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Title: The Purpose of History
Author: Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge
Release Date: October 28, 2018 [EBook #58179]
Language: English
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THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
SALES AGENTS
NEW YORK:
LEMCKE & BUECHNER
30-32 WEST 27TH STREET
LONDON:
HUMPHREY MILFORD
AMEN CORNER, E. C.
THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
BY
FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1916
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1916,
BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Printed from type, July, 1916.
NOTE
This book contains three lectures delivered at the University of North
Carolina on the McNair Foundation in March of the current year. It
expresses certain conclusions about history to which I have been led by
the study of the history of philosophy and by reflection on the work of
contemporary philosophers, especially Bergson, Dewey, and Santayana.
I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Faculty and Students of
the University of North Carolina for a most delightful visit at Chapel
Hill.
F. J. E. W.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
JUNE, 1916
CONTENTS
I. FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 1
II. THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 27
III. THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 58
THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
I
FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY
The serious study of history is characteristic of a certain maturity of
mind. For the intellectually young, the world is too new and attractive
to arouse in them a very absorbing interest in its past. Life is for
them an adventure, and the world is a place for excursions and
experiences. They care little about what men have done, but much about
what they might do. History, to interest them, must be written as a
romance which will fire their imagination, rather than as a philosophy
which might make them wise. But maturity, somewhat disciplined and
disillusioned, confirms the suspicion, which even youth entertains at
times, that the world, while offering an opportunity, hedges the offer
about with restrictions which must be understood and submitted to, if
effort is to be crowned with success. The mature may thus become eager
to understand life without ceasing to enjoy it. They may become
philosophical and show their wisdom by a desire to sympathize with what
men have done and to live rationally in the light of what is possible.
They may study history, convinced that it enlarges their sympathies and
promotes rational living.
We might, therefore, conclude that the prevailing interest in historical
studies is a sign that the age is growing in maturity and is seeking an
outlook upon life which is both sane and encouraging. This may well be
true. But even if the study of history indicate a certain maturity of
mind, it is not a guarantee that history will not be studied in the
spirit of youth. History may do little more than afford a new world for
wild adventure and undisciplined experience. Moreover, maturity is not
necessarily wise. Disgust, revolt, and loss of sympathy are not always
strangers to it. Historical studies may be pursued with little
comprehension of their aim or meaning; and history may be taught with
little reflection on its philosophical significance. It would appear,
therefore, that the study of history itself affords an opportunity for
philosophical inquiry, and may profitably stimulate questions about the
character of those facts with which history is concerned.
In these lectures I intend to deal with the purpose of history. I would
not, however, be misunderstood. My aim is not, by making another attempt
to find the increasing purpose running through the ages, to win
permanently the laurel which, hitherto, ambitious philosophers have worn
only for a season. There is, no doubt, a kind of rapture in seeing
history as St. Augustine saw it,--the progress of the City of God from
earth to heaven; and there is a kind of pride not wholly ignoble, in
seeing it as Hegel did,--the vibrating evolution from the brooding
absolution of the East to the self-conscious freedom of one's own
philosophy embraced and made universal by the civilizing energy of one's
own state. My aim is more modest. It is not romantic, but technical.
Metaphysics rather than poetry is to be my domain, although I cherish
the hope that poetry may not, therefore, be misprized. If it may
ultimately appear, not only as an ornament to living, but also as an
exemplary method of living well, I may even now invoke the Muses to my
aid, but Clio first, and, afterwards, Calliope. It is my aim, through an
examination of what the historian himself proposes, to discover in what
sense the idea of purpose in history is appropriate, and to what ideas
we are led when we think of history as the record of human progress.
The conclusions I hope to clarify, I may here anticipate. There is
discoverable in history no purpose, if we mean by purpose some future
event towards which the whole creation moves and which past and present
events portend; but there is purpose in history, if we mean that the
past is utilized as material for the progressive realization, at least
by man, of what we call spiritual ends. More generally, history is
itself essentially the utilization of the past for ends, ends not
necessarily foreseen, but ends to come, so that every historical thing,
when we view it retrospectively, has the appearance of a result which
has been selected, and to which its antecedents are exclusively
appropriate. In that sense purpose is discoverable in history. But this
purpose is not single. History is pluralistic and implies a pluralistic
philosophy. There are many histories, but no one of them exists to the
prejudice of any other. And, finally, progress is not aptly conceived as
an evolution from the past into the future. Evolution is, rather, only a
name for historical continuity, and this continuity itself is a fact to
be investigated and not a theory which explains anything, or affords a
standard of value. The past is not the cause or beginning of the
present, but the effect and result of history; so that every historical
thing leaves, as it were, its past behind it as the record of its life
in time. Progress may mean material progress when we have in mind the
improvement in efficiency of the instruments man uses to promote his
well-being; it may mean rational progress when we have in mind the
idealization of his natural impulses. Then he frames in his imagination
ideal ends which he can intelligently pursue and which, through the
attempt to realize them, justify his labors. Such are the conclusions I
hope to clarify, and I shall begin by considering the purpose men
entertain when they write histories.
It is natural to quote Herodotus. The Father of History seems to have
been conscious of his purpose and to have expressed it. We are told that
he gave his history to the world "in order that the things men have done
might not in time be forgotten, and that the great and wonderful deeds
of both Greeks and barbarians might not become unheard of,--this, and
why they fought with one another." This statement seems to be, in
principle, an adequate expression of the purpose of writing histories,
even if Herodotus did not execute that purpose with fidelity. The
limitations of its specific terms are obvious. One might expect that the
great deeds were mainly exploits at arms, that the history would be
military, and that the causes exposed would be causes of war. But the
history itself deals with geography and climate, with manners, customs,
traditions, and institutions, fully as much as with heroes and battles.
Professor Gilbert Murray says of it: "His work is not only an account of
a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually
tremendous; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the
expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen
through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The
world was at that time very interesting; and the one mind, while
strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human
records. Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too
sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the
earnest superstitions of people about him: he shares from the outset
their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving
events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature,
interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them
if they are only facts and figures; he catches quickly the atmosphere of
the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great
human influences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the
dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens; yet all the time shrewd,
cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and unconsciously convinced of the
weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness
of its apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the stamp of
this character and this profession."[1]
The history of Herodotus would, then, preserve a record of the world of
human affairs as he discovered it and an exposition of the causes and
conditions which have influenced human action. He would record what men
have done in order that their deeds might be remembered and in order
that they might be understood. Like all other historians he had his
individual limitations, but for all of them he seems to have expressed
the purpose of their inquiries. That purpose may be worked out in many
different fields. We may have military history, political history,
industrial history, economic history, religious history, the history of
civilization, of education, and of philosophy, the history, indeed, of
any human enterprise whatever. But always the purpose is the same, to
preserve a faithful record and to promote the understanding of what has
happened in the affairs of men. I need hardly add that, for the present,
I am restricting history to human history. Its wider signification will
not be neglected, but I make the present limitation in order that
through a consideration of the writing of human history, we may be led
on to the conception of history in its more comprehensive form.
To conceive the purpose of writing history adequately is not the same
thing as to execute that purpose faithfully. If Herodotus may be cited
in illustration of the adequate conception, he will hardly be cited by
historians in illustration of its faithful execution. They have
complained of him from time to time ever since Thucydides first accused
him of caring more about pleasing his readers than about telling the
truth. He is blamed principally for his credulity and for his lack of
criticism. Credulous he was and less critical than one could wish, but
it is well to remember, in any just estimate of him, that he was much
less credulous and much more critical than we should naturally expect a
man of his time to be. He wrote in an age when men generally believed
spontaneously things which we, since we reflect, can not believe, and
when it was more congenial to listen to a story than to indulge in the
criticism of it. He frequently expresses disbelief of what he has been
told and is often at great pains to verify what he has heard. With all
his faults he remains among the extraordinary men.
These faults, when they are sympathetically examined, indicate far less
blemishes in the character of Herodotus than they do the practical and
moral difficulties which beset the faithful writing of all history. That
is why he is so illustrative for our purpose. A faithful and true record
is the first thing the historian desires, but it is a very difficult
thing to obtain. Human testimony even in the presence of searching
cross-examination is notoriously fallible, and the dumb records of the
past, with all their variations and contradictions, present a stolid
indifference to our curiosity. The questions we ask of the dead, only we
ourselves can answer. Herodotus wrote with these practical and moral
difficulties at a maximum. We have learned systematically to combat
them. There has grown up for our benefit an abundant literature which
would instruct the historian how best to proceed. The methods of
historians, their failures and successes, have been carefully studied
with the result that we have an elaborate science of writing history
which we call historiography. Therein one may learn how to estimate
sources, deal with documents, weigh evidence, detect causes, and be
warned against the errors to which one is liable. Moreover,
anthropology, archæology, and psychology have come to the historian's
aid to help him in keeping his path as clear and unobstructed as
possible. In other words, history has become more easy and more
difficult to write than it was in the days of Herodotus. The better
understanding of its difficulties and of the ways to meet them has made
it more easy; but the widening of its scope has made it more difficult.
We still face the contrast between the adequate conception of the
purpose of writing history and the faithful execution of that purpose.
But it would seem that only practical and moral difficulties stand in
the way of successful performance. Ideally, at least, a perfect history
seems to be conceivable.
