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that "if they wished to understand history they must try to understand men and women. For history is the history of men and women, and nothing else. If you should ask me how to study history I should answer, Take by all means biographies, wheresoever possible, autobiographies, and study them. Fill your minds with live human figures. Without doubt, history obeys and always has obeyed in the long run certain laws. But these laws assert themselves, and are to be discovered not in things but in persons, in the actions of human beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings shall we understand the laws which they have obeyed or which have avenged themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism; if it be such, it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions under the name of laws rather as persons than as things." Kingsley's confusion in this passage of physical, social, and political "laws"—orderly successions of the forces in physical nature and of cause and effect in social organisation with those commands of a person or body of persons which do indeed require to "assert themselves" and depend on the "obedience" of "human beings"—cannot easily escape detection. But with this confusion we are not at present particularly concerned. We prefer to observe how Kingsley has here expressed that side of history with which creative art finds itself most at home. Why? Because clear-cut personality, individual being without any touch of the collective and impersonal, is evidently capable of more concentrated interest, of more artistic treatment, than the hazy outline of a multitude or an impalpable abstraction. How, indeed, can an artist conceive the conduct of his hero or heroine as the