But now let us listen to another and a more serious objection to the claim of history to be science.

Science, it will be said by many earnest men of science, aims at discovering laws that are clean out of time.

History, on the other hand, aims at no more than the generalized description of one or another phase of a time-process.
To this it may be replied that physics, and physics only, answers to this altogether too narrow conception of science.

The laws of matter in motion are, or seem to be, of the timeless or mathematical kind.
Directly we pass on to biology, however, laws of this kind are not to be discovered, or at any rate are not discovered.

Biology deals with life, or, if you like, with matter as living.