CHAPTER I. THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA. It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date 476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was... more...

I. Man’s Place in Nature, as affected by the Copernican Theory.   When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante—that wonderful book wherein all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse—we are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of reasoning about the facts of nature which seem... more...