ABSTRACT
Two generations have now passed since the blessed word ‘Evolution’ was invented, and was applied as a universal panacea to all the problems of the universe—historical no less than physical. By this I mean that a whole school of historians have set forth the thesis that history is a continuous logical process, a series of inevitable results following on a well-marshalled table of causes. Of course the logician may tell us that every consequence is the summing up of its antecedents. But that is hollow formal logic. And to my mind it is impossible to turn all history into a continuous and mechanical panorama of logical causes followed by inevitable results. My humble opinion is that things might generally have happened otherwise than they actually did. The history of mankind is often accidental, even occasionally cataclysmic. It is not a logical stream of cause and effect, but a series of happenings, affected in the most inscrutable fashion by incalculable chances, which were not in the least bound to occur, ranging from natural phenomena such as plagues or earthquakes, to the appearance of outstanding human personalities who ‘put on the clock’ or occasionally’ put the clock back’. The Whig historians who pontificated on the theme that ‘history is the history of peoples, as opposed to the personal adventures of kings and statesmen’ were far more wrong in their general conception of the world than Thomas Carlyle preaching of the all-importance of the individual in his book on ‘Heroes’.
