17
This intellectual attitude may be traced, in part perhaps, to the influence of Herodotus, whose unconfined survey of the whole world fascinated Ranke at Frankfort.^ "Herodotus did not hate the barbarians," he wrote in his Weltgeschichte ; "otherwise how could he depict them?" So Ranke himself wrote the history of France, not as a German, but as a Euro- pean. An orthodox Protestant, he was suspected of a lean- ing toward Catholicism, a conservative monarchist, he held the scales with wonderful evenness in the case of Charles I. and Cromwell. His devotion to historic truth, holding everything subordinate to showing "exactly how it took place," exposed him to the charge of indifference to philo- sophical and religious interests. This he vigorously re- pelled.2 Yet, after all, it is true that it was political history to which he devoted the most of his efforts. Economic phenomena are ti'eated episodically if at all, yet to Ranke may be attributed a share in the immense development of the study of economic history. Roscher, the pioneer and founder of the historical school of economics, was a student of Ranke's at Berlin in his best period, and of all his teachers he attributed the greatest influence to Ranke and Gervinus. Roscher' s thesis on The Historical Teaching of the Greek Sophists, 1838, and his first book, entitled, Leben, Werk und Zeitalter des Thucydides, testify to Ranke's inspiration.^
We have seen that it was as a teacher of teachers and
Werke, LII, 570. Ranke called on Macaulay in March, 1857. "I told him I admired the form of his writings and particularly the way he explained the present through the past, although I did not agree with him in every point," p. 386.
1 Page 39. " Die unendliche Weltumfassung, die sich in diesem Grundbuch des historischen Wissens ausgepragt hat."
2 " It is ridiculous to hear that I am deficient in philosophical and religious interests, since it is exactly that, and that alone, which impelled me to the study of history." Letter to Ritter, August 6, 1830, 239. Alexander von Humboldt good-humoredly wrote of him as " His non-puritanical, but antipapistical Holi- ness." Letter to Sarah Austin in Janet Ross, Three Generations of English
Women, I, 197. These volumes contain several interesting glimpses of Ranke, of. I, 172, and II, 190.
^ Wolowski's sketch of Roscher in Lalor's Roscher's Political Economy, I, 30. The original title of the thesis is De historicce doctrinoe apud sophistas majores vestigiis.
