Excerpt from The University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. 2: November, 1909

The historian, however, has a long-sighted eye. He sees indistinctly the minutiae of the immediate present, but he can differentiate stages of development and successions of achievement in the past. If the more scientific historian, the student of chronicles and the cataloguer of facts, should resent the suggestion that there is a philosophy of history, the point may readily be yielded to superior knowledge, and the ordinary onlooker may content himself with insisting upon the individual right to take an unscientific and even an unhistorical interest in the stages of human development and the long succession of human events.

This ordinary onlooker is impressed with the thought that the individual capacity of the human being, his individual possibilities, physical, mental, and moral, have not greatly increased within the few thousand years over which human knowledge can reach. What were the successive stages of his evolution before he began to make conscious records must be left to scientific speculation. But the historian who depends for his information or his speculative material upon such records must be impressed with the thought that there were individual giants, intellectual and moral as well as physical, who were great not only in comparison with their contemporaries but also in comparison with the giants of more recent times and were substantially their competitors in human excellence.

We need not commit ourselves to the exaggerations of a child's history of the world to believe that Alexander the Great had a personal genius for organization and leadership when he extended the power of his insignificant Macedonia over the cultured Greeks and led his armies around the eastern end of the Mediterranean to Egypt, again eastward through Asia Minor to India, and northeastward to the Caspian Sea. Had the people among whom he established enlightened institutions been able to maintain them, we should have recognized Alexander as the great founder of a European empire in Asia.

In the first centuries of our era the emperors of Rome had extended their power to the eastward until Constantinople became the capital of the Christian world, and yet Attila, leading his swarm of Huns from central Asia past this eastern outpost of Europe, penetrated into its very center, and it seemed that Christian civilization was only preserved by his ultimate defeat at Chalons.

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