The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

258 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

insight into the causal connexion of past and
future, because we have grasped the idea of development and dreamed the dream of progress, the
reconstruction of history has become a necessity.
It has also become a science. The promotion of
history to the rank of a science or Wissenschalft is
due to the conception of development. We conceive every historical event or phenomenon as a
moment in a continuous process of change, and the
historian's problem is to determine as completely
as possible its connexions with what went before
and with what came after, to define its causal relations and its significance in the development to
which it belongs. The unattainable ideal of historical research is to explain fully the whole
development of human civilisation. This is as
much a scientific problem as to trace the history of
the solar system or of animal life on the earth,
though natural and historical science deal with
very different kinds of data, and employ different
methods. If the Greeks had possessed records
extending over the history of two or three
thousand years, the conception of causal development would probably have emerged, and they
might have founded scientific history. The limitation of their knowledge of the past to a few
centuries disabled them from evolving this idea;
and history therefore always remained subordinate
to immediate practical ends. But we must not
underrate the importance of the new view which
Thucydides announced to the world, that history is