Historians From Scotland

"In the East, you have to buy a Polish paper to find out what is going on in the world. In the West (with few exceptions), the Press is as outward-looking and reflective as any on earth. The East is shabby, the West is bright. In the West, chance acquaintances tend to measure their words and celebrate with decorum. But in the East, there is a vivacity and alertness, almost a wildness when drinks and music are added, which seems more Slav than German. As a by-product of Communism, meant or unmeant, this lust for experience in thought and deed is something which burns all over Eastern Europe and which has not left the Germans unaffected. To some extent, the East Germans have come to share the mental attitudes of the "Socialist camp" as a whole, and to that extent, their approach to the fact of being German has been modified. This does not mean that, given half a chance, many of them would not pack the smart new tartan suitcases now on sale in the Democratic Republic and come West; they would, and candid supporters of the Ulbricht way of doing things admit it. But even those who find the climate intolerable — one unhappy museum attendant gestured at his Egyptian mummies and growled: "At least they were free when they were alive" — often take the basic social policy of their State for granted and confess to fears that life in West Germany might prove insecure and lonely."

"India is not only the Italy of Asia, it is not only the land of romance of art and beauty, and it is in religion, earth's central shrine. India is religion."

"Sir J. Jekyl told me, that he was present at this sermon: I think it was this: and that when the author had preached out the hour-glass, he took it up and held it aloft in his hand, and then turned it up for another hour, upon which the audience (a very large one for the place) set up almost a shout for joy. I once heard him preach at the Temple church, on the subject of popery, it was on the fast-day for the negotiations of peace at Utrecht. He set forth all the horrors of that religion with such force of speech and action, (for he had much of that in his preaching at all times,) that I have never seen an audience any where so much affected, as we all were who were present at this discourse. He preached then, as he generally did, without notes. He was in his exterior too the finest figure I ever saw in a pulpit."

"Bishop Burnet was a man of the most extensive knowledge I ever met with; had read and seen a great deal, with a prodigious memory, and a very indifferent judgment: he was extremely partial, and readily took every thing for granted that he heard to the prejudice of those that he did not like: which made him pass for a man of less truth than he really was. I do not think he designedly published any thing he believed to be false. He had a boisterous vehement manner of expressing himself, which often made him ridiculous, especially in the house of lords, when what he said would not have been thought so, delivered in a lower voice, and a calmer behaviour. His vast knowledge occasioned his frequent rambling from the point he was speaking to, which ran him into discourses of so universal a nature, that there was no end to be expected but from a failure of his strength and spirits, of both which he had a larger share than most men; which were accompanied with a most invincible assurance."

"I had admittance to hear one of these lectures. It was upon the new heavens and the new earth after the general conflagration. He first read to us the chapter in St. Peter, where this is described. Then enlarged upon it with that force of imagination and solemnity of speech and manner, (the subject suiting his genius,) as to make this resemblance of it to affect me extremely even now, although it is near forty years ago since I heard it. I remember it the more, because I never heard a preacher equal to him. There was an earnestness of heart, and look, and voice, that is scarcely to be conceived, as it is not the fashion of the present times; and by the want of which, as much as any thing, religion is every day failing with us."

"[T]he queen spoke to myself [in 1711]... I asked leave to speak my mind plainly; which she granted: I said, any treaty by which Spain and the West Indies were left to king Philip, must in a little while deliver up all Europe into the hands of France; and, if any such peace should be made, she was betrayed, and we were all ruined; in less than three years' time she would be murdered, and the fires would be again raised in Smithfield: I pursued this long, till I saw she grew uneasy; so I withdrew."

"Burnet I like much. It is observable, that none of his facts has been controverted, except his relation of the birth of the pretender, in which he was certainly mistaken—but his very credulity is a proof of his honesty. Burnet's style and manner are very interesting. It seems as if he had just come from the king's closet, or from the apartments of the men whom he describes, and was telling his reader, in plain honest terms, what he had seen and heard."

"Damn him, he has told a great deal of truth, but where the devil did he learn it?"

