the facts, not superimposed on them - [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced].

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of
historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his
attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a
philosophy of history on which I have touched above. I mean the
assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development
of the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the
power of free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it
entirely. The special acts of providence proceeding from God's
immediate government of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty
landmarks in history, would have been to him essentially disturbing
elements in that universal reign of law, the extent of whose
limitless empire he of all the great thinkers of antiquity was the
first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper
conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer
thought of God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face
haunting wood and glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge
continually interfering in the world's history to bring the wicked
to punishment and the proud to a fall. God to him was the
incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the
contemplation of his own perfection, one whom Philosophy might
imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the sublime
indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of men,
their desires or their sins? While, as regards the other