It is, indeed, conceivable that with adequate data, with a wise and
unbiased mind, and with a moderate supply of genius, an historian might
faithfully record the events with which he deals, and make us understand
how they happened. It is conceivable because it has in many cases been
so closely approximated. Our standards of judgment and appraisement here
are doubtless open to question by a skeptical mind. We may lack the
evidence which would make our estimate conclusive. But what I mean is
this: histories have been written which satisfy to a remarkable degree
the spirit of inquiry. They present that finality and inevitability
which mark the master mind. There are, in other words, authorities which
few of us ever question. They have so succeeded, within their
limitations, in producing the sense of adequacy, that their reputation
seems to be secure. Their limitations have been physical, rather than
moral or intellectual, so that the defects which mar their work are less
their own than those of circumstance. They thus appear to be substantial
witnesses that the only difficulties in the way of faithfully executing
the purpose of writing history are practical and moral--to get the
adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of
genius. There are no other difficulties.
Yet when we say that there are no other difficulties we may profitably
bear in mind that Herodotus has been charged not only with being
credulous and uncritical, but also with not telling the truth. At first
this might not appear to indicate a new difficulty. For if Herodotus
lied, his difficulty was moral. But it is not meant that Herodotus lied.
It is meant rather that within his own limitations he did not, and
possibly could not, give us the true picture of the times which he
recorded. He saw things too near at hand to paint them in that
perspective which truthfully reveals their proportions. His emphases,
his lights and shadows, are such as an enlightened man of his time might
display, but they are not the emphases, the lights and shadows which, as
subsequent historians have proved, give us ancient Greece with its true
shading. We understand his own age much better than he did because Grote
and other moderns have revealed to us what Greece really was. But what,
we may ask, was the real Greece? Who has written and who can write its
true history? Grote's reputation as an historian is secure, but his
history has already been superseded in many important respects. We are
told that, since its publication, "a great change has come over our
knowledge of Greek civilization." What then shall we say if neither
Herodotus, who saw that civilization largely face to face, nor Grote,
who portrays it after an exceptionally patient and thorough study of its
records, supplemented by what he calls scientific criticism and a
positive philosophy, has given us the real Greece? Clearly it looks as
if the perfect history is yet to be written, and as if every attempt to
write it pushes it forward into the future. And clearly we face, if not
a new difficulty, a fact at least which is of fundamental importance in
the attempt to understand what history itself is.
So Herodotus becomes again illustrative. His history once written and
given to the world becomes itself an item in the history of Greece,
making it necessary that the story be retold. In the face of a fact, at
once so simple and so profound, how idle is the boast of the publisher
who could say of the author of a recent life of Christ[2] that she "has
reproduced the time of Christ, not as we would understand it, but as He
himself saw it. She has told what He believed and did, rather than what
He is reported to have said. She has stripped Him of tradition and
shown Him as He was; she has given to literature an imperishable figure,
not of the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, but of the towering figure
of all history." How idle, I repeat, is such a boast of finality when we
know that this new history of Christ, instead of ending the matter, may
cause another history to be written by some student who comes to the old
record with a new insight and a new inspiration. It is possible, we may
say, to portray the Christ of His own day, or the wan Galilean of the
Middle Ages, or the figure which commands the attention of the twentieth
century, but the real Christ, the towering figure of all history,--who
will portray that? It is yet to be done and done again. No historical
fact can ever have its history fully written: and this, not because the
adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of
genius are lacking, but because it is itself the producer of new history
the more it is historically understood. It grows, it changes, it expands
the more adequately we apparently grasp it. We seem never to be at the
end of its career and we must stop abruptly with its history still
unfinished. Others may take up our task, but they will end as we have
ended. The history of nothing is complete.
It is well-nigh impossible to avoid the suspicion of paradox in such
statements as these. Yet I feel confident that every historical student
keenly alive to his task is abundantly sensible of this truth. Where
will he end the history of Greece or of Rome? What will be the final
chapter of the French Revolution? No: there is no paradox here, but
there is an ambiguity. For history is not only a record written to
preserve memory and promote understanding, it is also a process in time.
"With us," Professor Flint writes, "the word 'history,' like its
equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary
composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such
composition--either a narrative of events, or events which may be
narrated. It is impossible to free the term of this doubleness and
ambiguity of meaning. Nor is it, on the whole, to be desired. The
advantages of having one term which may, with ordinary caution, be
innocuously applied to two things so related, more than counterbalance
the dangers involved in two things so distinct having the same name. The
history of England which actually happened can not easily be confounded
with the history of England written by Mr. Green; while by the latter
being termed history as well as the former, we are reminded that it is
an attempt to reproduce or represent the course of the former.
Occasionally, however, the ambiguity of the word gives rise to great
confusion of thought and gross inaccuracy of speech. And this occurs
most frequently, if not exclusively, just when men are trying and
professing to think and speak with especial clearness and exactness
regarding the signification of history--i.e., when they are labouring to
define it. Since the word history has two very different meanings, it
obviously can not have merely one definition. To define an order of
facts and a form of literature in the same terms--to suppose that when
either of them is defined the other is defined--is so absurd that one
would probably not believe it could be seriously done were it not so
often done. But to do so has been the rule rather than the exception.
The majority of so-called definitions of history are definitions only of
the records of history. They relate to history as narrated and written,
not to history as evolved and acted; in other words, although given as
the only definitions of history needed, they do not apply to history
itself, but merely to accounts of history. They may tell us what
constitutes a book of history, but they can not tell us what the
history is with which all books of history are occupied. It is, however,
with history in this latter sense that a student of the science or
philosophy of history is mainly concerned."[3]
It is because history is not only something "narrated and written," but
also something "evolved and acted" that we are led to say that the
history of nothing is complete. The narrative may begin and end where we
please; and might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. But the
beginning and the end of the action are so interwoven with the whole
time process that adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the
fundamental reason why Grote's history surpasses that of Herodotus in
what we call historical truth. For the truth of history is a progressive
truth to which the ages as they continue contribute. The truth for one
time is not the truth for another, so that historical truth is something
which lives and grows rather than something fixed to be ascertained once
for all. To remember what has happened, and to understand it, carries us
thus to the recognition that the writing of history is itself an
historical process. It, too, is something "evolved and acted." It is
perennially fresh even if the events with which it deals are long since
past and gone. The record may be final, but our understanding of what
has been recorded can make no such claim. The accuracy of the record is
not the truth of history. We are well assured, for instance, that the
Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. The
record on that point is not seriously questionable, although we have to
rely on documents which have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to
our own day, we can have little doubt that the record of this greater
Marathon of Europe will surpass all others in fulness and accuracy.
There are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, difficulties in
the way of exactness even when we are dealing with contemporaneous
events. "Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differently as their
memories or their sympathies vary." Such difficulties we have learned
how to check until our records closely approach truth of fact.
Consequently the records of what men have done, or may be doing, may be
relatively unimpeachable. But it is quite a different matter to
understand what they have done and are doing. Without that
understanding, history is no better than a chronicle, a table of events,
but not that "thing to possess and keep always" after which the
historian aspires.
To understand is not simply difficult, it is also endless. But this fact
does not make it hopeless. The understanding of history grows by what it
feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, constantly reveals
more to be understood. Our illustrations may serve us again. From the
accessible records of the battle of Marathon we can understand with
tolerable success the immediate antecedents and consequents of that
great event. But in calling the event great we do not simply eulogize
its participants. We indicate, rather, that its antecedents and
consequents have been far-reaching and momentous. Greece, we say, was
saved. But what are we to understand by that salvation? To answer we
must write and rewrite her own history, the history of what she has been
and is; and with every fresh writing the battle of Marathon becomes
better understood. It becomes a different battle with a different truth.
And more than this: with every rewriting we understand better what went
before and what followed after until the battle itself becomes but the
symptom of deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's present struggle.
Already its history has begun with many volumes. Following the example
of Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are writing it
contemporaneously by summers and winters. The consequences they can only
guess at, but they have done much with the antecedents, so much that the
last fifty years of Europe are better understood than they were a year
ago. The record of them has changed little; our understanding of them
has changed much. It has changed so much that they have already become a
different half-century from what they were. The truth about them last
year is not the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence what will the
truth about them be?
I venture another illustration, one from the history of philosophy. I
choose Plato. He is such a commanding figure that the desire to
understand him is exceptionally keen. The record of his life and of his
conscious aims and purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no assured
authorities on these points. That is greatly to be regretted, because a
correct record is naturally the best of aids towards a correct
understanding. But the unsatisfactory record is not very material to the
illustration in hand. The record might be correct, but Plato would, even
so, remain an historical figure to be understood. He would continue to
be the producer of what we call Platonism, and we should have to
understand him as that producer. In that case, evidently, the details of
his life, his span of years, his immediate aims and activities would
involve but the beginning of an inquiry which would last as long as
Plato is studied by those who would understand him. Who, then, would be
the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle wrote, or the man about
whom Professor Paul Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is the man
about whom they both write, but that can mean only that he is the man
about whom writers can write so diversely. He is not the same man to
Professor Shorey that he was to Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a
nice question which of the two disciples has given us the correct
estimate of their master. Who was the real Plato? And that question
could still be asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its record,
what it is not, a continuous and uniformly accepted tradition. For it is
quite evident that the Platonic tradition has grown from age to age as
students of Plato have tried to understand him and to understand also
what other students have understood about him. The true Plato is still
the quest of Platonists.