"The merits and faults of Burnet's most familiar book are the merits and faults of the man himself. It is vivid, energetic, and picturesque. It is never dull, and it is never tired. It carries the reader along its stream of words with as little resistance as Burnet's audience opposed to his sermons. And the ease of its style is matched by an ease of fancy. Burnet was a gossip in an age of gossips. He had the same curiosity, the same love of the trivial, as obsessed Aubrey and Anthony à Wood. He did not disdain to record the tricks of manner and speech which differentiate one man from another, and which graver historians omit. For instance, he tells us that Lauderdale's "tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all he talked to"; that Shaftesbury "depended much on what a drunken physician had predicted"; that Orrery "pretended to wit, but it was very luscious"; that Buckingham "has no manner of literature, and all he knows is in chemistry." So much may be set down to his credit. On the other hand, his book is, like himself, garrulous, reckless, and undisciplined. He still preaches to the personages of his History as he preached to them, if he might, when he and they were alive. Withal he was a finished eavesdropper, who combined the keen scent for news with the tireless indiscretion of the modern reporter; and it may be said that there is no side of his own various character that is not illustrated in the History of My Own Time."

"He has given us such a gallery of portraits as you will not find outside the pages of Clarendon. He was not so fine a painter as his great rival, whose scrupulous tact in the selection of virtues and vices was beyond his reach. He was familiar, where Clarendon was austere, happily trivial and even witty, where Clarendon was pompous or priggish. He obtained his results not by choice and omission, but by a careless profusion of detail, and despite his lack of artistry, despite his prejudice, he bears indispensable witness to one of the most interesting periods of our history."

"[I]n the management of this Civil Society, great distinction is to be made, between the Power of making Laws for the regulating the Conduct of it, and the Power of executing those Laws: The Supream Authority must still be supposed to be lodged with those who have the Legislative Power reserved to them, but not with those who have only the Executive; which is plainly a Trust, when it is separated from the Legislative Power."

"It is certain, That the Law of Nature has put no difference nor subordination among Men, except it be that of Children to Parents, or of Wives to their Husbands; so that with Relation to the Law of Nature, all Men are born free; and this Liberty must still be supposed entire, unless so far as it is limited by Contracts, Provisions, or Laws. For a Man can either bind himself to be a Servant, or sell himself to be a Slave, by which he becomes in the power of another, only so far as it was provided by the Contract: since all that Liberty which was not expresly given away, remains still entire: so that the Plea for Liberty always proves it self, unless it appears that: it is given up or limited by any special Agreement."

"Nor could any be more qualified for writing the History of his own Times, for he was Curious and Inquisitive, and had a large Acquaintance, and the Opportunity of conversing with all sorts of Persons, of all Ranks, from the Throne downwards. He never heard of any Person of Note, whether at home or abroad, whom he did not take some Opportunity of visiting; and if they were not of themselves ready to declare what they knew, he endeavoured to draw them into it by his curious Questions, as I have been informed by those who knew his ways; so that without Question, there were few who could know more, or so much of the Transactions of these Times he writes of."

"The chief glory of Princes, and the chief of their Titles...is, That they are God's Deputies and Vicegerents here on earth; that they re­present him, and by consequence, that they ought to resemble him. The outward respect paid them, carries a proportion to that Character of Divinity which is on them, and that supposes an imitation of the Divine Perfections in them."

"The measures of Power, and by consequence of Obedience, must be taken from the express Laws of any State or Body of Men, from the Oaths that they swear, or from immemorial Prescription, and a long Possession, which both give a Title, and in a long Tract of Time make a bad one be came good, face Prescription, when it passes the Memory of Man, and is not disputed by any other Pretender, gives by the common Sense of all Men a just and good Title: so upon the whole matter, the degrees of all Civil Authority are to be taken either from express Laws, immemorial Customs, or from particular Oaths, which the Subjects swear to their Princes: this being still to be laid down for a Principle, that in all the Disputes between Power and Liberty, Power must always be proved, but Liberty proves it self; the one being founded only upon a Positive Law, and the other upon the Law of Nature."

"[T]he chief Design of our whole Law, and of all the several Rules of our Constitution, is to secure and maintain our Liberty."

