Excerpt from The Evolution of States: An Introduction to English Politics Alike as to ancient and modern history, the effort of scholars is now more and more towards comprehension of historic causation in terms of determining conditions, the economic above all; so much so that I have profited somewhat in my revision from various recent works, and might with more leisure have done so more fully. Revised as it is, however, the book may serve to expound views of history which are still not generally accepted, and to call in question fallacious formulas which seem to me still unduly common. On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that some of my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is that they are made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and I am satisfied that fuller light is to be obtained only in that direction. In the end, doubtless, conflicts of historical interpretation will turn upon problems of psychology. A contemporary German expert of distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem What is History? (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down that the main problem of every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles; that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he here means simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in the past in terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with their data. This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I doubt the utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to the old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of their "characters." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.