dence for this, however, and no necessity for making such a supposition. The interest in manners and customs was a perfectly natural product of the spirit of the Enlightenment and cannot be regarded as Voltaire's particular property. He merely brought to the clearest abstract expression what was the dominant interest of the time.
In conclusion, to sum up Hume's relation to the development of the historical method, it may be said that he succeeded to a considerable extent in transcending the position of abstract individualism. He conceived the individual to be endowed with social tendencies and impulses and to be dependent to some extent upon his social environment for his character and powers. He accordingly conceives society as not merely a collection of isolated individuals but as a body organized to some extent through the medium of imitation and the direct transference of manners. In place of the abstract intellectualism which characterized the Deistic writers, and which regarded the essentially human in men as abstract rationality, Hume introduced a method of psychological explanation which found the real motive forces of human nature in the passions. Since, however, he conceived the individual to be compounded of unchanging and atomic psychic principles, he thought that the study of history should be directed ultimately to the discovery and elucidation of universal psychological laws. It was, therefore, to be the basis of political science and of all the mental sciences. By thus developing history with his attention directed chiefly toward manners and customs, Hume made a most important, if indirect, contribution to the historical method. Nevertheless, he missed the essentially historical point of view, because he was thus led to neglect the unique and individual aspect of historical events and persons. For the historian the individual must be a personality, not an exemplification of psychological laws. Hume, therefore, never attained the full conception of historical continuity by which later historians learned to conceive events as moments of an evolving organic unity, and which made history a self-sufficing discipline, worthy of study for its own sake.
| George H. Sabine |
| Cornell University.. |