"Like all Arabs they (Enemies of Muhammad) were connoisseurs of language and rhetoric. Well, then if the Koran were his (Muhammad's) own composition other men could rival it. Let them produce ten verses like it. If they could not (and it is obvious that they could not), then let them accept the Koran as an outstanding evidential miracle."

"But Islam has a still further service to render to the cause of humanity. It stands after all nearer to the real East than Europe does, and it possesses a magnificent tradition of interracial understanding and co-operation. No other society has such a record of success uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity, and of endeavour so many and so various races of mankind… Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of East and West is to be replaced by co-operation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition. In its hands lies very largely the solution of the problem with which Europe is faced in its relation with East. If they unite, the hope of a peaceful issue is immeasurably enhanced—but if Europe, by rejecting the cooperation of Islam, throws it into the arms of its rivals, the issue can only be disastrous for both."

"That his [Muhammad's] reforms enhanced the status of women in general by contrast with the anarchy of pre-Islamic Arabia is universally admitted."

"As a literary monument the Koran thus stands by itself, a production unique in Arabic literature, having neither forerunners nor successors in its own idiom. Muslims of all ages are united in proclaiming the inimitability not only of its contents but of its style."

"I am not a Muslim in the usual sense, though I hope I am a “Muslim” as “one surrendered to God”; but I believe that embedded in the Qur’an and other expressions of the Islamic vision are vast stores of divine truth from which I and other occidentals have still much to learn."

"Islam is now wrestling with Western thought as it once wrestled with Greek philosophy, and is as much in need as it was then of a 'revival of the religious sciences'. Deep study of al-Ghazālī may suggest to Muslims steps to be taken if they are to deal successfully with the contemporary situation. Christians, too, now that the world is in a cultural melting-pot, must be prepared to learn from Islam, and are unlikely to find a more sympathetic guide than al-Ghazālī."

"In the early days of the Islamic empire the Christian inhabitants of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were probably better off as dhimmis under Muslim Arab rulers than they had been under Byzantine Greeks."

"Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world."

"But of this genera of writing, William Muir's The Life of Mahomet, first published in 1861 in four volumes, was the best. It was a pioneering study and it has not been improved upon since then. William Muir had strong Christian views but he was also a painstaking and conscientious researcher, and he exhausted most of the sources on the Prophet's life, which were not many. The basic material on Muhammad is limited and new biographies could not really be new except in details, treatment and emphases."

"The sword of Mahomet and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known."

"The tragedy of Karbala decided not only the fate of the caliphate, but of the Mohammedan kingdoms long after the Caliphate had waned and disappeared."

"Neither their (the Muslims') tenets nor their practice will in any respect bear to come into competition with Christian, or even with Jewish morality. ... For instance, we call the Muslims chaste because they abstained from indiscriminate profligacy, and kept carefully within the bounds prescribed as licit by their Prophet. But those bounds besides the utmost freedom of divorce and change of wives, admitted an illimitable licence of cohabitation with 'all that the right hand of the believer might possess,' or, in other words, with any possible number of damsels he might choose to purchase, or receive in gift, or take captive in war."

"Without descending farther into detail, or attempting to enumerate that infinite multitude of deities to which the fancy or the fears of men have allotted the direction of the several departments in nature, we may recognize a striking uniformity of features in the systems of superstition established throughout every part of the earth. The less men have advanced beyond the state of savage life, and the more slender their acquaintance with the operations of nature, the fewer were their deities in number, and the more compendious was their theological creed; but as their mind gradually opened, and their knowledge continued to extend, the objects of their veneration multiplied, and the articles of their faith became more numerous. This took place remarkably among the Greeks in Europe, and the Indians in Asia, the two people in those great divisions of the earth who were most early civilised, and to whom, for that reason, I shall confine all my observations. They believed, that over every movement in the natural world, and over every function in civil or domestic life, even the most common and trivial, a particular deity presided. The manner in which they arranged the stations of these superintending powers, and the offices which they allotted to each, were in many respects the same. What is supposed to be performed by the power of Jupiter, of Neptune, of Aeolus, of Mars, of Venus, according to the mythology of the West, is ascribed in the East to the agency of Agnee, the god of fire; Varoon, the god of oceans; Vayoo, the god of wind; Cama, the god of love; and a variety of other divinities. …though the faith of Hindoos has been often tried by severe persecutions, excited by the bigotry of their Mahomedan conquerors, no people ever adhered with greater fidelity to the tenets and rites of their ancestors."

