The Historical Development of Idealism and Realism

Extract

“Generalizations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room,” says the immortal Locke. The more I see of our learned societies, the more I study the curricula of our different schools and educational establishments, the more thoroughly am I convinced that we persistently neglect the study of general history from a higher and a philosophical point of view; in fact, we appear scarcely to have attained the faculty to distinguish between geography, archology, genealogy, biography, ethnology, chronicles, heraldry, statistical reports, numismatics, and extracts from registers. We call everything that has happened history, and consider an old civic record, as devoid of influence on the destinies of humanity as the name, age, occupation, and domestic relations of one of the mummies under a glass case in our British Museum, an historical document of value. We are apt to confuse the task of the antiquary or of a contributor to Notes and Queries with that of the historian.