Whenever one studies, even superficially, any generation of men who have acted in the past and of whose actions there is some considerable record, that, I think, which most strikes the curious student is the nature of the things which were taken for granted during the period.

Very much might be written—whole books—upon the effects which this has upon history. Innumerable points arise as one considers it. For instance, there is no case I can remember of the things which were taken for granted existing in the same plenitude of record as the other things of history. The men of the Ninth Century did not sit down formally and tell us that they looked at the world in such and such a fashion. We have to glean and to pick out their standpoint by working parallel, noting unconscious expressions and side effects. It is like watching a man speaking on some matter of minor interest and trying to define through his tone and gesture the standpoint from which not only that minor interest, but every other, is regarded by his mind.

[Pg 71]

Perhaps nothing is more subject to close scrutiny to-day, is more suspected, and has more difficulty in establishing itself than an unusual physical experience, especially if there be about it a suspicion of connection with the nature and destiny of the human soul. There are certain periods in human history—the end of the Roman Empire is one of them; the beginning, or at least the very early dawn, of the Middle Ages was another—when marvels of this kind were sought after and met, as it were, half way by the mind of the time. The marvellous ran through the spirit of those generations very much as the accumulation of the ascertained, common and often unimportant, fact runs through the spirit of our time. They accumulated legend and what must, in the vast majority of cases, have been even falsehood with the same readiness with which we accumulate columns of statistics. They believed certain types of things to be true, and that belief led them to accept very much of the same nature on which they had no proof.

A very excellent example of the changes which take place from one generation to another in this respect may be discovered by any one who will set himself out to answer this question: "What did Englishmen in the middle and end of the Twelfth Century think about property in land?" Note the conditions of the problem. Land was the all-important thing of the time. It was the one thing on which men left records which they were [Pg 72]determined should be minute, accurate and permanent. Yet there is no scholar at once so learned and so wise that he can with any exactitude answer the question. And it is evident that the fascination of the subject chiefly lies in the limitless field which it opens for discussion. There are those—excellent scholars—who will have it that the Englishmen of that time thought of land fundamentally as something common to the community. There are others—scholars of perhaps equal standing—who will have it that the Roman conception of absolute ownership had survived in nearly all its original simplicity. Between these two extremes scholarship may range at will; and however certain one may be individually that one's own point of view is right, one will never be able to marshal proof which shall certainly convince, and finally convince, the whole of the learned world. The men of that time believed something about land. They never set it down, they took it for granted; and we can only judge of what that belief was by its secondary effects. It sounds amazing, but it is true.

Another character of this unseizable spirit of the time is the distortion it appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time—our own.

No one can read the history of the French Revolution without perceiving that certain doctrines of comparatively little effect upon the material circumstance of men so entirely filled the whole mental[Pg 73] atmosphere of the great bulk of the French people, and certainly of a very large proportion of Western Europe in general, as to mould the whole of thought. We can name those doctrines, we can talk of "equality"—a dogma which may be true or false, but is certainly transcendental; we may talk as they talked about "liberty," but that does not give us any conception of the colour, smell, at............