As historiography was completely dominated by the canons of humanism at the beginning of the period of discovery, it was natural that the earliest of the historians of the commercial revo lution should be humanists who turned their at tention to the new movement. Their style and arrangement of material, however, had to be al tered to some extent, and the centre of inter est was profoundly changed. The first of these writers was Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (d. 1526), an Italian humanist who devoted himself to a description of the new world which had just been revealed. His
it was not only somewhat of a synthetic com pilation from earlier works, but also indicated the reaction of the commercial revolution upon European thought by its emphasis upon the significance of commerce in modern history and by its surcharge, of 18th century political philosophy concerning the rights of man, lib erty and the state of nature. But import ant as some of these writers may have been in altering the conventions of style and the interests of the historian, the general effect of the commercial revolution upon historiography was less vital in the production of historians of the discoveries than in the alteration of all phases of life in the succeeding centuries which grew more or less directly out of it and indi rectly wrought great changes in historical con cepts and methods.
2. The Reaction of the New Scientific Philosophy upon Historiography.— None of the indirect influences of the commercial revo lution upon historical writing were more im portant and more obvious than its aid in pro ducing that new philosophy of nature of which Bacon and Descartes were the most conspicuous exponents. The results of the explorations of all the major portions of the earth's surface bad not only demonstrated the great extent of the habitable portions of the globe, but had also shown that the supposed marvels and terrors in the unexplored regions were but an unfounded myth which quite failed to materialize. At the same time that De Gama, Columbus and Ma gellan were revealing the extent and nature of the surface of the globe, less picturesque fig ures were devoting themselves to an explora tion of the universe, with results equally disas trous to the older theological traditions. The vast and immeasurable extent of the universe was apprehended to an elementary degree by Copernicus, Galileo and Tycho Brahe. The no tion of an orderly arrangement and functioning of the universe was established by the great laws of mechanics, discovered and formulated by Galileo, Kepler and Newton. To these ma jor advances in science should be added the ex planation of the now commonplace natural phenomena through the great advances in every field of natural science in the 17th century. The net result of all these notable advances was a serious challenge to the old theological inter pretations, based primarily upon the concept of a of arbitrariness,° who was continually varying or suspending the laws of the universe to punish a recalcitrant prince or to answer the prayer of a faithful bishop.
The general implications of the above scien tific discoveries were reduced to a systematic body of philosophical thought by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. Bacon especially empha sized the necessity of following the inductive method and Descartes attempted a mechanical interpretation of the universe. The new discov eries and the new philosophy tended to produce a rationalistic interpretation of natural and so cial phenomena which abruptly challenged the older and generally accepted view of miracles and wonders that had been so popular with Christian historians during the medieval period. The English Deists, such as Cherbury, Blount, Locke, Shaftesbury, Woolston and Hume, for ever discredited the doctrine of the miraculous. Finally, with the attacks upon the traditional views of the composition of the Old and New Testaments by Hobbes, Spinoza, Astruc and Relmarus, the philosophy of wonder-working was undermined, not only through the evidence of natural science, but by questioning the au thenticity of the Scriptural accounts in which the miracles were recorded. The gradual growth of toleration, especially in England, dur ing the latter part of the 17th century and the opening of the 18th centuries enabled these rev olutionary ideas to obtain an adequate expres sion and a general currency.
It was also inevitable that the new scientific discoveries and the new philosophy of nature should react profoundly upon the contemporary social philosophy. The idea of orderly devel opment and continuity in social as well as nat ural processes was comprehended by Vico, Hume and Turgot. The older idea of social evolution as a gradual decline or retrogression from d primordial "golden age" was replaced in the writings of Vico, Voltaire, Hume, Turgot, Kant, Godwin and Condorcet by the concept of continual progress from lower stages of civil ization. The need for miracles to justify his tory and the other sciences dealing with human activities was lessened by the growing preva lence of the Deists' doctrine of the inherent and reasonable "decency" of man—a notion widely at variance with the older views of the "Fathers° and of Calvin, which maintained the hopeless depravity of mankind. Finally, the new discoveries and the secularization of nat ural and social philosophy produced a great ex tension of the interests of the historian beyond the field of politics and religion. In the writ ings of Voltaire, Raynal, Montesquieu and Hee ren it became apparent that the impulse to a broader and sounder scope of history had be• gun to affect others than those who described the course of the explorations. Though this healthy tendency toward a wider field of his torical investigation and narrative was to some extent checked by the renewed impulse to poli tical history with 18th and 19th century nation alism, it had gained a foothold from which it was not entirely dislodged until it was over whelmingly reinforced by the expansion of in terest in social, economic and intellectual topics after the industrial revolution and its social and intellectual consequences in the 19th century.