fall of institutions, the growth of parties, the waxing and waning of organisms like Church or State, in whose many-centuried existence individual careers are swallowed up. Using the methods of Science, these students have persuaded themselves that history also is a science, which, in truth, it can never be. Judicial temper, patience, veracity,--the qualities which they rightly magnify,--were not invented by them, nor are these the only qualities required in writing history. Speaking broadly, facts lie within the reach of any diligent searcher. But a fact is a mere pebble in a brook until some David comes to put it in his sling. True history is the arrangement and interpretation of facts, and--more difficult still--insight into motives: for this there must be art, there must be imagination. To the disciples of the “scientific school” it may be said that the heaping up of great stores of facts--the collection of manuscripts, the cataloguing of documents, the shoveling all together in thick volumes prefaced by forty pages of bibliography, each paragraph floating on a deep, viscous stream of notes, each volume bulging with a score of appendices--is in no high sense history, but the accumulation of material therefor. It bears the same relation to history as the work of the quarryman to that of the architect; most worthy in itself, and evidently indispensable, but not the same. Stand before some noble edifice,--Lincoln Cathedral, for instance, with its incomparable site, its symmetry and majestic proportions: scan it until you feel its personality and realize that this is a living idea, the embodiment of strength and beauty and aspiration and awe,--and you will not confound the agency of the stone-cutters who quarried the blocks with that of the architect in whose imagination the design first rose. Neither should there be confusion between the historical hodman and the historian.