Note 26 — I. THE STUDY OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

Op. cit., I, 172-3. Edgar Wind, “Some Points of Contact Between History and Natural Science,” in Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford, 1936), 255-64, shows that the latest developments of science, which make it so much less “exact,” lead to the raising of questions by scientists “that historians like to look upon as their own.” But if these latest developments have made science more “humanistic,” Wind is over-optimistic when he says that “the notion of a description of nature which indiscriminately subjects men and their fates like rocks and stones to its ‘unalterable law’ survives only as a nightmare of certain historians.” For many of them (not to mention sociologists) it seems still to be a cherished ideal.