My first serious concern was to find some organon, method, or standpoint of interpretation, which should be coextensive with the full breadth of these different specialisms, and with the field of Civilisation to be surveyed (and which, to keep within manageable limits, I was obliged to confine to the ages of written history), and then by means of this, to work out those general laws which should bind each and all of the factors into a unity with one another and with the whole. This done, I then had to apply them in detail to the matter of the historical specialisms as at present existing; and here I found that although the facts and details had been carefully collected, sifted, and arranged in orderly sequence, they still contained crude and imperfectly assimilated matter which prevented them from being dove-tailed with other specialisms in a single harmonious chain of evolution and development. I had accordingly to draw on each of the various specialisms to remedy the limitations and defects of the others. In the evolution of Greek Philosophy, for example, it was necessary, in order to make it consistent and harmonious, to show the influence of a new principle of causation introduced at a certain point from Persian and Hindoo sources.

To bring out the inner significance of Hindooism and Buddhism, again, it was necessary to use Greek Philosophy and Christianity as foils; while to reconstruct the life of Jesus on the fewest and simplest motives, and to separate the truth from the fiction in the Gospel narratives, as well as to get a consistent conception of the Kingdom of God, it was necessary to fall back on the anterior evolution of Judaism, rather than on the later evolution of Christianity itself in which the historians of Earlv Christianity had entangled themselves. To explain the formation of the New Testament Canon, and the reasons for the selection of its separate books (in my judgment the true touchstone of our understanding of Early Christianity), it was necessary to draw even more freely on Greek Philosophy, Syrian Philosophy, and Judaism, than on the Higher Criticism itself, important as it is; and so on. After the Reformation, when the unity of the Church was broken up, Historical Specialism in its modern sense first made its appearance, and entered on those triumphs in one field after another, which are its abiding glory.

In its accumulation of thoroughly sifted historical material of all kinds, and its orderly arrangement and distribution, it showed its most useful and beneficent side, but unfortunately this material, so necessary for severe scholarship, instead of having been first put through the crucible to remove its dross, and handed over to a general Science of Civilisation to be overhauled, co-ordinated, and reconstituted, has been delivered over to the public for consumption, by each specialism, raw from its own particular mine; with results the more false and misleading, the more important they are to society and the State. And it will not be until these specialisms have found some general scheme of Civilisation as a whole under which to work, that they will become, like the Physical Sciences, Biology, and Medicine, fruitful and useful again. It is true, of course, that most of the leading specialists know something of the results of the others in their immediate neighbourhood, but except among the broader minds, this is little more than a mere penumbra of light, like that of the glow-worm in the grass, extending little farther than their immediate affiliations and surroundings, and not a full complement of illuminants, deliberately lighting up the whole field.

But I will go further, and will venture to say this: - that there is no general conclusion which is important to the public at large, and which is the product of any one of these specialisms dealing with history, the human mind or human life, but is liable to have its flank turned, and itself shown to be a practical falsity, by considerations drawn from this Science of Civilisation as a whole. And further, as I have already said, it will not be until these specialisms have found some such general scheme under which to work, that they either can or will become fruitful again. Any Government or private philanthropist therefore who is contemplating the founding of new Universities for "original research" in these historical specialisms, may well pause and consider; for with the prestige that now attaches to all specialisms in the public mind, owing to their triumph in the Physical Sciences, these Universities, if established, would deliver the public over to the despotism of a race of dreamers, theorists, and impracticals, compared with whom the isolated Rousseaus of the past would show as but single locusts to an invading swarm; and the multiplied isolated excavations which they would everywhere throw up along the landscape of knowledge, would, like those coffins of the dead which cumber the Chinese fields, prove permanent obstacles to all true progress.

Even as it is, the proposal to add a new academic chair on any large and important subject of human interest, is felt as a nightmare by men of broad general culture and insight everywhere, and adds a new terror to the literary life. When Walter Pater, for example, seeking to make a speciality of literary style by divorcing it from the thought it enshrines, could solemnly announce that the great Plato, who with Aristotle continued to rule the minds of men, Pagan and Christian, for two thousand years, did so by his style, mainly or alone, surely this note of warning is not premature.

To sum up, then, we may say that the public may trust implicitly the results of specialism throughout the whole domain of the Physical Sciences, because they work under great general laws, like those of gravitation and the conservation and transmission of force, which are of universal validity; that they may trust provisionally the results of specialism in the Biological and Medical sciences, as the best that can be had under existing conditions and at the present stage, inasmuch as they also work under broad general conceptions, like Natural Selection and the Science of Medicine, which, although not the final truth, contain the greatest amount of truth yet known; but that in the specialisms connected with History, Religion, Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Political Economy, Morals, and Sociology, the public can place no real confidence whatever, until their results are everywhere overhauled and co-ordinated, and these specialisms themselves compelled to work under some generally accepted scheme of Civilisation as a whole.