"His little book is full of admirable passages which historians may well read and ponder; but I have a feeling that the impulse to which we owe it was not so much intellectual curiosity about the nature of history and the function of historical writing as it was an emotional revulsion against the deification of Martin Luther and the glorification of "modern progress." Wishing, naturally enough, to exalt a difference of opinion to the level of a philosophical principle, he persuades himself that history, apprehended by a kind of objective "creative act of the historical imagination," can be made to teach eternal truths. I suspect that his "creative act of the historical imagination," although different in emphasis, is not different in kind, from that employed by the whig historians."
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Historians from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyPeople from LeedsChristians from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Carl Becker, review of The Whig Interpretation of History in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1932), p. 279
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield
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Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
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