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ALISON'S HISTORY OF THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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{ Continued from p . 511 . ) History is interesting under a two-fold aspect ; it has a scientific interest , and a moral or biographic interest . A scientific ,
inasmuch as it exhibits the general laws of the moral universe acting in circumstances of complexity , and enables us to trace the connexion between great effects and their causes . A moral or biographic interest , inasmuch as it represents to us the characters and lives of human beings , and calls upon us , according to their deservings or to their fortunes , for our sympathy , our admiration ,
or our censure . Now , without entering at present , more than to the extent of a few wards , into the scientific aspect of the history of the French Revolution , or stopping to define the place which we would assign to it as an event in universal history , we need not fear to declare utterly unqualified for estimating the French Revolution ^ atiy one who looks upon it as arising from causes peculiarly French , or otherwise than as one turbulent passage in a progressive revolution embracing the whole human race . All political revolutions , not effected by foreign conquest , originate in moral revolutions . The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions . The hundred political revolutions of the last three centuries were but
a few outward manifestations of a moral revolution , which dates from the great breaking loose of the human faculties commonly described as the ' revival of letters , ' and of which the main instrument and agent was the invention of printing . How much of the course of that moral revolution yet remains to be run , or how many political revolutions it will yet generate before it be exhausted , no one can foretell . But it must be the shallowest view of the
French Revolution , which can now consider it as any thing but a mere incident in a great change in man himself , in his belief , in his principles of conduct , and therefore in the outward arrangements of society ; a change which is but half completed , and which is now in a state of more rapid progress here in England , than any where else ?>
Now if this view fee just , which we must be content for the present to assume , surely for an English historian , writing at this particular time concerning the French Revolution , there was something pressing for consideration of greater interest and importance than the degree of praise or blame due to the few individuals who , with more or less of consciousness what they were about , happened to be personally implicated in that strife of the elements .
But also , if , feeling his incapacity for treating history from the scientific point of view , our author thinks fit to confine himself to
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513
Alison's History Of The French Kevolution.
ALISON'S HISTORY OF THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION .
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No . 80 . 2 O
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 513, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/1/
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