This book examines successive stages in the development of the thought of Sir Herbert Butterfield in relation to fundamental issues in the science of history. In a carefully nuanced way it lays bare the unspoken motivations and hidden tensions in Butterfield's debate with himself and with a host of contemporary historians in the period between 1924-79.

This book examines successive stages in the development of the thought of Sir Herbert Butterfield in relation to fundamental issues in the science of history. In a carefully nuanced way it lays bare the unspoken motivations and hidden tensions in Butterfield's debate with himself and with a host of contemporary historians in the period between 1924-79.

Despite the boundless advances of modern science, much of the Universe still remains a mystery. Mysteries have a way of gnawing at the human mind. Mysteries demand to be solved. In seeking to unravel the mysteries of the Universe, scientists and philosophers have proposed bold speculations to explain those mysterious phenomena that lie at the edges of knowledge. The mysterious phenomena to which the author refers are those that have remained elusive to established fact and certainty. Such phenomena include the nature, structure, origin, and terminus of the well-ordered Universe. This book explores these phenomena through careful scrutiny which separates cogent conjectures from wild flights of fancy in order that these phenomena should be explained with the utmost accuracy.

Many of those speculations and conjectures proposed by contemporary science and philosophy to explain the Universe will prove useful. These are retained. But there will also be many conjectures in need of revision and many speculations that must be replaced. These speculations and conjectures that do not prove fruitful to the inquiry are revised.