POLITICS (v. 12.), which may he said to mark an era in the
evolution of historical criticism. For there is nothing on which
Aristotle insists so strongly as that the generalisations from
facts ought to be added to the data of the A PRIORI method - a
principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive
speculative politics but of physics also: for are not the residual
phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means
empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly
styled IL MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO, may be said to have
apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively
empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both
in the process called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts,
which has been defined as the application to facts of such general
conceptions as may fix the important characteristics of the
phenomena, and present them permanently in their true relations.
He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is
incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of
man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that
inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they
are in the physical world, and that where the superficial observer
thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns
merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable results
of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the
philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man,
to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as
in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the