Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages
Archives, then, are accessible to-day which were unknown to Sismondi: The industry of modern scholars in ransacking and dili gently investigating the records of the past has furnished the world with a body of knowledge which, properly interpreted, throws a new light on history and invests it with a new meaning. Rich, vital significance has been extracted from what once appeared to be barely intelligible rubbish-heaps of fact. The discovery of fresh facts, too, has often given new interpretation; new questions have presented themselves, and some have received an answer. Doubtless the modern scholar has his own prejudices but though Sismondi's mis judgments are singularly few, the widening of human thought removes us far from the religious and political prepossessions of his time. We are not now engaged in seeking every opportunity to cast stones at the Popes, nor are we ready to render uncritical worship directly the resounding, but often empty, name of Liberty is mentioned. Nor is this all. During the last half of the last century we have accustomed ourselves to recognise that human societies are organic, but inter dependent, wholes, which develop by natural law, and can only be understood by the application of scientific methods. This conception was present to the mind of Machiavelli, the Florentine historian, but was imperfectly appreciated by him and his successors. To the later nineteenth century it came with the force of a revelation, and has had an effect on the historical mind which can only be compared to that of the revolutionary conceptions of Copernicus or Darwin on the scientific investigator. And, again, we have learned to recognise economic factors as great determining forces in history. The germinal ideas of the latter half of the century from which we have just emerged, and the labours of its scholars in tracing the roots of the past, are fructifying, and the result will be that all history will have to be rewritten in a profounder and more penetrative spirit.
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