Syllabus Of Lectures On European History PDF Download

Excerpt from Syllabus of Lectures on European History I. History defined. The blank knowledge of facts which is all that most readers gather from their historical studies, is a mere deposition of rubbish without cohesion, resting upon no basis of theory applied to the political development of nations, and accounting for the great stages of their internal movements. To such persons history is "an old almanac" merely. It is because of this estimate placed upon the past efforts of the human family that an intelligent man could be led to say that "he thanked God that he had never charged his memory with a single historical fact; that, on the contrary, he had, out of profound contempt for a sort of knowledge so utterly without value in his eyes, anxiously sought to extirpate from his memory any relics of historical records which might happen to survive from his youthful studies; that the whole vast series of history had become a wilderness, and his mind, as touching all such absurd knowledge, under the blessing of Heaven, a tabula rasa" Outside of a somewhat doubtful self-congratulation upon the extent of his own ignorance, and an almost too credulous thankfulness to God as the author of it, there is here a sort of truth which is only grasped by a strong mind trained to look on but one side of a subject. But this view of history is only a libel upon human understanding. It is a parallel with the conclusion reached by the ancient philosopher, when walking over a battlefield where the skeletons of the slaughtered whitened the plain, that "the men who fought in that conflict were all bone." 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.