It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by
that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something
which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic
truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something
being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence
of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we
declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth,
and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only
that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might
well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then
have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us
what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light
of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have
been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors
to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been
faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has
happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals
in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common
enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what
that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known.
History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is
also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order
that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically
from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but
it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. It may
afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a
book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense
progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because
every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and
a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of
reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something
like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are
subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time.
That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full
truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date.
Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to
affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that
event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the
history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written.
It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen
of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to
live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of
history itself.
The writer of history may, consequently, attain his purpose within the
limits of the practical and moral difficulties which beset it in either
of two ways. He may give us the contemporaneous understanding of what
has happened in terms of the outlook and perspective of his own day,
giving us a vision of what has gone before as an enlightened mind of his
time might see it. His history might then be that of ancient peoples
beheld in the new perspective into which they have now been placed.
Could he, by miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they would
doubtless fail to recognize their own history, truthful as it might be.
But comprehension might dawn upon them as they read, and they might
exclaim: "These were the things we were really doing, but we did not
know it at the time; we have discovered what we were; our history has
revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, by the restrained exercise
of his imagination, may give us what has happened in the perspective of
the time in which it happened, or in a perspective anterior to his own
day. He may seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past
contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination to days no longer ours
and to ways of feeling and acting no longer presently familiar. Such a
history would be less comprehensive and complete than the former. It
would also be more difficult to write, because historical imagination of
this kind is rare and also because it is not easy to divest the past of
its present estimate. Yet the imagination has that power and enables us
to live again in retrospect what others have lived before us. But in
both cases the history would be an active conservation of events in
time; it would reveal their truth, their meaning, and their purpose.
If now we ask what may be this truth and meaning, or in what sense may
we appropriately speak of a purpose in history, we pass from history to
philosophy. No longer shall we be concerned with the purpose of writing
history, but rather with the character of the facts which stimulate
that purpose and assist in its attainment. From history as the attempt
to preserve memory and promote understanding we pass to history as a
characteristic of natural processes. We shall try to analyze what the
career of things in time involves; but we shall keep this career in mind
in those aspects of it which bear most significantly upon the history of
man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Murray, Gilbert. "Ancient Greek Literature." D. Appleton & Co.,
1908. Page 133.
[2] Austin, Mary. "The Man Jesus." Harper, 1915.
[3] Flint, Robert. "History of the Philosophy of History." Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1894. Page 5.
II
THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY
History leads to philosophy when it raises in a fundamental way the
question of truth. As we have seen, the term "truth," when applied to
history, has a double meaning. It may mean that the record of what has
happened is correct, and it may mean that the understanding of what has
happened is correct. If the record is correct, its truth seems to be
something fixed once for all and unchanging. The perfect record may
never be possessed, but it seems to be ideally possible, because the
events which the record would keep in memory must have happened, and,
therefore, might have been recorded if fortune had been favorable. If,
however, the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth
can not be something fixed once for all. It is fixed only from time to
time. One correct understanding of what has happened does not displace
another as truth might displace error, but one supplements and enlarges
another. Histories which have gone before are not undone by those that
follow after. They are incorporated into them in a very real way.
Historical truth, therefore, when it does not mean simply the
correctness of the records of history, is progressive. If the record of
what has happened is correct, its truth is perpetual; if the
understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth is
contemporaneous. Now what does this distinction involve? Does it involve
merely the recognition that facts may remain unchanged while our
knowledge of them grows? A suspicion, at least, has been created that it
involves something more, namely, the recognition that the facts
themselves, being something "evolved and acted," are also progressive.
Historical facts are careers in time. It is their occurrence which is
recorded and it is their career which is understood. We may, therefore,
undertake an inquiry into the nature of facts like these.
We may start from the distinction between facts and our knowledge of
them, for it is clear that whatever the character of the facts may be,
our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. The past is dead and
gone. It is something over and done with, so that any change in it is
forever impossible. We should then, if we would be precise, say, not
that it is the past which grows and enlarges, but only our knowledge of
it. We recover and conserve it in memory and imagination only, and as we
recover it more and more completely and relate it more and more
successfully, we know and understand it better. Plato is dead, and not
one feature, circumstance, or action of his life can now be changed. He
lives only in the memory of man; and because he lives there and
stimulates the imagination, there is born a Plato of the imagination.
There are thus two Platos, the one real and the other historical. The
one lived and died long ago; the other still lives in human history. The
real Plato has produced the historical Plato and affords a check upon
historians in their representation of him. That representation may
approach progressively nearer to what the real Plato was like, but it
can never be the man who has passed away. History would be thus a branch
of human knowledge, and grow with the growth of knowledge, while its
objects remain unchanged. That is why history has constantly to be
rewritten. Furthermore, in the rewriting, new types of history appear
with new or altered emphases. The moral and religious type is
supplemented by the political, and the political by the economic and
social. For with the growth of knowledge the past looks different to us
and we discover that what appeared once adequate has to be revised.
We may admit, therefore, that history, whatever else it may be, is at
any rate a kind of human knowledge. Like all knowledge it leads us to
recognize that there is a distinction between knowledge itself and its
objects, and that the progressive character of knowledge indicates an
approximation to an adequate representation of the objects and not
changes in their own character. This distinction in its application to
history is evidently not a distinction between literature and its
subject-matter. For the past, if we now take the past to be the proper
subject-matter of written history, appears to have a twofold character.
It is all that has happened precisely as it happened, and it is all that
is remembered and known, precisely as it is remembered and known. There
are, we may say, a real past and an historical past. The latter never is
the former, but always a progressively more adequate representation of
the former.
Now this distinction between the real past and the historical past may
be fruitful. It may also be treacherous, for the terms in which it is
expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very easy to claim that the
real past is after all only the historical past, because the past itself
being dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved in history. Yet
properly understood, the distinction is essential to any philosophical
comprehension of what history is. It points out that history is not the
past, but is its recovery and conservation. Events begin and end; men
are born and die; events and men disappear into the past in a manner and
an order which are unalterable. But it is not their disappearance which
constitutes their existence in time a history. Their historical
existence is a kind of continuing life. It may be that it continues only
in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly illustrates the nature of
history as a process in time. In other words the life of knowledge, of
memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has
happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it
in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits
of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now
restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and
events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which
are unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never to return in the
precise and identical manner of their first existence, they are
conserved, and continue the process of dying as occurrences in order to
live as a history. Yesterday as yesterday is gone forever. Its
opportunities are over and its incidents dead. As an historical
yesterday it lives as material for to-day's employment. It becomes an
experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy.
History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must
speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by
ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying;
whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed.
But the conservation of what happens is obviously not a perpetuation.
History is not the staying of events, for time forbids that they stay.
The conservation is rather a utilization, a kind of employment or
working over of material. Through it discriminations and selections are
made and connections discovered; the moving panorama is converted into
an order of events which can be understood, because consequences are
seen in the light of their antecedents and antecedents are seen in the
light of the consequences to which they lead. There is thus a genuine
incorporation of what has happened into what does happen, of yesterday
into to-day, so that yesterday becomes a vital part of to-day and finds
its enlargement and fulfilment there. We can thus write our own
biographies. It is possible for us to discover what mistakes we have
made and what ends we have attained. Our history appears thus to be a
utilization of material, a realization of ends, a movement with purpose
in it. Selection is characteristic of it very profoundly. Other
histories, of other men, of times, of peoples, of institutions, we write
in the same way because in the same way we discover and understand what
has happened in their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utilizing,
selective, and purposeful movement in time, history appears to be when
we restrict it to the domain of human knowledge.
It seems, however, idle so to restrict it. For other things besides our
knowledge grow--animals and plants, and the stars even. They, too, have
a history, and it may be that their history, being also an affair in
time, is not unlike in character to our own growth in knowledge. Or
perhaps it were even better to say that both they and our knowledge
illustrate equally what history is, discovering time itself to be the
great historian. All time-processes, that is, appear to be, when we
attentively consider them, processes which supplement, complete, or
transform what has gone before. They are active conservations and
utilizations of the past as material. They save what has happened from
being utterly destroyed, and, in saving it, complete and develop it.
Time is, thus, constantly rounding out things, so to speak, or bringing
them to some end or fulfilment. That is why we call its movement
purposeful.
Yet there have been philosophies which have tried to make of time a
magical device by which man might represent to himself in succession
that which in itself is never in succession. They picture his journey
through life as a journey through space where all that he sees, one
thing after another, comes successively into view like the houses on a
street along which he may walk. But as the houses do not exist in
succession, neither do the facts he discovers. They, too, come into view
as he moves along. These philosophies, consequently, would have us think
of a world in itself, absolute and complete, to which nothing can be
added and from which nothing can be subtracted. It is somehow fixed and
finished now; but our human experience, being incomplete and
unfinished, gives to it the appearance of a process in time and
discloses to us what it would be like if all its factors and the laws
which hold them in perfect equilibrium were experienced in succession.
History would thus be a kind of temporal revelation of the absolute and
we should read it as we read a book, from cover to cover, discovering
page by page a story which is itself finished when we begin.
Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the world to be thus finished
and complete in itself and only appearing to us as a temporal
revelation, has often thought of movements in time as only the results
of preceding movements. Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the
effect of what has already happened, rather than the active conservation
and working over of what has already happened. The past is made the
cause and producer of the present, so that the state of the world at any
moment is only the result or outcome of what it was in the preceding
moment. To-day is thought to be the effect of yesterday and the cause of
to-morrow, and is thus but a transition from one day to another.
Time-processes are thus robbed of any genuine activity or productivity,
and time itself is made to be nothing but the sequential order in which
events occur. Purpose, conservation, utilization, and all that active
supplementing and working over of the past on which we have dwelt,
become illusions when applied to the world at large. They represent our
way of conceiving things, but not nature's way of doing things.
But these philosophies, as Professor Bergson especially among recent
philosophers has pointed out,[4] gain whatever force they have
principally from the fact that they think of time in terms of space.
They picture it as a line already drawn, when they should picture it as
a line in the process of being drawn. As already drawn, the line has a
beginning, an end, and consequently, a middle point. Let us call the
middle point the present. All the line to the left of that point we will
call the past and all to the right of it the future. We thus behold time
spatially with all its parts coexistent as the points on the line.
Events are then conceived to move from the past through the present into
the future, just as a pencil point may pass from the beginning of the
line through its middle point to the end. But, unlike the pencil point,
they can not go backward. This fact gives us a characteristic by which
we may distinguish time from space even if we have represented time
spatially. The spatial order is reversible, the temporal is not. Time is
like a line on which you can go forward, but on which you can not go
backward. But you can go forward. Everything goes from the past to the
future. The present is but the transition point of their going.
There are, undoubtedly, advantages in thinking of time in this spatial
way. Thereby we are able to make calendars and have a science of
mechanics. It affords a basis for many successful predictions. But,
quite evidently, time is neither such a line nor anything like it.
Nothing whatever goes from the past through the present into the future.
We can not make such a statement intelligible. For "to go" from the past
to the future is not like going from New York to Boston. Boston is
already there to go to, but the future is not anywhere to go to. And New
York is there to leave, but the past is not anywhere to leave. What then
is this mysterious "going" if its starting-point and its end are both
non-existent now? Clearly it is a "going" only in a metaphorical sense.
We call it a "going" because we can so represent it by dates and places.
We can say that here we have been going from Friday through Saturday to
Sunday. But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past nor future,
that it is neither yesterday nor to-morrow, and that if we go anywhere
we must start to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday will be yesterday. But
note now the strange situation into which we have fallen--only in the
future is this day ever in the past! And that is true of every day in
the world's history. It becomes a past day only in its own future.
Clearly then time is not like a line already drawn. It is more like a
line in the drawing. You take the pencil and the line is left behind it
as the pencil moves. New points are being constantly added to what has
gone before. The line is being manufactured. Let us call so much of it
as has now been drawn the past and that which has not yet been drawn the
future. It is clear then that the present is not the middle point of the
line nor any point whatever upon it, for all of the line that has been
drawn belongs to the past and all the rest of it to the future. Its past
has already been done; its future is not yet done, but only possible.
Furthermore, it is clear that no point moves from the past into the
future. Such a movement is unintelligible. If there is any movement of
points at all, it is a movement into the past. That is, the line,
instead of growing into the future, grows into the past--continually
more and more of it is drawn. For remember that the future of the line
is not the place on the paper or in the air which by and by the line may
occupy. Its future is a genuine future, a possibility as yet nowhere
realized. It is the part of the line which always will be, but never is;
or, better, it is that part of the line which will have a place and a
date if the line continues to be drawn. The movement of time is thus not
a movement from the past to the future, but from the possible to the
actual, from what may be to what has been. The present is not the
vanishing point between past and future; it is not, so to speak, in the
same line or dimension with them. It is something quite different. It is
all that we mean by activity or eventuality. It is the concrete,
definite, and effective transforming of the possible into the actual. It
is the _drawing_ of the line, but in no sense is it a part or point of
the line itself.
There are, doubtless, difficulties in thinking of time in this way, for
it is not entirely free from spatial reminiscences. But it serves to
point out that past, present, and future are not like parts of a whole
into which an absolute or complete time is divided. They are more like
derivatives of the time process itself in the concrete instances of its
activity. They are what every growing or changing thing involves,
whether it be the knowledge of man or the crust of the earth, for
everything that grows or changes manufactures a past by realizing a
future. It leaves behind it the record of what it has done conserved by
memory or by nature, and in leaving that record behind constantly
enlarges or transforms it. The growth moves in a manner and an order
which when once performed are unalterable, but there is growth none the
less. Since time is like this, it seems evidently unintelligible to
restrict it and history to human experience and make the world in itself
absolute. It would be better to say that it is history in the large
sense applicable to the world itself that makes human experience
possible. Yet it would be more advisable not to make such a distinction
at all, but to recognize that human experience is one kind of history,
namely, history conscious of itself, the time process deliberately at
work.
Now it is evident that history in this latter sense is purposive and
selective. That which has happened is not remembered as a whole or
understood as a whole. Not only are details forgotten or neglected, but
things and events otherwise important are omitted for the sake of
securing emphasis and distinction among the things remembered. Herodotus
spoke of "wonderful deeds" and others following this example have
regarded history as concerned only with great men and great events. It
is true that the little men and the little events tend to disappear, but
we should remember that it is the selective character of history which
makes them little. Speaking absolutely, we may say that no item, however
apparently insignificant, is really insignificant in the historical
development of any people or any institution, for in some measure every
item is material to that development. But all are not equally material.
The absence of any one of them might undoubtedly have changed the whole
history, but given the presence of them all, some are of greater
significance than others.
The history of the English people may be regarded as a development of
personal liberty. It is doubtless more than that, but it is that. As
such a development, it is evident that there are many things which an
historian of personal liberty will disregard in order that the
particular movement he is studying may be emphasized and distinguished.
It will be that particular movement which will determine for him what is
great and what little. So it comes about that histories are diversified
even when they are histories of the same thing. There are many histories
of England which differ from one another not only in accuracy,
philosophical grasp, and brilliancy, but also in the purpose they
discover England to be fulfilling. By purpose here is not meant a
predestined end which England is bound to reach, but the fact that her
history can be construed as a development of a specific kind. In other
words her past can be understood only when it is seen to be relevant to
some particular career which has its termination in her existing
institutions. Her past has contributed through time to definite results
which are now apparent. The things that have happened have not all
contributed to these results in the same measure. Some have contributed
more, some less. What is true in this illustration appears to be true
generally. Every history is a particular career in the development of
which some facts, persons, and events have been more significant than
others, so that the termination of the career at any time is like an end
that has been reached or a consequence to which its antecedents are
peculiarly appropriate. That is the sense in which history is purposeful
and selective.
The selection is twofold. First, there is selection of the type of
career, and secondly, there is selection of the items especially
relevant to its progress. We may have the military, the political, the
social, the industrial, the economic, or the religious history of
England, for instance, and although these histories will overlap and
involve one another, each of them will exhibit a career which is
peculiar and distinct from its fellows. When reading the industrial
history we shall not be reading the religious history. In the one we
shall find circumstances and events recorded which we do not find in the
other, because all circumstances and events do not have significance
equally for the development of industry and religion. Historical
selection is, therefore, twofold,--the selection of a career to be
depicted and of events and circumstances peculiarly relevant to that
career.
Is this selection, we may ask, only a device on the historian's part to
facilitate our comprehension, or is it a genuine characteristic of the
time process itself? Does the historian read purpose into history or
does he find it there? It may assist in answering such questions to
observe that if selection is a device of the historian, it is one to
which he is compelled. Without it history is unintelligible. Unless we
understand events and circumstances as contributing to a definite result
and contributing in different measures, we do not understand them at
all. The Magna Charta, the British Constitution, the Tower of London,
the River Thames, the mines of Wales, the plays of Shakespeare--all
these things and things like them are for us quite unintelligible if
they illuminate no career or illustrate no specific movements to which
they have particularly contributed. Selection is, consequently, not a
device which the historian has invented; it is imposed upon him by his
own purpose to preserve the memory and promote the understanding of what
has happened. The procedure of the historian is not arbitrary, but
necessary. It is imposed upon him by the character of the facts with
which he deals. These facts are movements from the possible to the
actual and are helped and hindered by other such movements. An
historical fact is not only spread out in space and exists equally with
all its contemporaries at an assignable place in reference to them, it
also persists in time, comes before and after other persisting facts,
and persists along with others in a continuance equal to, or more or
less than, theirs. In a figure we may say, facts march on in time, but
not all at the same speed or with the same endurance; they help or
impede one another's movement; they do not all reach the goal; some of
them turn out to be leaders, others followers; their careers overlap and
interfere; so that the result is a failure for some and a success for
others. The march is their history.
This is figure, but it looks like the fact. Simple illustrations may
enforce it. The seeds which we buy and sow in the spring are not simply
so many ounces of chemical substances. They are also so many possible
histories or careers in time, so many days of growth, so much promise of
fruit or flower. Each seed has its own peculiar history with its own
peculiar career. The seeds are planted. Then in the course of time, soil
and moisture and atmosphere and food operate in unequal ways in the
development of each career. Each is furthered or hindered as events
fall out. Some careers are cut short, others prosper. Everywhere there
is selection. Everywhere there is adaptation of means to ends. The
history of the garden can be written because there is a history there to
write.
Such an illustration can be generalized. Our world is indubitably a
world in time. That means much more than the fact that its events can be
placed in accordance with a map or dated in accordance with a calendar.
It means that they are events in genuine careers, each with its own
particular character and its own possibility of a future, like the seeds
in the garden. Things with histories have not only structures in space
and are, accordingly, related geometrically to one another; they have
not only chemical structures and are thus analyzable into component
parts; they have also structures in time. They are not now what they
will be, but what they will be is always continuous with what they are,
so that we must think of them stretched out, so to speak, in time as
well as in space, or as being so many moments as well as so much volume.
What they become, however, depends not only on their own time
structures, but also on their interplay with one another. They are
helped and hindered in their development. The results reached at any
time are such as complete those which have gone before, for each career
is the producer, but not the product of its past.
It seems clear, therefore, that there is purpose in history. But
"purpose" is a troublesome word. It connotes design, intention,
foresight, as well as the converging of means upon a specific end. Only
in the latter sense is it here used, but with this addition: the end is
to be conceived not in terms of any goal ultimately reached, but in
terms of the career of which it is the termination; and in this career,
the present is continually adding to and completing the past. The
growing seeds end each in its own specific flower or fruit. They are
each of its own kind and named accordingly. It is only because each of
them has its specific structure in time that their growth presents that
convergence of means toward an end by which we distinguish them and for
which we value them. In purpose construed in this way there is evidently
no need of design or intention or foresight. In making a garden there is
such need. The purposes of nature may be deliberately employed to attain
the purposes of men. But apart from beings who foresee and plan there
appears to be no evidence of intention in the world. When we speak of
nature's designs, we speak figuratively, and impute to her rational and
deliberate powers. But we can not clearly affirm that the rain falls in
order that the garden may be watered, or that the eye was framed in
order that we might see. The evidence for design of that character has
been proved inadequate again and again with every careful examination of
it. To say, therefore, that nature is full of purpose does not mean that
nature has been framed in accordance with some preconceived plan, but
rather that nature is discovered to be an historical process, the
conversion of the possible into the actual in such a way that there is
conserved a progressive record of that conversion.
From the selective character of history it follows that a single
complete history of anything is impossible--certainly a single complete
history of the world at large. History is pluralistic. This conclusion
might be reached as others have already been reached by pointing out how
it follows from the purpose of writing history, and how this purpose
indicates the character of movements in time. Indeed this has already
been done in pointing out that the history of England is its many
histories and the history of a garden the history of its many seeds.
Always there is a particular career and particular incidents appropriate
to it. Any career may be as comprehensive as desired, but the more
inclusive it is the more restricted it becomes. The history of Milton
contains details which the history of English literature will omit; and
the history of the cosmos shrinks to nothing when we try to write it.
The only universal history is the exposition of what history itself is,
the time process stripped of all its variety and specific interests.
Consequently, a single purpose is not discoverable; there are many
purposes. When we try to reduce them all to some show of singleness we
again do no more than try to tell what a temporal order is like. It is
metaphysics and not history we are writing.
To affirm that history is pluralistic is, however, only to reaffirm the
selective character of history generally. A history of the world in
order to be single, definite, and coherent, must exhibit a single,
definite, and coherent purpose or time process. That means, of course,
that it is distinguished from other purposes equally single, definite,
and coherent. There are thus many histories of the world distinguished
from one another by the incidence of choice or emphasis. The flower in
the crannied wall with its history fully recorded and understood would,
consequently, illustrate the universe. All that has ever happened might
be interpreted in illumination of its career. Yet it would be absurd to
maintain that either nature or Tennyson intended that the little flower
should be exclusively illustrative. The wall would do as well, or its
crannies, or the poet. Nature exhibits no preference either in the
choice of a history or in the extent of its comprehensiveness. Man may
be thought to be, and man is, an incident in the universe, and the
universe may be thought to be, and the universe is, the theater of man's
career.
The same principle may be illustrated from human history exclusively. We
who are of European ancestry and largely Anglo-Saxon by inheritance are
pleased to write history as the development of our own civilization with
its institutions, customs, and laws; and we regard China and Japan, for
example, as incidental and contributory to our own continuation in time.
Because our heritage is Christian we date all events from the birth of
Christ. Yet we gain some wisdom by pausing to reflect how our procedure
might impress an enlightened historian from China or Japan. Would he
begin with the cradle of European civilization, pass through Greece and
Rome, and then from Europe to America, remarking that in 1852 A.D.
Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world? Surely he would begin
otherwise, and not unlike ourselves would construe the history of the
world in a manner relevant to the progress of his own civilization.
Europe and America and Christianity would contribute to that
development, but would not constitute its essential or distinctively
significant factors. The historian is himself an historical fact
indicating a selection, a distinction, and an emphasis in the course of
time. His history is naturally colored by that fact. Other histories he
can write only with an effort at detachment from his own career. He must
forget himself if he would understand others; but he must understand
himself first, if he is successfully to forget what he is. He must know
what history is, recognize its pluralistic character, and try to do it
justice.
To do justice to the pluralistic character of history is not, however,
simply to write other histories than one's own with commendable
impartiality. It is also to be keenly alive to the philosophical
implications of this pluralism. The most significant of them is
doubtless this: since philosophically considered history is a thing not
written, but evolved and acted, to no one history can absolute
superiority or preference be assigned. Absolutely considered the history
of man can not claim preëminence over the history of the stars. He is no
more the darling of the universe than is the remotest nebula. It is just
as intelligible and just as true to say that man exists as an
illustration of stellar evolution as to say that the sun exists to
divide light from darkness for the good of man. Absolutely considered
the cosmos is impartial to its many histories. But even that is not well
said, for it implies that the cosmos might be partial if it chose. We
should rather say that there is no considering of history absolutely at
all. For history is just the denial of absolute considerations. It is
the affirmation of relative considerations, of considerations which are
relative to a selected career. There is no other kind of history
possible.
The recognition of this fact does not, however, imply the futility of
all history. It does not imply that any history is good enough for men
since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. So to conclude is to
disregard completely the implications of pluralism. If no history can
claim absolute distinction, all histories are distinguished,
nevertheless, from one another. If no history can claim preëminence over
any other, it is true also that none can be robbed by any other of its
own distinction and character. The fact that the morning stars do not
sing together is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. The
fact that the rain falls equally upon the just and the unjust is
evidence neither of the impartial dispensations of deity nor of the
equal issue of vice and virtue. Each event in its own history and
illustrative of its own career is the law.
Yet men have been prone to write their own history as if it were
something else than a human enterprise, as if it were something else
than the history of humanity. Those who seek to read their destiny from
the constellations ascendant at their birth are generally called
superstitious; but those who seek to read it from the constitution of
matter, or from the mechanism of the physical world, or from the
composition of chemical substances, although no less superstitious, are
too frequently called scientists. But "dust thou art and unto dust thou
shalt return" is an essential truth only about the history of dust; it
is only an incidental truth about the history of man. One learns nothing
peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. It affords no measure of
the appreciation of poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the
passion for happiness. Human history is human history only. The hopes
and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be
understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in
terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way
in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully
remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used
for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more
satisfying to understand.
Yet some there are who stop worshipping the stars when they discover
that the stars neither ask for worship nor respond to it, and who
dismiss reverence and piety when they discover that a god did not create
the world. Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God,
but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an
end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to
worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast
purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been
divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own
history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found
that the stars have a different history from his own.
The inevitable failure of astronomy and geology to afford man gods
suitable for his worship is not a recommendation that he should
vigorously embrace the superstitions of his ancestors. To counsel that
would be an infamy equal to that which has just been condemned. The
counsel is rather that what is not human should not be taken as the
standard and measure of what is human. Human history can not be wholly
resolved into physical processes nor the enterprises of men be construed
solely as the by-product of material forces. Such resolution of it
appears to be unwarranted in view of the conclusions to which a
consideration of what history is, leads. The obverse error has long
since been sufficiently condemned. We have been warned often enough that
water does not _seek_ its own level or nature _abhor_ a vacuum. Even
literary criticism warns us against the pathetic fallacy. But in
refusing to anthropomorphize matter, we ought not to be led to
materialize man. We should rather be led to recognize that the reasons
which condemn anthropomorphic science are precisely the reasons which
commend humanistic philosophy. It is just because history is pluralistic
that it is unpardonable to confound different histories with one
another. So we may conclude that the pluralism of history which makes
all histories, when absolutely considered, of equal rank and of
indifferent importance, does not rob them, therefore, of their specific
characters, nor make human history a presumptuous enterprise for them
that write it not in the language of nature, but in the language of man.
This conclusion needs greater refinement of statement if it is to be
freed from ambiguity. For the distinction between nature and man is an
artifice. It is not a distinction which philosophy can ultimately
justify. Undoubtedly man is a part or instance of nature, governed by
nature's laws and intimately involved in her processes. But he is so
governed and involved not as matter without imagination, but as a being
whose distinction is the historical exercise of his intelligence. Nature
is not what she would be without him and that is why his history can
never be remembered or understood if he is forgotten. He can not be
taken out of nature and nature be then called upon to explain him. As a
part or instance of nature man is to be remembered and understood, but
as the part or instance which he himself is, and not another. His
history, consequently, can never be adequately written solely in terms
of physics or chemistry, or even of biology; it must be written also in
terms of aspiration.
All time processes are histories, but man only is the writer of them, so
that historical comprehension becomes the significant trait of human
history. To live in the light of a past remembered and understood is to
live, not the life of instinct and emotion, but the life of
intelligence. It is to see how means converge upon ends, and so to
discover means for the attainment of ends desired. Human history becomes
thus the record of human progress. From it we may learn how that
progress is to be defined and so discover the purpose of man in history.
For him the study of his own history is his congenial task to which all
his knowledge of other histories is contributory; and for him the
conscious, reflective, and intelligent living of his own history is his
congenial purpose.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] See especially his "Données immédiates de la conscience," 1888.
(Eng. tr. "Time and Free Will," by F. L. Pogson. The Macmillan Company,
1912.) "L'évolution créatrice," 1908. (Eng. tr. "Creative Evolution," by
Arthur Mitchell. Henry Holt and Company, 1913.)
III
THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY
Although history is pluralistic, it is not, therefore, discontinuous. We
can not divide it in two in such a manner that its parts will be wholly
unconnected. Any division we may make, although we make it as plain as
the fence which divides a field, gives us a boundary which, like the
fence, belongs equally to the parts on either side of it. Novelty and
distinction may abound in the world, but nothing is so novel or distinct
that it is wholly cut off from antecedents and consequences of some
sort. It is this fact which we denote when we speak of the continuity of
history. We indicate that every action of time, every conversion of the
possible into the actual, is intimately woven into the order of events
and finds there a definite place and definite connections. Consequently
it becomes easy to represent the movement of history as a kind of
progress from earlier to later things, from ancestors to descendants, or
from the original or primitive to the derived. If, however, progress is
to mean anything more than just this representation of historical
continuity, if, for example, it is to mean, besides a progression from
the earlier to the later, some improvement also, clearly a criterion is
necessary, by which progress may be judged and estimated. An inquiry is
thus suggested into the continuity of history to see in what sense
progress may be affirmed of it and by what criteria that affirmation may
be warranted. As a preliminary to this inquiry it is advisable to
envisage the continuity itself and determine how far it assists in
understanding what has happened.
From among the many illustrations which might be cited to bring the fact
of historical continuity visibly before us, these from Professor Tylor's
"Primitive Culture" are particularly suggestive because they deal with
familiar things: "Progress, degradation, survival, modification, are all
modes of the connection that binds together the complex network of
civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own
daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and
how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past
ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he
who knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even
that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of
Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style
of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass
between them. Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art
still carry their history plainly stamped upon them; and if the history
yet farther behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because
we can not clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is
thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous
little tails of the German postilion's coat show of themselves how they
came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman's
bands no longer so convey their history to the eye, and look
unaccountable enough till one has seen the intermediate stages through
which they came down from the more serviceable wide collars, such as
Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave their name to the
'band-box' they used to be kept in. In fact, the books of costume,
showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual stages and passed into
another, illustrate with much force and clearness the nature of the
change and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year to year in
more important matters of life. In books, again, we see each writer not
for and by himself, but occupying his proper place in history; we look
through each philosopher, mathematician, chemist, poet, into the
background of his education,--through Leibnitz into Descartes, through
Dalton into Priestly, through Milton into Homer.
"'Man,' said Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'ever connects on from what lies at
hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).' The notion of the
continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren
philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the
consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to
know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what
they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study
of development, when he declared at the beginning of his 'Positive
Philosophy' that 'no conception can be understood except through its
history,' and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To
expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere
inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested.
Imagine any one explaining the trivial saying, 'a little bird told me,'
without knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts,
to which Dr. Dasent in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so
reasonably traces its origin. To ingenious attempts at explaining by the
light of reason things which want the light of history to show their
meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been
due."[5]
The illustrations are drawn from the domain of human interests. They
could be paralleled by others drawn from natural history. The
honeysuckle may carry us elsewhere than to Assyria, revealing
unsuspected kinships in the world of plants. Biology has made the
conception of the continuity of living forms a familiar commonplace, and
geology can find in the earth's crust the story of countless years. So
familiar has the idea of continuity become that terms like "evolution"
and "development" have ceased to be technical and have become terms of
common speech. We speak readily of the evolution of man, of government,
of the steam-engine, of the automobile, and of the atom. The idea has so
possessed all departments of inquiry that a large part of the
literature of every subject is occupied with setting forth connections
which have gone before. Not only do we go through Milton into Homer, but
through yesterday into an ever receding past which grows more alluring
the more it recedes. The quest for origins has been of absorbing
interest. It would seem that we can never understand anything at all
until we have discovered its origin in something which preceded it.
In the first lecture I pointed out how impossible it appears ever to end
any history finally. We now seem to face a corresponding impossibility,
namely, the impossibility of ever really beginning it successfully. It
would appear that we stop only because we do not care to go farther, or
lack the means to do so, and not because we can say that we have found a
first beginning with no antecedents before it. We may begin the history
of philosophy with the Greeks, with Thales of Miletus, but the question
has been repeatedly asked, Was not Thales a Semite? Did he not derive
his ideas from Egypt and Babylonia? And whence came philosophy itself?
Was it not the offspring of religion which preceded it, so that, before
we begin its history, we must pass, as Professor Cornford suggests,[6]
from religion to philosophy? Then what of religion itself? What were its
antecedents and whence was its descent? So the questions multiply
interminably until we must admit that "in the beginning" is a time
arbitrarily fixed or only relatively determined. History, being
continuous, has neither beginning nor end.
This fact, however, ought not to bewilder any one who contemplates it
steadily. It is an obvious consequence of the nature of time, for every
present has a past and a future, and a first or last present is,
consequently, quite unintelligible. The historian, least of all, should
be bewildered. If he has recognized that history is pluralistic, he will
recognize also that beginnings and ends are, in any intelligible sense,
the termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute first or last in
history taken as a whole, for, as we have seen, the attempt to take
history as a whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the attempt to
define history. It gives us the metaphysics of time, but not an
absolute, complete, and finished whole, whose boundaries, although never
empirically reached, are ideally conceivable. Our thinking moves in a
direction quite different. It leads us to observe that distinctions
begin and end, and begin and end as absolutely as one chooses, but do
not, thereby, cut themselves off from all connections. These lectures
began to be delivered last Friday, but not the day before; the first
word of them was written at a perfectly definite time and place which
can never be changed; they will end with a definiteness equally precise;
but these beginnings and endings destroy no continuity. Every history is
equally continuous, undisturbed by its beginnings and endings. Each
action of time is preceded and followed by everything which precedes and
follows it, and yet each action of time begins and ends with its own
peculiar and individual precision. In affirming this we are affirming,
by means of a particular instance, the metaphysical nature of continuity
itself. For by continuity we mean the possibility of precise and
definite distinctions. The continuity of a line may be divided at its
middle point. It is then precisely divided, but is not, thereby, broken
into two separate lines.[7] After this manner the continuity of history
is to be conceived. And in the light of this conception we should
understand what the continuity of history can explain.
It is tempting to say that it can explain nothing at all, but it is
evident that there is an uncertainty of meaning in such a claim. For
things may be explained or made clear in a variety of ways with little
resemblance to one another. What we mean by a circle may be made clear
by defining a circle, or by an algebraical formula, or by drawing a
circle. All these ways will be fruitful, but they will be fruitful
relatively to the problem which provokes them. To explain anything at
all, it is necessary to keep in mind the questions to which the proposed
explanation is relevant. If I am asked to draw a circle it will not do
simply to define it; and if I am asked to tell what it is algebraically,
it will not do simply to draw it. So it is apparent that, when we wish
to know what the continuity of history can explain, or when we affirm
that it explains nothing, we should have in mind, first of all, the
questions to which the continuity of history would be an appropriate
answer. There appears to be only one such question, and that is, What
have been the antecedents of any given fact? These antecedents the
continuity of history explains in that it makes them clear. It may also
make clear what the consequences of a given fact have been or may be.
But this explanatory value is a derivative of the preceding or an
enlargement of it, through our habit of looking at consequences as
derived from their antecedents, and of basing our expectations of what
may happen upon our observations of what has happened. Further
explanatory value in the continuity of history it seems difficult to
find, even if we make the statement of it less general and more precise.
But in saying this, it is not implied that this value is mean or
inconsiderable. The continuity of history is both entertaining and
instructive. It is entertaining because it reveals unsuspected kinships
and alluring connections. It is instructive because it furnishes a
foundation for inference and practice. To man it gives the long
experience of his race to enjoy and profit by. It guides his
expectations and enhances the control of his own affairs. It is the same
with the continuities of nature generally. They beget the vision of an
ordered world and help to frame rules which are applicable in the
control of nature. Accordingly it is not disparagement which is here
intended, but a limitation which should be appreciated.
When we say to our children, "A little bird told me," both we and our
children may be quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent's introduction to the Norse
Tales. We may be quite unconscious that we are using an expression
traceable to a time when people believed in such language of birds and
beasts as gifted persons could understand. It may be that we repeat the
words simply because we remember that our parents once successfully
deceived us in our childhood by using them, and that our parents did but
follow the example of theirs. But evidently we should not explain the
trivial saying simply by following it back endlessly into antiquity
unless we concluded that it had always been characteristic of parents to
deceive children in this manner. In that case we should have discovered
a metaphysical truth about the nature of parents, and no further
explanation would be required.
If, however, we are not willing to admit that parents are such by nature
that they will cite birds as sources of information when it is expedient
to keep the real source hidden, but insist that this habit be otherwise
explained, we ask for an explanation which the continuity of history
alone can not afford. An explanation in contemporaneous terms is
required. We do not use the phrase because our ancestors used it,
although we may have derived it from them; we use it because of its
known efficacy. We may, however, discover that our ancestors--or Norse
parents--used it for a different reason, namely, because they believed
in a language of beasts and birds. But if we ask why they so believed,
it will not profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so doing we
come upon the contemporaneous, experimental origin of that belief. For
it is evident that if the belief had an origin, there was a time
anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can not, therefore, be
explained solely in terms of that anterior time. Its origin points, not
to continuity, but to action. It indicates not that the originators of
the belief had ancestors, but that, in view of their contemporaneous
circumstances, they acted in a certain way. To explain the origin of
anything, therefore, we can not trust to the continuity of history
alone. That continuity may carry us back to the beginnings of beliefs
and institutions which have persisted and been transmitted from age to
age; it may reveal to us experimental factors which have shaped beliefs
and institutions, but which have long since been forgotten; but it can
never, of itself, reveal the experimental origin of any belief or
institution whatever. That is, in principle, the limitation by which the
explanatory value of historical continuity is restricted. To understand
origins we must appeal to the contemporaneous experience of their own
age, or to experimental science.[8]
Simple as this consideration is, it has been too much neglected by
historians and philosophers in recent times on account of the profound
influence of the doctrine of evolution. The great service, which that
doctrine has rendered, has been to fix our attention on the evident fact
of continuity from which our minds had been distracted by a too
exclusive preoccupation with theories of the atomic kind. Through
several centuries, philosophy had acquired the habit of thinking
generally in terms of elements and their compounds, whenever it
addressed itself to a consideration of nature, or of the mind, or of the
relation between the two. Its principal problem was to discover means
of connection and unification which might make clear how that which is
essentially discrete and discontinuous might, none the less, be combined
into a unity of some sort. As it failed, it usually took refuge in the
opposite idea, and attempted to conceive an original unity out of which
diversity was generated by some impulsion in this initial and primal
being. Philosophy thus vibrated between the contrasted poles of the same
fundamental endeavor, between the attempt to combine elements into a
unity, and the attempt to resolve unity into elements. The latter
attempt, especially in men like Hegel and Spencer, had the advantage of
involving the idea of continuity, and became the controlling
philosophical enterprise of the latter part of the last century. But it
was principally the doctrine of evolution or development as set forth by
biologists, anthropologists, and historians that made the fact of
continuity convincingly apparent and freed philosophy from the necessity
of attempting to explain it. Continuity became a fact to be appreciated
and understood, and ceased to be a riddle to be solved. The doctrine of
evolution thus wrought a real emancipation of the mind.
But this freedom has been often abused. Relieved of the necessity of
explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even
students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently
content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs
to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of
ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the
exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental
science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in
our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. If we
would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to
consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate
marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote
ancestors. And this practical advice has sometimes taken the form of
metaphysics. If we wish to know the nature of things or to appraise
their worth, we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic stuff from
which everything has been derived. Thus man and all the varied panorama
of the world vanish backward into nebulæ, and life disappears into the
impulse to live. Not trailing clouds of glory do we come, but trailing
the primitive and the obsolete.
Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our
temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and
sophistication. That is the usual result of inquisitions into one's
ancestry. But disillusionment and sophistication may produce either
regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home
of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our
disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better for us to have lived
then when illusions were cherished and vital, than to live now when they
are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has been sapped, and we
may cry with Matthew Arnold's Obermann
"Oh, had I lived in that great day!"
Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break
with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and
superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of
centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at
last, we have begun to make progress.
But progress is not to be construed in terms of a conservatism which is
artificial and reactionary, or of a radicalism which is undisciplined
and irresponsible. Conservatism and radicalism are, as already
indicated, temperamental affections which a too exclusive and irrational
contemplation of our ancestry may produce in us. They are born of fear
or impatience, and are not the legitimate offspring of history. For
historical continuity, just because it does not of itself reveal the
experimental origin of any belief or institution, does not of itself
disclose progress or any standard by which progress may be estimated. It
teaches no lesson in morals and provides no guide to the perplexed. And
the reason for this is simple. History is continuous, and, therefore,
there is no point, no date, no occurrence, no incident, no origin, no
belief, and no institution, which can claim preëminence simply on
account of its position. If men were once superstitious because of their
place in history and are now scientific for precisely the same reason,
we can not therefore conclude, with any intelligent or rational
certainty, that evolution has progressed from superstition to science,
or that science is better than superstition. Values are otherwise
determined. The continuity of history levels them all.
Yet there may be laws of history. The comparative study of history,
whether the history be of civilizations or of living forms or of
geological formations, reveals uniformities and sequences which promote
our understanding and aid our practice. If we should find that wherever
men have lived, their institutions, laws, customs, religion, and
philosophy tend to show a uniformity of direction in their development,
we should feel justified in concluding that the tendency indicated a law
of history. Yet such laws would not be indications of progress. They
would indicate rather the conditions under which progress is or can be
made. For laws are expressions of the limitations under which things may
be done. They show the forms and structures to which actions conform.
But whether these actions are good or bad, upward or downward,
progressive or retrogressive, they do not show. For decline no less than
progress is in conformity with law, and the continuity of history is
indifferent to both. Were we, therefore, in possession of all the laws
and uniformities of history, we should not have discovered thereby what
either decline or progress is; but were we in possession of a knowledge
of what decline and progress are, the laws and uniformities of history
would teach us better to avoid the one and attain the other.
It would seem to follow from these considerations that progress
involves something more than the continuous accumulation of results in
some specified direction, the piling of them up on one another in such a
way that the total heap is more impressive than any of the portions
added to it, and more illustrative, consequently, of a particular
career. There might, indeed, be progress in this sense, if we divorced
the conception of it from any standard which might intelligently judge
it and set a value upon it. For the passage from seed to fruit, or any
movement in time which attains an end illustrative of the steps by which
it has been reached is in that sense progressive. But progress in this
sense means no more than the fact of history. The career of things in
time is precisely that sort of movement, and indicates the sense in
which history is naturally purposeful. To call it progress adds nothing
to the meaning of it unless a standard is introduced by which it can be
measured. If we will risk again the treacherous distinction between man
as intelligent and nature as simply forceful, we may say that progress
rightfully implies some improvement of nature. We should then see that
to improve nature involves the doing of something which nature, left to
herself, does not do, and, consequently, that nature herself affords no
indication of progress and no measure or standard of it. Nor does
history afford them, if we divorce history from every moral estimate of
it. For again, we may say that progress implies some improvement of
history, so that to judge that there has been progress is not to
discover that history by evolving has put a value upon itself. It is
rather to judge that history has measured up to a standard applied to
it. It seems idle, therefore, to suppose that history apart from such a
standard can tell us what progress is or whether it has been made.
Yet history might do so if we are ready to admit man makes moral
judgments as naturally as the sun shines. If his morality were some
miracle, supernaturally imposed upon his natural career, we should need
supernatural sanctions for it, for no natural achievement of his could
justify it. These sanctions might justify him and what he does, if he
conformed to them, but neither he nor his actions could give them
natural warrant. They would express nothing after which he naturally
aspires, and could, consequently, afford him no vision of a goal the
attainment of which would crown his history with its own natural
fruition. But if his morality is natural, his ideals and standards of
judgment express what he has discovered he might be, and point out to
him what his history might attain, had he knowledge and power enough to
turn it in the direction of his own conscious purposes. Accordingly his
history then might reveal both progress and the criterion of it. But it
would do so not simply because it is a history, but because it is a
history of a certain kind. Man makes progress because he can conceive
what progress is, and use that conception as a standard of selection and
as a goal to be reached. He participates in his own history consciously,
and that means that he participates in it morally, with a sense of
obligation to his career. For to be conscious implies the anticipation
in imagination of results which are not yet attained, but which might be
attained if appropriate means were found. Conceiving thus what he might
be, man always has some standard and measure of what he is. He sees
ahead of him, and moves, therefore, with care and discrimination. All
the forces and impulses of his nature do not simply impel him on from
behind; they also draw him on from before through his ability to
conceive to what enlargement and fruition they might be carried. He
condemns his life as miserable, only because he conceives a happiness
which condemns it; and he calls it good, only because joys, once
anticipated but now attained, have blessed it. Progress is thus
characteristic of human history, because it is characteristic of man
that progress should be conceived. His life is not only a life of
nutrition and reproduction, or of pleasures and pains, but a life also
of hopes and fears. And when hope and fear are not blind, but
enlightened, his life is also a life of reason, for reason is the
ability to conceive the ends which clarify the movements toward them.
"Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and
pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a
devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since
the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by
hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would
take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a
progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the
ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being.
In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having
its sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience
would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the
increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without
a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow,
the improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor
desired."[9]
Carrying thus the conception and measure of progress in his own career,
man can judge his history morally, and decide what progress he has made.
He speaks aptly of "making" progress, recognizing in that expression
that he uses the materials at his command for the ends he desires. But
the materials at his command are not of his own making. He may, indeed,
have modified them by former use, but in each instance of his using them
they are always so much matter with a structure and character of their
own. This fact puts the continuity of history in a new light. It forbids
the attempt to conceive it as a movement pushing forward, as it were,
into the future. We should conceive it rather from the point of view of
the time process as we have already analyzed it. Then we should see that
the continuity of history is the continuity of the results of the
conversion of the possible into the actual--the part of the line which
has been drawn. It comprises all that has been accomplished, conserved
either by man's memory or by nature at large, and existing for continued
modification or use. As such, it has its own structure, its own
uniformities, and its own laws. To them every modification made is
subject. That is why everything "connects on from what lies at hand,"
and why everything we do--even the expressions we use--points backward
to what our ancestors have done. Since what they have done is only
material for what we may do, it can not of itself explain our use of it,
or judge our own values. An understanding of it should, however, make us
wiser in the use of it. That is why we need contemporaneous experience
and empirical science. We need to discover, either by our own experience
or by reconstituting the experience of others, what happens when given
material is used in a given way. Such discoveries are the only genuine
explanations. They reveal the conditions to which actions must conform
if the ends we desire are to be attained.
More generally expressed the continuity of history is the continuity of
matter. It comprises in sum the structure to which every movement in
time is subject. It makes up what we call the laws of nature conformably
to which whatever is done must be done. But in itself it is inert and
impotent. Activity of some sort must penetrate it, if there is to be
anything effected. And what is effected reveals, when experimentally
understood, the laws as limitations within which the control of any
movement is possible.
A wall is built by laying stone on stone. It may be torn down and built
again, or left a ruin. The placing or overthrow of every stone occurs as
just that event but once, never to return, but the stones, though
chiseled or worn in the handling, remain constant material for constant
use. The result is a wall or a ruin, both of which illustrate the law of
gravitation, but neither of which was produced by that law. That is what
history is like. It is an activity which transforms the materials of the
world without destroying them, and transforms them subject to laws of
their own. The world is thus ever new, but never lawless. It is always
fresh and always old. The present is, as Francis Bacon said, its real
antiquity. Time is thus the arch-conservative and the arch-radical.
Forever it revises its inheritance, but it is never quit of it.
Man's inheritance comprises both what he has derived from his ancestors,
and also the world bequeathed to him from day to day. This material he
uses with some knowledge of its laws, and with the conscious desire to
convert it to his own ends. The kinds of progress he can make are thus
relevant to the purposes he sets before him. Since the satisfaction of
his physical needs and the desire of comfortable living require some
mastery of physical resources, his progress can naturally be measured by
the degree of success he makes in providing for satisfactions of this
kind. Such progress is material progress, and its standards are economy
and efficiency, or the attainment of the maximum result with the minimum
of effort. This kind of progress is very diversified, embracing all the
economic concerns of life, and much of society and the arts. But
material prosperity is provisional. To be well-housed, well-fed,
well-clothed, and even to have friends and the opportunity for unlimited
amusement, these things have never been permanently regarded as
defining human happiness to the full. Having these things man is still
curious to know what he will do. Material progress indicates mastery of
the necessities of his existence in order that he may then be free to
act. If no free act follows upon such mastery, life loses its savor, and
pleasures grow stale. Material progress would thus seem to be a
preliminary to living well, but would not be living well itself. For man
would be in a sorry plight if he succeeded in mastering the physical
resources of his world, and then found nothing to do.
There seems to be nothing further for him to do than to reflect, or
rather what he does further, flows from his reflections. Since he
satisfies his bodily wants, not blindly, but consciously and through
exercise of his intelligence, looking before and after, and trying to
see his life from beginning to end, his reflections lead him to
self-consciousness. He discovers his personality and makes the crucial
distinction between his body and his soul. He speaks of _his_ world, of
_his_ friends, of _his_ life. He begins then to wonder for what purpose
and by what right his possessive attitude is warranted; for unless he
suppresses his reflections or yields himself thoughtlessly to his
instincts and emotions, he can not fail to observe that things are no
more rightfully his than another's, and that to belong rightfully to any
one there must be some warrant drawn from a world with which his soul
could be congenial. Even his soul begins to appear as not rightfully
his, for why should he have now this haunting sense of belonging to
another world, and of being a visitor to this in need of introduction
and credentials? Reflection thus gives birth to a new kind of life in
which also progress may be made. We call it rational progress, for it
involves the attempt to justify existence by discovering sanctions which
reason can approve, and to which all should give assent, because each
soul must, on seeing them, recognize them as its own.
Reflection may lead man to do generous things. He may comfort the
distressed, help the poor, relieve pain, or reform society. The world
affords him abundant opportunity for his benefactions. He may create
beautiful things which he and others can enjoy perfectly in the mere
beholding of them. He may worship the gods, dimly conscious that they at
least lead the perfect life, and that to dwell with them is immortality.
Such exercises of the spirit yield him a new kind of happiness. But his
danger lies in supposing that his existence can be thus externally
justified: that others will bless him for his benefactions; that Beauty
lurks hidden to be gloriously seen even at the risk of destruction; or
that God intended him to be happy. If, however, he is saved from thus
superstitiously converting the ideal possibilities of his life into
justifying reasons why he should exist at all, he may see in them the
fruition of all his history. Even his material progress gives him a hint
of this, for it is genuine progress and justifies itself naturally
through the attainment of its ends. For he needs no sanction to warm his
body when cold, or to feed it when hungry. It is sufficient that he sees
the end to be reached and finds the means to reach it. The hunger of the
soul may be no less efficacious. Although these cravings tend to bring
uneasiness and distaste into his animal enjoyments, they find some
satisfaction if these enjoyments are idealized and transformed into a
vision of what they might be freed from the material grossness which
clogs them. Man then begins to conceive ideal love and friendship, and
an ideal society. If only he were the free partaker of such perfect
things, his existence would need no justification. In acknowledging
this, however, he may rediscover himself and learn more adequately what
the purpose of his history is. It is so to use the materials of the
world that they will be permanently used in the light of the ideal
perfection they naturally suggest. Man can conceive no occupation more
satisfying and no happiness more complete. In entering upon it he makes
rational progress. Its measure is the degree of success he attains in
making his animal life minister to ideals he can own without reserve and
love without regret.
Human history is something more than the lives of great men, the rise
and fall of states, the growth of institutions and customs, the vagaries
of religion and philosophy, or the controlling influence of economic
forces. It is also a rational enterprise. Expressed in naturalistic
terms it is history conscious of what history is. To remember and to
understand what has happened is not, therefore, simply an interesting
and profitable study; it may be also an illustration of rational living.
It may be an indication that man, in finally discovering what his
history genuinely is, is at the same time making it minister constantly
and consciously to its own enlargement and perfection. That intelligent
beings should recover their history is no reason why they should
repudiate it, even if they find many things of which to be ashamed; for
they are examples of the recovery of the past with the prospect of a
future. In reading their own history, they may smile at that which once
they reverenced, and laugh at that which once they feared. They may have
to unlearn many established lessons and renounce many cherished hopes.
They may have to emancipate themselves continually from their past; but
note that it is from their past that they would be emancipated and that
it is freedom that they seek. It is not a new form of slavery. Into what
greater slavery could they fall than into that implied by the
squandering of their inheritance or by blaming their ancestors for
preceding them? They will be ancestors themselves one day and others
will ask what they have bequeathed. These others may not ask for Greece
again or for Rome or for Christianity, but they will ask for the like of
these, things which can live perennially in the imagination, even if as
institutions they are past and dead. He is not freed from the past who
has lost it or who regards himself simply as its product. In the one
case he would have no experience to guide him and no memories to
cherish. In the other he would have no enthusiasm. To be emancipated is
to have recovered the past untrammeled in an enlightened pursuit of that
enterprise of the mind which first begot it. It is not to renounce
imagination, but to exercise it illumined and refreshed.
History is, then, not only the conserving, the remembering, and the
understanding of what has happened: it is also the completing of what
has happened. And since in man history is consciously lived, the
completing of what has happened is also the attempt to carry it to what
he calls perfection. He looks at a wilderness, but, even as he looks,
beholds a garden. For him, consequently, the purpose of history is not a
secret he vainly tries to find, but a kind of life his reason enables
him to live. As he lives it well, the fragments of existence are
completed and illumined in the visions they reveal.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Tylor, Edward B. "Primitive Culture." Henry Holt & Co., 1889. Vol.
I, pages 17 ff.
[6] Cornford, Francis M. "From Religion to Philosophy." Longmans, Green
& Co., 1912.
[7] See Dedekind, Richard. "Continuity and Irrational Numbers," in
"Essays on the Theory of numbers." Tr. by Wooster W. Beman. Open Court
Publishing Co., 1901.
[8] If space permitted, this same limitation could be abundantly
illustrated from the sciences, especially the biological sciences. They
have made very clear what an essential difference there is between the
continuity of living forms and the origin of new forms. This difference
can be readily appreciated by comparing a work on "evolution" or
"natural history" with a work on "experimental biology."
[9] Santayana, George. "The Life of Reason," 1905. Vol. I, pages 3-4.
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