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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY A True understanding of the matter and meaning of history is not to be obtained either by the anecdotal method, which records events, and nothing but events, with the delight of the gossiping barber; or by the intellectual method, which seeks to discover causes and events, and explains them in a more or less childish, short-sighted, and arbitrary fashion; or the philosophical, which, while claiming to deduce universal laws, a general plan, direction, and goal from the multitude of individual instances, has really only introduced subjective preconceptions that are often of the most terrifyingly foolish kind. All these methods must fail, because all alike devote a diligence and devotion that is really pitiable to the study of the inessential, while their eyes are firmly closed to what is essential. The historian endeavours to realize the circumstances of an individual,1 of a definite group or community, to discover by accurate investigation the exact condition under which a particular event took place. He tries to find the names of persons and places, dates and turning-points in a man\'s career.But what is the object of all this concrete individual knowledge? It may afford aesthetic satisfaction, but not real knowledge. 1 Thomas Carlyle, \" On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History,\" Lecture I. (I quote from an edition in one volume; undated; Ward, Lock and Co.; p. 3): \"For, as I take it, Universal History ... is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.\" If history is to be anything more than a mere collection of stories and tales, 1FIt is to do anything more than while away the tedium of the reader like any other imaginative story, it must give a picture of the life of mankind: must show the m...