"The Glasgow historian, William Robertson, in his An Historical Disquisition Concerning Ancient India (1791) stated, “Many facts have been transmitted to us, which, if they are examined with proper attention, clearly demonstrate that the natives of India were not only more early civilised, but had made greater progress in civilization than any other people…” It was from their ancient writings, he said, that they derived “the most liberal sentiments which they entertain at present, and the wisdom for which they are now celebrated has been transmitted to them from ages very remote.”"

"Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them, by one of the strongest of all ties, the desire of supplying their mutual wants."

"In order to complete the history of the human mind, and attain to a perfect knowledge of its nature and operations, we must contemplate man in all those various situations wherein he has been placed. We must follow him in his progress through the different stages of society, as he gradually advances from the infant state of civil life toward its maturity and decline."

"It will be seen that the writer is no friend to Democracy and no great believer in Progress, as the word is commonly understood in politics... However much we may differ with the writer in detail here and there, the article contains much that no serious political thinker will deem himself entitled to overlook."

"Maine challenges it [democracy] as an aristocrat. He agreed with Machiavelli that the world is made up of the vulgar. Civilisation is a hardly-won habit which force created, habit perpetuates, and legal skill protects and elaborates. In Ancient Law we see the germs of modern anthropological methods. Popular Government suggests the psychological studies of Graham Wallas. But the psychological insight is distorted by a tendency to see civilisation as contract writ large."

"Maine brings into the field of inquiry a new element, the element of science in the English sense of the word, that is of exact knowledge based on observation, and aiming at the formulation, of laws. The fact is that Maine did not only stand under the influence of the preceding generation, which had given such an extraordinary impulse to historical research, but also under the sign of his own time with its craving for a scientific treatment of the problems of social life."

"Maine's direct influence on political thought was to be slight. His influence on the study of law was enormous and therefore his indirect influence on politics has been enormous too. Intending to show law as a growth, he in fact greatly increased our control over it as an instrument."

"I have been reading Maine in the Quarterly—the best anti-democratic writing that we have had. He dined with us this evening: seems really concerned that we have no proper constitution in England: thinks it would be a real gain to have a constitutional code settled by Act of Parliament. Of course it could not have binding force for future Parliaments, but—there is valuable efficacy in the written word; if judiciously written it would be difficult to alter. The genuine alarm that M. seems to feel at the existing state of things in England impressed me much, since his intellect has always seemed to me a very cool and disengaged one."

"In combating what seemed to him the insular arrogance of Bentham and the obscurantism of the legal profession, he emphasised our debt to Rome. He saw Roman law as the institution mainly responsible for the distinction between progressive and stationary societies. This emphasis on Roman law was invaluable. It meant that Maine faced the most difficult problems of history—the effect of borrowing by one people of the institutions of another and the securing of the same social results by different peoples using different methods."

"When I listened to the lectures of Henry S. Maine, which afterwards became his Ancient Law, I was as strongly attracted to Roman Law and historical Jurisprudence as I had been repelled by the barbarous verbiage of "common forms." I insisted upon becoming Maine's pupil for six months, as a condition of keeping my reason during my study of law."

"Henry Sumner Maine, whose private pupil I was in 1857, when he was giving his lectures on "Ancient Law," was rather historian than lawyer, and more social philosopher than jurist. I remained in intimacy with him until his too early death, and never ceased to delight in his brilliant scholarship and analytic genius, as well as his literary culture and charm of manner. His very precarious health quite prevented him from acquiring the profound and exact learning of a modern professor; but he may rank with Herbert Spencer, and indeed with Charles Darwin, as an instance of how intellectual insight and grasp of luminous principles can dispense with any exhaustive study of books, nay, so often can open visions of truths which are denied to the voracious amasser of book learning."

"At one master-stroke he forged a new and lasting bond between law, history, and anthropology. Jurisprudence itself has become a study of the living growth of human society through all its stages, and it is no longer possible for law to be dealt with as a collection of rules imposed on societies as it were by accident, nor for the resemblances and differences of the laws of different societies to be regarded as casual."

