AUTHORS' PREFACE
The title of this work is clear. However, it is necessary to state succinctly both what our intention has, and what it has not been; for under this same title, "Introduction to the Study of History," very different books have already been published.
It has not been our intention to give, as Mr. W. B. Boyce has done, a summary of universal history for the use of beginners and readers of scanty leisure.
Nor has it been our intention to add a new item to the abundant literature of what is ordinarily called the "Philosophy of History." Thinkers, for the most part not professed historians, have made history the subject of their meditations; they have sought for its "analogies" and its "laws." Some have supposed themselves to have discovered "the laws which have governed the development of humanity," and thus to have "raised history to the rank of a positive science." These vast abstract constructions inspire with an invincible a priori mistrust, not the general public only, but superior minds as well. Fustel de Coulanges, as his latest