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Given that an infinite intelligence in the world wished to realise purposes without instituting them as directly accomplished, but by letting them express themselves through a gradual “becoming,” the method would be exactly what is shown in the mechanical theory of life, that is, the primitive data and starting-points would have inherent in them a peculiar constitution and a rigidly inexorable orderliness of causal sequence.
Previous writers had been content to say that the distance between one point and another was so many stadia, but he reduced all this rough reckoning to so many degrees of latitude and longitude, from fixed lines as starting-points.
All this, it must be agreed, is unexpected and disconcerting, had never been foreseen or suspected and may be regarded as one of the strangest prodigies, one of the most stupefying revelations that have taken place since man has dwelt in this world of riddles, Nevertheless, by reflecting, by comparing, by investigating, by regarding certain forgotten or neglected landmarks and starting-points, by taking into consideration the thousand imperceptible gradations between the greatest and the least, the highest and the lowest, it is still possible to explain, admit and understand.
V. A series, even a complete series, of all the states of all societies and of all their evolutions would not be enough to exhaust the subject-matter of history. There remains a number of unique facts which we cannot pass over, because they explain the origin of certain states of society, and form the starting-points of evolutions.
No one probably felt more than the political heir of Gaius Gracchus and of Marius, how desirable in a military as well as in a political point of view it would have been to establish a series of Transalpine colonies as bases of support for the new rule and starting-points of the new civilization.
When they have been thus definitely established, they may serve as fresh starting-points, and, by deduction, lead to very varied discoveries. The principles which govern physical science are few in number, and their very general form gives them a philosophical appearance, while we cannot long resist the temptation of regarding them as metaphysical dogmas.
Thus has the courage of our architects and builders received triumphant vindication! The inert elements of the population had mostly got away, and those that remained seemed what Mr. H. G. Wells calls "efficients." Sheds were already going up as temporary starting-points of business.
The starting-points in certain minor Roman institutions from which it had grown, seem to have disappeared with the Saxon occupation of Britain.
We must then, I think, absolutely eschew any abstract rules as starting-points. What rules we may require, we must neither borrow nor invent, but discover, during the course of our reading.
Written documents, then, are not, as material documents are, valuable by themselves; they are only valuable as signs of psychological operations, which are often complicated and hard to unravel. The immense majority of the documents which furnish the historian with starting-points for his reasonings are nothing else than traces of psychological operations.
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