John Robert Seeley

Sir John Robert Seeley (10 September 1834 – 13 January 1895) was an English historian and essayist.

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• John the Baptist was like the Emperor Nerva. In his career it was given him to do two things—to inaugurate a new régime, and also to nominate a successor who was far greater than himself.
  • p. 4

• No heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. And such an enthusiastic virtue Christ was to introduce.
  • p. 8

• Men in general take up scheme after scheme, as circumstances suggest one or another, and therefore most biographies are compelled to pass from one subject to another, and to enter into a multitude of minute questions, to divide the life carefully into periods by chronological landmarks accurately determined, to trace the gradual development of character and ripening or change of opinions.
  • p. 18

• The difficulty of determining whether a man is or is not good has now become a commonplace of moralists and satirists. It is almost impossible to discover any test which is satisfactory, and the test which is actually applied by society is known to be unsatisfactory in the extreme.
  • pp. 57–58

• No man saw the building of the new Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God.
  • p. 330 (concluding sentence of book)

• It is a favourite maxim of mine that history, while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a practical object. That is, it should not merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future,
  • p. 1 (opening sentence of book)

• We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.
  • p. 8

• The chief forces which hold a community together and cause it to constitute one State are three, common nationality, common religion, and common interest.
  • p. 50

• Property can exist only under the guardianship of the State.
  • p. 57

• Commerce in itself may favour peace, but when commerce is artificially shut out by a decree of Government from some promising territory, then commerce just as naturally favours war.
  • p. 110

• Seeley was witty, charming, sympathetic, entirely void of self importance, never making ignorance an excuse for sarcasm, and under his presidency there was a great deal of serious thought given to politics in the higher sense; though pupils were often too shy to talk in the seminar itself, they did talk afterwards among themselves on the subjects there discussed.
  • A Cambridge student of Seeley, quoted in Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1968), p. 180

• The chair was in fact precisely 151 years old when at last the academic claims of history found recognition here, by the inappropriate but normal device of turning it into a tripos of its own. The achievement belonged to the first truly notable Regius professor, Sir John Seeley.
  • Geoffrey Elton, The History of England: Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, 1984, in G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (1991), pp. 101-102

• In 1869 Seeley became professor of modern history at Cambridge... His lectures at once made a great impression. They were carefully prepared, epigrammatic in style, animated in delivery, attractive and stimulating from the originality, width, and suggestiveness of their views. For many years his classes were large, and were by no means confined to those who were making history a special study.
  • George Prothero, 'Seeley, John Robert', Dictionary of National Biography, Volume LI. Scoffin—Sheares, ed. Sidney Lee (1897), p. 191

• In his teaching of modern history Seeley adopted, though he did not formulate, the view that "history is past politics, and politics present history." Historical narrative without generalisation had no value for him; he always tried to solve some problem, to trace large principles, to deduce some lesson. If the conclusions which he reached could be made applicable to present difficulties, so much the better. History was to be a school of statesmanship. So eager was he to establish general principles that his conclusions occasionally appear paradoxical, and are sometimes open to dispute. But his method is at once stimulating and productive, and his whole conception of the subject tends to place it on a high level of public utility. Of the duties of the individual towards the state Seeley formed a high ideal, and, though not an active politician, he held strong political views. In later life he was a liberal unionist, and on more than one occasion raised his voice in public against home rule. He was for several years closely connected with the Imperial Federation League, and, though he never traced out any definite scheme of federation, there was nothing that he had more at heart than the maintenance of the union between Great Britain and her colonies.
  • George Prothero, 'Seeley, John Robert', Dictionary of National Biography, Volume LI. Scoffin—Sheares, ed. Sidney Lee (1897), p. 192

• In my first year [at Cambridge] Seeley was still alive, as Regius Professor. He was dying, but stuck manfully to his work. In the small history school of the day it was possible for the Professor to see personally the score of history freshmen who came up each year. I was sent to see him in his house, and the old man gave me, in a stern voice, a lecture on the theme that history was a science and had nothing to do with literature; he told me that Carlyle and Macaulay were charlatans. Though I had not much sense in those days, I had just enough not to reply; but I went away boiling with rage. And I still resent his words, because he himself had not won his position in life by writing scientific history, but precisely by writing literary history, on subjects about which he knew far less than Carlyle knew about Cromwell, or Macaulay about the English Revolution. Seeley's Ecce Homo, whatever its merits and its use, was one of the least "scientific" books ever written on an historical subject, and his Expansion of England, however important, was merely a clever and timely essay. It was on those works that his fame rested, not on his Stein, which may have been a "scientific" history for all I know.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography & Other Essays (1949), pp. 16-17

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