conception of history; it is not to deny the great law that society has
a certain order of progress; but only to urge that within that, the only
possible order, there is always room for all kinds and degrees of
invention, improvement, and happy or unhappy accident. There is no
discoverable law fixing precisely the more or the less of these; nor how
much of each of them a community shall meet with, nor exactly when it
shall meet with them. We have to distinguish between possibility and
necessity. Only certain steps in advance are possible at a given time;
but it is not inevitable that those potential advances should all be
realised. Does anybody suppose that humanity has had the profit of all
the inventive and improving capacity born into the world? That Turgot,
for example, was the only man that ever lived who might have done more
for society than he was allowed to do, and spared society a cataclysm?
No,--history is a _pis-aller_. It has assuredly not moved without the
relation of cause and effect; it is a record of social growth and its
conditions; but it is also a record of interruption and misadventure and
perturbation. You trace the long chain which has made us what we are in
this aspect and that. But where are the dropped links that might have
made all the difference? _Ubi sunt eorum tabulae qui post vota nuncupate
perierunt_? Where is the fruit of those multitudinous gifts which came
into the world in untimely seasons? We accept the past for the same
reason that we accept the laws of the solar system, though, as Comte
says, 'we can easily conceive them improved in certain respects.' The
past, like the solar system, is beyond reach of modification at our
hands, and we cannot help it. But it is surely the mere midsummer
madness of philosophic complacency to think that we have come by the
shortest and easiest of all imaginable routes to our present point in
the march; to suppose that we have wasted nothing, lost nothing, cruelly
destroyed nothing, on the road. What we have lost is all in the region
of the 'might have been,' and we are justified in taking this into