"As the founder of modern comparative social studies, as a prodigious historical scholar, as perhaps the most penetrating observer of Indian society, Maine knew that human progress, or even the wish for it, is a fragile creation; but he did not despair of it. On the contrary, progress—by which Maine means, chiefly, the promotion of a high state of intellectual attainment, and of liberty under law—has been active in the West for some centuries. The index of its success is the trend from Status to Contract among peoples, and its principal instruments are private property and freedom of contract. The life of the mind, and the liberty of persons, flourish in a society diversified, economically individualistic, and characterized by several property (as distinguished from the various forms of communal ownership.) A society which men freely contract for economic ends tends to be progressive; modern collectivism, then, is stifling."

"Intellectually he was a giant; I have hardly ever known anyone who gave me such an impression of the power and grasp of his mind. Like Mr. Gladstone, he would sometimes, when he was talking to me in my room, get interested in his subject, and, with great emphasis, and in an unnecessarily loud voice, deliver a speech which, if it had been taken down, would have been an appreciable addition to the sum of human thought. In Council he rarely spoke, but when he did so, always with the same thunderous voice and commanding air, he invariably convinced everybody and carried his point. His knowledge, his sagacity, his insight were wonderful, and they were by no means confined to questions of law."

"The five brilliant volumes of his social studies constitute a foundation for this scientific history; modern legal thought and sociology and political speculation, as well as historical method, are deeply indebted to Maine. In this or that he has been corrected or amended; Maine himself expected nothing else; but the bulk of his writing looms still majestic in accuracy and outlook."

"Maine has always spoken to me in strong dislike of the acts of Modern Liberals & I believe he was to have stood as a moderate Conservative at Cambridge. I take him to be of the same politics as many of the Liberals of thirty years ago, who are now Conservative. I believe he writes for the St James Gazette & he has written four articles against Democracy in the Quarterly which have attracted a great deal of attention."

"History does not furnish Maine, as it furnished Acton, with any guiding thread of growing freedom; and the process towards contract does not appear in the issue to be a process towards liberty. What History proves is the rarity and fragility of democracy. History has with Maine, what it tends to have with many of us, a way of numbing generous emotions. All things have happened already; nothing much came of them before; and nothing much can be expected of them now."

"The general argument of Popular Government proceeds from a sort of intellectual anti-intellectualism. Assuming, like some French writers, such as Renan and afterwards Tarde, that aristocracy is the mother of all real progress, and holding that the multitude has been the enemy of all fruitful novelty, Maine argues that democracy, whatever its love of change during its militant phase, will in its triumphant phase pass into a Chinese stationary State."

"Today we are no longer concerned to argue that status necessarily precedes contract and recognize that the two notions are not incompatible in one and the same society. In Maine's work we can excise the genetic argument and still profit from the discussion that remains. This can be said of many writers of the period, but even this patronizing judgement is superseded by the recognition that Maine and his most able contemporaries allowed themselves to be guided, by such facts as were available, to combat the products of more speculative evolutionism. He saw, for example, nothing in his facts which could lead him to agree with the popular fantasy that all societies had evolved from a condition of sexual promiscuity through a matriarchal period to a condition of society laying its main emphasis upon descent through males."

"He says that Primogeniture has been of very great political service. I admitted this, but objected that there is another side to the question, that Primogeniture embodies the confusion between authority and property which constitutes modern Legitimacy, that Legitimacy has, in this century, acted as an obstacle to free institutions, and that a one-sided judgment thrown off as that sentence is, gives a Tory tinge to the entire paper. He answered, "You seem to use Tory as a term of reproach." I was much struck by this answer—much struck to find a philosopher, entirely outside party politics, who does not think Toryism a reproach, and still more, to find a friend of mine ignorant of my sentiments about it."

"We want to help to better the conditions for our own people. We want to see our people raised, not into a society of State ownership, but into a society in which, increasingly, the individual may become an owner. There is a very famous sentence of Sir Henry Maine's, in which he said that the progress of our civilisation had been of recent centuries a progress on the part of mankind from status to contract. Socialism would bring him back from contract to status."