Author: J. Watts de PeysterPublisher:
ISBN: 9781331874522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 22
Book Description
Excerpt from The Burgoyne Campaign: Of July -October, 1777 "Qui n'avance pas, recule!" - Michelet. "Whoever ceases to advance, loses ground." The result of about forty years critical examination of history has led, step by step, to the inevitable conclusion that if "history is philosophy" or experience "teaching by examples," very little is generally known, if at all clearly developed, of the methods by which the great problems of human progress have been solved. A recent writer of ability - or so considered, it is to be supposed, because he is so extensively quoted observes, "The philosophy of history undervalues the work of individual persons. It attributes political and spiritual changes to invisible forces operating in the heart of society, regarding the human actors as no more than ciphers." He is right. Individuals are undervalued. God operates and achieves miracles through individuals, justifying the remark that genius is the manifestation of the direct action of God, Deity, upon men through a man. The great difficulty in arriving at a correct judgment lies in the fact that merit in this world is gauged by success, whereas the greatest merit has, as the rule, been a failure so far as contemporaneous recognition and reward is concerned. Some of the men who have exercised the greatest influence on human progress perished of misery or by re, and their mutilated or charred corpses served, simply, as steps for some audacious charlatan to mount to celebrity and fortune. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."