Rothblatt, Sheldon. The Revolution of the
Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (New York: Basic Books,
1968).
Rothblatt briefly discusses Kingsley’s views on history. He had
an aversion to Comtean influences on undergraduates and teachers and he
disagreed with the positivists’ minimizing of the influence of great individuals
on the course of history. While Kingsley accepted that there were
laws in history and that scientific methods were useful to the historian,
he disagreed with those who held that history was an exact science that
could be explained by the application of a number of physical laws. Rather,
Kingsley believed that history “was mainly biography” (170).
History;
Comte;
“The
Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History”. |
