Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from System of Modern History, Vol. 1: Rise of the Modern European System
Andl conceive that a system of this kind is of value, not only for the general laws which it discloses -laws without a knowledge of which all social action must be empirical - but also, and at present chie?y, for the altered aspect in which it may lead us to regard our own times and country. There are many obvious causes which tend to make us over-estimate the import ance of both of them; and for such an error the best corrective may be found in a study which teaches us the entire dependence of the present upon the past, and the mutual relations of each member of the whole Euro pean commonwealth. Our mental state, if we derive our notions only from the phenomena that surround us, will not be very different from that of the earliest speculators in astronomy, to whom the movements and order of the world were, as yet, necessarily unknown who conceived their own earth as the unmoved centre of the universe for whom every star was a divinity, every eclipse a portent, and the ordinary changes of the seasons scarcely assured as matters of scientific cer tainty. We need a wider View, and a better acquaintance with distant objects, to enable us to correct the errors of our first impressions.
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