Lord Acton's Philosophy of History

Extract

“I have never had any contemporaries,” said Lord Acton toward the close of his life; and, in the main, he was right. His broad cosmopolitanism made him impatient of English insularity. His belief in the necessity of freedom of conscience alienated him, in spirit if not in form, from the church of his birth. His insistence upon the absolute validity of the moral law as the final measure of all things isolated him in the midst of a century which seemed largely to have concluded that morality and success are synonymous. Certain it is that his own age did not estimate him over highly. At his death in 1902 there were not a few who asserted that for all his depth of erudition, Acton had contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. He had been an omnivorous reader and possessed a greater knowledge of the sources of modern history than any other man of his day. Yet all this store of learning had been of no avail to the world, for Acton had written nothing. At his death, a lecture in English, a letter in German, were all that represented Acton on the shelves of the library of his own university, Cambridge. Even today, after his lectures, his letters, and his periodical writings have been collected and edited, his output remains small: two volumes of lectures, three of letters, two of historical essays contributed to the reviews of his time. Yet in spite of the scantiness of his written work, Acton must be numbered among the great historians of the last century.