To herald the opening of the sixteenth
century, from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the great
authors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words [Greek
text]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous prescience
Polybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the material sovereignty
of Roman institutions and exemplified in himself the intellectual empire
of Greece.
The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has not
been a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought now
antiquated and of no account. The only spirit which is entirely removed
from us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is essentially modern. The
introduction of the comparative method of research which has forced
history to disclose its secrets belongs in a measure to us. Ours, too,
is a more scientific knowledge of philology and the method of survival.
Nor did the ancients know anything of the doctrine of averages or of
crucial instances, both of which methods have proved of such importance
in modern criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the
statical elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all
physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the single
instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole new
science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back to a time when
man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.
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