heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day. The
present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it
was to the prediction of the future.

Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one
with modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal-
beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric
phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the
history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed
whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us. To
lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation
of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years,
is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to intermingle preternatural
in geological theories.

Whatever the canons of art may be, no difficulty in history is so
great as to warrant the introduction of a spirit of spirit [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], in the sense of a violation of
the laws of nature.

Upon the other point, however, Thucydides falls into an
anachronism. To refuse to allow the workings of chivalrous and
self-denying motives among the knights of the Trojan crusade,
because he saw none in the faction-loving Athenian of his own day,
is to show an entire ignorance of the various characteristics of
human nature developing under different circumstances, and to deny
to a primitive chieftain like Agamemnon that authority founded on
opinion, to which we give the name of divine right, is to fall into
an historical error quite as gross as attributing to Atreus the
courting of the populace ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced])