THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
I
HISTORY AND CHRONICLE
I
'Contemporary history' is wont to be called the history of a passage of time, looked upon as a most recent past, whether it be that of the last fifty years, a decade, a year, a month, a day, or indeed of the last hour or of the last minute. But if we think and speak rigorously, the term 'contemporaneous' can be applied only to that history which comes into being immediately after the act which is being accomplished, as consciousness of that act: it is, for instance, the history that I make of myself while I am in the act of composing these pages; it is the thought of my composition, linked of necessity to the work of composition. 'Contemporary' would be well employed in this case, just because this, like every act of the spirit, is outside time (of the first and after) and is formed 'at the same time' as the act to which it is linked, and from which it is distinguished by means of a distinction not chronological but ideal. 'Non-contemporary history,' 'past history,' would, on the other hand, be that which finds itself in the presence of a history already formed, and which thus comes into being as a criticism of that history, whether it be thousands of years or hardly an hour old.
But if we look more closely, we perceive that this history already formed, which is called or which we would like to call 'non-contemporary' or 'past' history, if it really is history, that is to say, if it mean something and is not an empty echo, is also contemporary, and does not in any way differ from the other. As in the former case, the condition of its existence is that the deed of which the history is told must vibrate in the soul of the historian, or (to employ the expression of professed historians) that the documents are before the historian and that they are intelligible. That a narrative or a series of narratives of the fact is united and mingled with it merely means that the fact has proved more rich, not that it has lost its quality of being present: what were narratives or judgments before are now themselves facts, 'documents' to be interpreted and judged. History is never constructed from narratives, but always from documents, or from narratives that have been reduced to documents and treated as such. Thus if contemporary history springs straight from life, so too does that history which is called non-contemporary, for it is evident that only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact. Therefore this past fact does not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest, in so far as it is unified with an interest of the present life. This has been said again and again in a hundred ways by historians in their empirical formulas, and constitutes the reason, if not the deeper content, of the success of the very trite saying that history is magister vitæ.
I have recalled these forms of historical technique in order to remove the aspect of paradox from the proposition that 'every true history is contemporary history.' But the justice of this proposition is easily confirmed and copiously and perspicuously exemplified in the reality of historiographical work, provided always that we do not fall into the error of taking the works of the historians all together, or certain groups of them confusedly, and of applying them to an abstract man or to ourselves considered abstractly, and of then asking what present interest leads to the writing or reading of such histories: for instance, what is the present interest of the history which recounts the Peloponnesian or the Mithradatic War, of the events connected with Mexican art, or with Arabic philosophy. For me at the present moment they are without interest, and therefore for me at this present moment those histories are not histories, but at the most simply titles of historical works. They have been or will be histories in those that have thought or will think them, and in me too when I have thought or shall think them, re-elaborating them according to my spiritual needs. If, on the other hand, we limit ourselves to real history, to the history that one really thinks in the act of thinking, it will be easily seen that this is perfectly identical with the most personal and contemporary of histories. When the development of the culture of my historical moment presents to me (it would be superfluous and perhaps also inexact to add to myself as an individual) the problem of Greek civilization or of Platonic philosophy or of a particular mode of Attic manners, that problem is related to my being in the same way as the history of a bit of business in which I am engaged, or of a love affair in which I am indulging, or of a danger that threatens me. I examine it with the same anxiety and am troubled with the same sense of unhappiness until I have succeeded in solving it. Hellenic life is on that occasion present in me; it solicits, it attracts and torments me, in the same way as the appearance of the adversary, of the loved one, or of the beloved son for whom one trembles. Thus too it happens or has happened or will happen in the case of the Mithradatic War, of Mexican art, and of all the other things that I have mentioned above by way of example.
Having laid it down that contemporaneity is not the characteristic of a class of histories (as is held with good reason in empirical classifications), but an intrinsic characteristic of every history, we must conceive the relation of history to life as that of unity; certainly not in the sense of abstract identity, but of synthetic unity, which implies both the distinction and the unity of the terms. Thus to talk of a history of which the documents are lacking would appear to be as extravagant as to talk of the existence of something as to which it is also affirmed that it is without one of the essential conditions of existence. A history without relation to the document would be an unverifiable history; and since the reality of history lies in this verifiability, and the narrative in which it is given concrete form is historical narrative only in so far as it is a critical exposition of the document (intuition and reflection, consciousness and auto-consciousness, etc.), a history of that sort, being without meaning and without truth, would be inexistent as history. How could a history of painting be composed by one who had not seen and enjoyed the works of which he proposed to describe the genesis critically? And how far could anyone understand the works in question who was without the artistic experience assumed by the narrator? How could there be a history of philosophy without the works or at least fragments of the works of the philosophers? How could there be a history of a sentiment or of a custom, for example that of Christian humility or of knightly chivalry, without the capacity for living again, or rather without an actual living again of these particular states of the individual soul?
On the other hand, once the indissoluble link between life and thought in history has been effected, the doubts that have been expressed as to the certainty and the utility of history disappear altogether in a moment. How could that which is a present producing of our spirit ever be uncertain? How could that knowledge be useless which solves a problem that has come forth from the bosom of life?
II
But can the link between document and narrative, between life and history, ever be broken? An affirmative answer to this has been given when referring to those histories of which the documents have been lost, or, to put the case in a more general and fundamental manner, those histories whose documents are no longer alive in the human spirit. And this has also been implied when saying that we all of us in turn find ourselves thus placed with respect to this or that part of history. The history of Hellenic painting is in great part a history without documents for us, as are all histories of peoples concerning whom one does not know exactly where they lived, the thoughts and feelings chat they experienced, or the individual appearance of the works that they accomplished; those literatures and philosophies, too, as to which we do not know their theses, or even when we possess these and are able to read them through, yet fail to grasp their intimate spirit, either owing to the lack of complementary knowledge or because of our obstinate temperamental reluctance, or owing to our momentary distraction.
If, in these cases, when that connexion is broken, we can no longer call what remains history (because history was nothing but that connexion), and it can henceforth only be called history in the sense that we call a man the corpse of a man, what remains is not for that reason nothing (not even the corpse is really nothing). Were it nothing, it would be the same as saying that the connexion is indissoluble, because nothingness is never effectual. And if it be not nothing, if it be something, what is narrative without the document?
A history of Hellenic painting, according to the accounts that have been handed down or have been constructed by the learned of our times, when closely inspected, resolves itself into a series of names of painters (Apollodorus, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles, etc.), surrounded with biographical anecdotes, and into a series of subjects for painting (the burning of Troy, the contest of the Amazons, the battle of Marathon, Achilles, Calumny, etc.), of which certain particulars are given in the descriptions that have reached us; or a graduated series, going from praise to blame, of these painters and their works, together with names, anecdotes, subjects, judgments, arranged more or less chronologically. But the names of painters separated from the direct knowledge of their works are empty names; the anecdotes are empty, as are the descriptions of subjects, the judgment of approval or of disapproval, and the chronological arrangement, because merely arithmetical and lacking real development; and the reason why we do not realize it in thought is that the elements which should constitute it are wanting. If those verbal forms possess any significance, we owe it to what little we know of antique paintings from fragments, from secondary works that have come down to us in copies, or in analogous works in the other arts, or in poetry. With the exception, however, of that little, the history of Hellenic art is, as such, a tissue of empty words.
We can, if we like, say that it is 'empty of determinate content,' because we do not deny that when we pronounce the name of a painter we think of some painter, and indeed of a painter who is an Athenian, and that when we utter the word 'battle,' or 'Helen,' we think of a battle, indeed of a battle of hoplites, or of a beautiful woman, similar to those familiar to us in Hellenic sculpture. But we can think indifferently of any one of the numerous facts that those names recall. For this reason their content is indeterminate, and this indetermination of content is their emptiness.
All histories separated from their living documents resemble these examples and are empty narratives, and since they are empty they are without truth. Is it true or not that there existed a painter named Polygnotus and that he painted a portrait of Miltiades in the Poecile? We shall be told that it is true, because one person or several people, who knew him and saw the work in question, bear witness to its existence. But we must reply that it was true for this or that witness, and that for us it is neither true nor false, or (which comes to the same thing) that it is true only on the evidence of those witnesses—that is to say, for an extrinsic reason, whereas truth always requires intrinsic reasons. And since that proposition is not true (neither true nor false), it is not useful either, because where there is nothing the king loses his rights, and where the elements of a problem are wanting the effective will and the effective need to solve it are also wanting, along with the possibility of its solution. Thus to quote those empty judgments is quite useless for our actual lives. Life is a present, and that history which has become an empty narration is a past: it is an irrevocable past, if not absolutely so, καθ' αὑτό, then certainly for the present moment.
The empty words remain, and the empty words are sounds, or the graphic signs which represent them, and they hold together and maintain themselves, not by an act of thought that thinks them (in which case they would soon be filled), but by an act of will, which thinks it useful for certain ends of its own to preserve those words, however empty or half empty they may be. Mere narrative, then, is nothing but a complex of empty words or formulas asserted by an act of the will.
Now with this definition we have succeeded in giving neither more nor less than the true distinction, hitherto sought in vain, between history and chronicle. It has been sought in vain, because it has generally been sought in a difference in the quality of the facts which each difference took as its object. Thus, for instance, the record of individual facts has been attributed to chronicle, to history that of general facts; to chronicle the record of private, to history that of public facts: as though the general were not always individual and the individual general, and the public were not always also private and the private public! Or else the record of important facts (memorable things) has been attributed to history, to chronicle that of the unimportant: as though the importance of facts were not relative to the situation in which we find ourselves, and as though for a man annoyed by a mosquito the evolutions of the minute insect were not of greater importance than the expedition of Xerxes! Certainly, we are sensible of a just sentiment in these fallacious distinctions—namely, that of placing the difference between history and chronicle in the conception of what interests and of what does not interest (the general interests and not the particular, the great interests and not the little, etc.). A just sentiment is also to be noted in other considerations that are wont to be adduced, such as the close bond between events that there is in history and the disconnectedness that appears on the other hand in chronicle, the logical order of the first, the purely chronological order of the second, the penetration of the first into the core of events and the limitation of the second to the superficial or external, and the like. But the differential character is here rather metaphorized than thought, and when metaphors are not employed as simple forms expressive of thought we lose a moment after what has just been gained. The truth is that chronicle and history are not distinguishable as two forms of history, mutually complementary, or as one subordinate to the other, but as two different spiritual attitudes. History is living chronicle, chronicle is dead history; history is contemporary history, chronicle is past history; history is principally an act of thought, chronicle an act of will. Every history becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought, but only recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a time concrete and expressive. The history of philosophy even is chronicle, when written or read by those who do not understand philosophy: history would even be what we are now disposed to read as chronicle, as when, for instance, the monk of Monte Cassino notes: 1001. Beatus Dominicus migravit ad Christum. 1002. Hoc anno venerunt Saraceni super Capuam. 1004. Terremotus ingens hunc montem exagitavit, etc.; for those facts were present to him when he wept over the death of the departed Dominic, or was terrified by the natural human scourges that convulsed his native land, seeing the hand of God in that succession of events. This does not prevent that history from assuming the form of chronicle when that same monk of Monte Cassino wrote down cold formulas, without representing to himself or thinking their content, with the sole intention of not allowing those memories to be lost and of handing them down to those who should inhabit Monte Cassino after him.
But the discovery of the real distinction between chronicle and history, which is a formal distinction (that is to say, a truly real distinction), not only frees us from the sterile and fatiguing search after material distinctions (that is to say, imaginary distinctions), but it also enables us to reject a very common presupposition—namely, that of the priority of chronicle in respect to history. Primo annales [chronicles] fuere, post historiæ factæ sunt, the saying of the old grammarian, Mario Vittorino, has been repeated, generalized, and universalized. But precisely the opposite of this is the outcome of the inquiry into the character and therefore into the genesis of the two operations or attitudes: first comes history, then chronicle. First comes the living being, then the corpse; and to make history the child of chronicle is the same thing as to make the living be born from the corpse, which is the residue of life, as chronicle is the residue of history.
III
History, separated from the living document and turned into chronicle, is no longer a spiritual act, but a thing, a complex of sounds and of other signs. But the document also, when separated from life, is nothing but a thing like another, a complex of sounds or of other signs—for example, the sounds and the letters in which a law was once communicated; the lines cut into a block of marble, which manifested a religious sentiment by means of the figure of a god; a heap of bones, which were at one time the expression of a man or of an animal.
Do such things as empty narratives and dead documents exist? In a certain sense, no, because external things do not exist outside the spirit; and we already know that chronicle, as empty narrative, exists in so far as the spirit produces it and holds it firmly with an act of will (and it may be opportune to observe once more that such an act carries always with it a new act of consciousness and of thought): with an act of will, which abstracts the sound from the thought, in which dwelt the certainty and concreteness of the sound. In the same way, these dead documents exist to the extent that they are the manifestations of a new life, as the lifeless corpse is really itself also a process of vital creation, although it appears to be one of decomposition and something dead in respect of a particular form of life. But in the same way as those empty sounds, which once contained the thought of a history, are eventually called narratives, in memory of the thought they contained, thus do those manifestations of a new life continue to be looked upon as remnants of the life that preceded them and is indeed extinguished.
Now observe how, by means of this string of deductions, we have put ourselves into the position of being able to account for the partition of historical sources into narratives and documents, as we find it among some of our modern methodologists, or, as it is also formulated, into traditions and residues or remains (Überbleibsel, Überreste). This partition is irrational from the empirical point of view, and may be of use as indicating the inopportunity of the introduction of a speculative thought into empiricism. It is so irrational that one immediately runs against the difficulty of not being able to distinguish what one wished to distinguish. An empty 'narrative' considered as a thing is tantamount to any other thing whatever which is called a 'document.' And, on the other hand, if we maintain the distinction we incur the further difficulty of having to base our historical construction upon two different orders of data (one foot on the bank and the other in the river)—that is to say, we shall have to recur to two parallel instances, one of which is perpetually referring us back to the other. And when we seek to determine the relation of the two kinds of sources with a view to avoiding the inconvenient parallelism, what happens is this: either the relation is stated to depend upon the superiority of the one over the other, and the distinction vanishes, because the superior form absorbs into itself and annuls the inferior form; or a third term is established, in which the two forms are supposed to become united with a distinction: but this is another way of declaring them to be inexistent in that abstractness. For this reason it does not seem to me to be without significance that the partition of accounts and documents should not have been adopted by the most empirical of the methodologists. They do not involve themselves in these subtleties, but content themselves with grouping the historical sources into those that are written and those that are represented, or in other similar ways. In Germany, however, Droysen availed himself of these distinctions between narratives and documents, traditions, etc., in his valuable Elements of Historicism (he had strong leanings toward philosophy), and they have been employed also by other methodologists, who are hybrid empiricists, 'systematists,' or 'pedants,' as they are looked upon in our Latin countries. This is due to the copious philosophical traditions of Germany. The pedantry certainly exists, and it is to be found just in that inopportune philosophy. But what an excellent thing is that pedantry and the contradictions which it entails, how it arouses the mind from its empirical slumbers and makes it see that in place of supposed things there are in reality spiritual acts, where the terms of an irreconcilable dualism were supposed to be in conflict, relation and unity, on the contrary, prevail! The partition of the sources into narratives and documents, and the superiority attributed to documents over narratives, and the alleged necessity of narrative as a subordinate but ineradicable element, almost form a mythology or allegory, which represents in an imaginative manner the relation between life and thought, between document and criticism in historical thought.
And document and criticism, life and thought, are the true sources of history—that is to say, the two elements of historical synthesis; and as such, they do not stand face to face with history, or face to face with the synthesis, in the same way as fountains are represented as being face to face with those who go to them with a pail, but they form part of history itself, they are within the synthesis, they form a constituent part of it and are constituted by it. Hence the idea of a history with its sources outside itself is another fancy to be dispelled, together with that of history being the opposite of chronicle. The two erroneous fancies converge to form one. Sources, in the extrinsic sense of the empiricists, like things, are equally with chronicle, which is a class of those things, not anterior but posterior to history. History would indeed be in a fix if it expected to be born of what comes after it, to be born of external things! Thing, not thought, is born of thing: a history derived from things would be a thing—that is to say, just the inexistent of which we were talking a moment ago.
But there must be a reason why chronicle as well as documents seems to precede history and to be its extrinsic source. The human spirit preserves the mortal remains of history, empty narratives and chronicles, and the same spirit collects the traces of past life, remains and documents, striving as far as possible to preserve them unchanged and to restore them as they deteriorate. What is the object of these acts of will which go to the preservation of what is empty and dead? Perhaps illusion or foolishness, which preserves a little while the worn-out elements of mortality on the confines of Dis by means of the erection of mausoleums and sepulchres? But sepulchres are not foolishness and illusion; they are, on the contrary, an act of morality, by which is affirmed the immortality of the work done by individuals. Although dead, they live in our memory and will live in the memory of times to come. And that collecting of dead documents and writing down of empty histories is an act of life which serves life. The moment will come when they will serve to reproduce past history, enriched and made present to our spirit.
For dead history revives, and past history again becomes present, as the development of life demands them. The Romans and the Greeks lay in their sepulchres, until awakened at the Renaissance by the new maturity of the European spirit. The primitive forms of civilization, so gross and so barbaric, lay forgotten, or but little regarded, or misunderstood, until that new phase of the European spirit, which was known as Romanticism or Restoration, 'sympathized' with them—that is to say, recognized them as its own proper present interest. Thus great tracts of history which are now chronicle for us, many documents now mute, will in their turn be traversed with new flashes of life and will speak again.
These revivals have altogether interior motives, and no wealth of documents or of narratives will bring them about; indeed, it is they themselves that copiously collect and place before themselves the documents and narratives, which without them would remain scattered and inert. And it will be impossible ever to understand anything of the effective process of historical thought unless we start from the principle that the spirit itself is history, maker of history at every moment of its existence, and also the result of all anterior history. Thus the spirit bears with it all its history, which coincides with itself. To forget one aspect of history and to remember another one is nothing but the rhythm of the life of the spirit, which operates by determining and individualizing itself, and by always rendering indeterminate and disindividualizing previous determinations and individualizations, in order to create others more copious. The spirit, so to speak, lives again its own history without those external things called narratives and documents; but those external things are instruments that it makes for itself, acts preparatory to that internal vital evocation in whose process they are resolved. The spirit asserts and jealously preserves 'records of the past' for that purpose.
What we all of us do at every moment when we note dates and other matters concerning our private affairs (chronicles) in our pocket-books, or when we place in their little caskets ribbons and dried flowers (I beg to be allowed to select these pleasant images, when giving instances of the collection of 'documents'), is done on a large scale by a certain class of workers called philologists, as though at the invitation of the whole of society. They are specially known as the erudite when they collect evidence and narrations, as archæologists and archivists when they collect documents and monuments, as the places where such objects are kept (the "silent white abodes of the dead") are called libraries, archives, and museums. Can there be any ill-feeling against these men of erudition, these archivists and archæologists, who fulfil a necessary and therefore a useful and important function? The fact remains that there is a tendency to mock at them and to regard them with compassion. It is true enough that they sometimes afford a hold for derision with their ingenuous belief that they have history under lock and key and are able to unlock the 'sources' at which thirsty humanity may quench its desire for knowledge; but we know that history is in all of us and that its sources are in our own breasts. For it is in our own breasts alone that is to be found that crucible in which the certain is converted into the true, and philology, joining with philosophy, produces history.
II
PSEUDO-HISTORIES
I
History, chronicle, and philology, of which we have seen the origin, are series of mental forms, which, although distinct from one another, must all of them be looked upon as physiological—that is to say, true and rational. But logical sequence now leads me from physiology to pathology—to those forms that are not forms but deformations, not true but erroneous, not rational but irrational.
The ingenuous belief cherished by the philologists that they have history locked up in their libraries, museums, and archives (something in the same manner as the genius of the Arabian Nights, who was shut up in a small vase in the form of compressed smoke) does not remain inactive, and gives rise to the idea of a history constructed with things, traditions, and documents (empty traditions and dead documents), and this affords an instance of what may be called philological history. I say the idea and not the reality, because it is simply impossible to compose a history with external things, whatever efforts may be made and whatever trouble be taken. Chronicles that have been weeded, chopped up into fragments, recombined, rearranged, always remain nevertheless chronicles—that is to say, empty narratives; and documents that have been restored, reproduced, described, brought into line, remain documents—that is to say, silent things. Philological history consists of the pouring out of one or more books into a new book. This operation bears an appropriate name in current language and is known as 'compilation.' These compilations are frequently convenient, because they save the trouble of having recourse to several books at the same time; but they do not contain any historical thought. Modern chronological philologists regard medieval chroniclers and the old Italian historians (from Machiavelli and Guicciardini down to Giannone) with a feeling of superiority. These writers 'transcribed,' as they called it, their 'sources' in the parts of their books that are devoted to narrative—that is to say, chronicle. Yet they themselves do not and cannot behave otherwise, because when history is being composed from 'sources' as external things there is never anything else to do but to transcribe the sources. Transcription is varied by sometimes summarizing and sometimes altering the words, and this is sometimes a question of good taste and sometimes a literary pretence; it is also a verifying of quotations, which is sometimes a proof of loyalty and exactitude, sometimes a make-believe and a making oneself believe that the feet are planted firmly on the earth, on the soil of truth, believed to be narrative and quotation from the document. How very many of such philological historians there are in our time, especially since the so-called 'philological method' has been exaggerated—that is to say, a one-sided value has been attributed to it! These histories have indeed a dignified and scientific appearance, but unfortunately fehlt leider! das geistige Band, the spiritual tie is wanting. They really consist at bottom of nothing but learned or very learned 'chronicles,' sometimes of use for purposes of consultation, but lacking words that nourish and keep warm the minds and souls of men.
Nevertheless, since we have demonstrated that philological history really presents chronicles and documents and not histories, it might be asked upon what possible ground do we accuse it of irrationality and error, seeing that we have regarded the formation of chronicles, the collection of documents, and all the care that is expended Upon them as most rational? But error never lies in the fact, but only in the 'claim' or 'idea' that accompanies the fact. And in this case the idea or claim is that which has been defined above as properly belonging to philological history—namely, that of composing histories with documents and narratives. This claim can be said to exercise a rational function also, to the extent that it lays down the claim, though without satisfying it, that history should go beyond the mere chronicle or document. But in so far as it makes the claim, without itself fulfilling it, this mode of history must be characterized as contradictory and absurd.
And since the claim is absurd, philological history remains without truth as being that which, like chronicle, has not got truth within it, but derives it from the authority to which it appeals. It will be claimed for philology that it tests authorities and selects those most worthy of faith. But without dwelling upon the fact that chronicle also, and chronicle of the crudest, most ignorant and credulous sort, proceeded in a like manner by testing and selecting those authorities which seemed to it to be the most worthy of faith, it is always a question of faith (that is to say, of the thought of others and of thought belonging to the past) and not of criticism (that is to say, of our own thought in the act), of verisimilitude and not of that certainty which is truth. Hence philological history can certainly be correct, but not true (richtig and not wahr). And as it is without truth, so is it without true historical interest—that is to say, it sheds no light upon an order of facts answering to a practical and ethical want; it may embrace any matter indifferently, however remote it be from the practical and ethical soul of the compiler. Thus, as a pure philologist, I enjoy the free choice of indifference, and the history of Italy for the last half-century has the same value for me as that of the Chinese dynasty of the Tsin. I shall turn from one to the other, moved, no doubt, by a certain interest, but by an extra-historical interest, of the sort formed in the special circle of philology.
This procedure, which is without truth and without passion, and is proper to philological history, explains the marked contrast so constantly renewed between the philological historians and historians properly so called. These latter, intent as they are upon the solution of vital problems, grow impatient to find themselves offered in reply the frigid products of philology, or become angry at the persistent assertion that such is history, and that it must be treated in such a spirit and with such methods. Perhaps the finest explosion of such a feeling of anger and annoyance is to be found in the Letters on the Study of History (1751) of Bolingbroke, in which erudition is treated as neither more nor less than sumptuous ignorance, and learned disquisitions upon ancient or primitive history are admitted at the most as resembling those 'eccentric preludes' which precede concerts and aid in setting the instruments in tune and that can only be mistaken for harmony by some one without ear, just in the same way as only he who is without historic sense can confuse those exhibitions of erudition with true history. As an antithesis to them he suggests as an ideal a kind of 'political maps,' for the use of the intellect and not of the memory, indicating the Storie fiorentine of Machiavelli and the Trattato dei benefici of Fra Paolo as writings that approach that ideal. Finally he maintains that for true and living history we should not go beyond the beginning of the sixteenth century, beyond Charles V and Henry VIII, when the political and social history of Europe first appeared—a system which still persisted at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He then proceeds to paint a picture of those two centuries of history, for the use, not of the curious and the erudite, but of politicians, too one, I think, would wish to deny the just sentiment for history which animates these demands, set forth in so vivacious a manner. Bolingbroke, however, did not rise, nor was it possible for him to rise, to the conception of the death and rebirth of every history (which is the rigorously speculative concept of 'actual' and 'contemporary' history), owing to the conditions of culture of his time, nor did he suspect that primitive barbaric history, which he threw into a corner as useless dead leaves, would reappear quite fresh half a century later, as the result of the reaction against intellectualism and Jacobinism, and that this reaction would have as one of its principal promoters a publicist of his own country, Burke, nor indeed that it had already reappeared in his own time in a corner of Italy, in the mind and soul of Giambattista Vico. I shall not adduce further instances of the conflict between effective and philological historians, after this conspicuous one of Bolingbroke, because it is exceedingly well known, and the strife is resumed under our very eyes at every moment. I shall only add that it is certainly deplorable (though altogether natural, because blows are not measured in a struggle) that the polemic against the 'philologists' should have been transferred so as to include also the philologues pure and simple. For these latter, the poor learned ones, archivists and archæologists, are harmless, beneficent little souls. If they should be destroyed, as is sometimes prophesied in the heat of controversy, the fertility of the spiritual field would be not only diminished, but ruined altogether, and we should be obliged to promote to the utmost of our power the reintroduction of those coefficients of our culture, very much in the same way as is said to have been the case with French agriculture after the improvident harrying of the harmless and beneficent wasps which went on for several years.
Whatever of justified or justifiable is to be found in the statements as to the uncertainty and uselessness of history is also due to the revolt of the pure historic sense against philological history. This is to be assumed from observing that even the most radical of those opponents (Fontenelle, Volney, Delfico, etc.) end by admitting or demanding some form of history as not useless or uncertain, or not altogether useless and uncertain, and from the fact that all their shafts are directed against philological history and that founded upon authority, of which the only appropriate definition is that of Rousseau (in the Émile), as l'art de choisir entre plusieurs mensonges, celui qui ressemble mieux à la vérité.
In all other respects—that is to say, as regards the part due to sensational and naturalistic assumptions—historical scepticism contradicts itself here, like every form of scepticism, for the natural sciences themselves, thus raised to the rank of model, are founded upon perceptions, observations, and experiments—that is to say, upon facts historically ascertained—and the 'sensations,' upon which the whole truth of knowledge is based, are not themselves knowledge, save to the extent that they assume the form of affirmations—that is to say, in so far as they are history.
But the truth is that philological history, like every other sort of error, does not fall before the enemy's attack, but rather solely from internal causes, and it is its own professors that destroy it, when they conceive of it as without connexion with life, as merely a learned exercise (note the many histories that are treatments of scholastic themes, undertaken with a view to training in the art of research, interpretation, and exposition, and the many others that are continuations of this direction outside the school and are due to tendency there imparted), and when they themselves evince uncertainty, surrounding every statement that they make with doubts. The distinction between criticism and hypercriticism has been drawn with a view to arresting this spontaneous dissolution of historical philology; thus we find the former praised and allowed, while the latter is blamed and forbidden. But the distinction is one of the customary sort, by means of which lack of intelligence disguised as love of moderation contrives to chip off the edges from the antitheses that it fails to solve. Hypercriticism is the prosecution of criticism; it is criticism itself, and to divide criticism into a more and a less, and to admit the less and deny the more, is extravagant, to say the least of it. No 'authorities' are certain while others are uncertain, but all are uncertain, varying in uncertainty in an extrinsic and conjectural manner. Who can guarantee himself against the false statement made by the usually diligent and trustworthy witness in a moment of distraction or of passion? A sixteenth-century inscription, still to be read in one of the old byways of Naples, wisely prays God (and historical philologists should pray to Him fervently every morning) to deliver us now and for ever from the lies of honest men. Thus historians who push criticism to the point of so-called hypercriticism perform a most instructive philosophical duty when they render the whole of such work vain, and therefore fit to be called by the title of Sanchez's work Quod nihil scitur. I recollect the remark made to me when I was occupied with research work in my young days by a friend of but slight literary knowledge, to whom I had lent a very critical, indeed hypercritical, history of ancient Rome. When he had finished reading it he returned the book to me, remarking that he had acquired the proud conviction of being "the most learned of philologists," because the latter arrive at the conclusion that they know nothing as the result of exhausting toil, while he knew nothing without any effort at all, simply as a generous gift of nature.[1]
II
The consequence of this spontaneous dissolution of philological history should be the negation of history claimed to have been written with the aid of narratives and documents conceived as external things, and the consignment of these to their proper lower place as mere aids to historical knowledge, as it determines and redetermines itself in the development of the spirit. But if such consequences are distasteful and the project is persevered in of thus writing history in spite of repeated failures, the further problem then presents itself as to how the cold indifference of philological history and its intrinsic uncertainty can be healed without changing those presumptions. The problem, itself fallacious, can receive but a fallacious solution, expressed by the substitution of the interest of sentiment for the lack of interest of thought and of æsthetic coherence of representation for the logical coherence here unobtainable. The new erroneous form of history thus obtained is poetical history.
Numerous examples of this kind of history are afforded by the affectionate biographies of persons much beloved and venerated and by the satirical biographies of the detested; patriotic histories which vaunt the glory and lament the misadventures of the people to which the author belongs and with which he sympathizes, and those that shed a sinister light upon the enemy people, adversary of his own; universal history, illuminated with the ideals of liberalism or humanitarianism, that composed by a socialist, depicting the acts, as Marx said, of the "cavalier of the sorry countenance," in other words of the capitalist, that of the anti-Semite, who shows the Jew to be everywhere the source of human misfortune and of human turpitude and the persecution of the Jew to be the acme of human splendour and happiness. Nor is poetical history exhausted with this fundamental and general description of love and hate (love that is hate and hate that is love), for it passes through all the most intricate forms, the fine gradations of sentiment. Thus we have poetical histories which are amorous, melancholy, nostalgic, pessimistic, resigned, confident, cheerful, and as many other sorts as one can imagine. Herodotus celebrates the romance of the jealousies of the gods, Livy the epos of Roman virtue, Tacitus composes horrible tragedies, Elizabethan dramas in sculptural Latin prose. If we turn to the most modern among the moderns, we find Droysen giving expression to his lyrical aspiration toward the strong centralized state in his history of Macedonia, that Prussia of Hellas; Grote to his aspirations toward democratic institutions, as symbolized in Athens; Mommsen to those directed toward empire, as symbolized in Cæsar; Balbo pouring forth all his ardours for Latin independence, employing for that purpose all the records of Latin battles and beginning with nothing less than those between the Itali and Etrusci against the Pelasgi; Thierry celebrating the middle class in the history of the Third Estate represented by Jacques Bonhomme; the Goncourts writing voluptuous fiction round the figures of Mme de Pompadour, of Mme Du Barry, of Marie Antoinette, more careful of the material and cut of garments than of thoughts; and, finally, De Barante, in his history of the Dukes of Burgundy, having his eye upon knights and ladies, arms and love.
It may seem that the indifference of philological history is thus truly conquered and historical material dominated by a principle and criterion of values. This is the demand persistently addressed to history from all sides in our day by methodologists and philosophers. But I have avoided the word 'value' hitherto, owing to its equivocal meaning, apt to deceive many. For since history is history of the spirit, and since spirit is value, and indeed the only value that is possible to conceive, that history is clearly always history of values; and since the spirit becomes transparent to itself as thought in the consciousness of the historian, the value that rules the writing of history is the value of thought. But precisely for this reason its principle of determination cannot be the value known as the value of 'sentiment,' which is life and not thought, and when this life finds expression and representation, before it has been dominated by thought, we have poetry, not history. In order to turn poetical biography into truly historical biography we must repress our loves, our tears, our scorn, and seek what function the individual has fulfilled in social activity or civilization; and we must do the same for national history as for that of humanity, and for every group of facts, small or great, as for every order of events. We must supersede—that is to say, transform—values of sentiment with values of thought. If we do not find ourselves able to rise to this 'subjectivity' of thought, we shall produce poetry and not history: the historical problem will remain intact, or, rather, it will not yet have come into being, but will do so when the requisite conditions are present. The interest that stirs us in the former case is not that of life which becomes thought, but of life which becomes intuition and imagination.
And since we have entered the domain of poetry, while the historical problem remains beyond, erudition Or philology, from which we seem to have started, remains something on this side—that is to say, is altogether surpassed. In philological history, notwithstanding the claims made by it, chronicles and documents persist in their crude natural and undigested state. But these are profoundly changed in poetical history; or, to speak with greater accuracy, they are simply dissolved. Let us ignore the case (common enough) of the historian who, with a view to obtaining artistic effects, intentionally mingles his inventions with the data provided by the chronicles and documents, endeavouring to make them pass for history—that is to say, he renders himself guilty of a lie and is the cause of confusion. But the alteration that is continuous and inherent to historiography consists of the choice and connexion of the details themselves, selected from the 'sources,' rather owing to motives of sentiment than of thought. This, closely considered, is really an invention or imagining of the facts; the new connexion becomes concrete in a newly imagined fact. And since the data that are taken from the 'sources' do not always lend themselves with docility to the required connexion, it is considered permissible to solliciter doucement les textes (as, if I am not mistaken, Renan, one of the historian-poets, remarked) and to add imaginary particulars, though in a conjectural form, to the actual data. Vossius blamed those Grecian historians, and historians of other nations, who, when they invent fables, ad effugiendam vanitatis notam satis fore putant si addant solemne suum 'aiunt,' 'fertur,' vel aliquid quod tantundem valeat. But even in our own day it would be diverting and instructive to catalogue the forms of insinuation employed by historians who pass for being most weighty, with a view to introducing their own personal imaginings: 'perhaps,' 'it would seem,' 'one would say,' 'it is pleasant to think,' 'we may infer,' 'it is probable,' 'it is evident,' and the like; and to note how they sometimes come to omit these warnings and recount things that they have themselves imagined as though they had seen them, in order to complete their picture, regarding which they would be much embarrassed if some one, indiscreet as an enfant terrible, should chance to ask them: "How do you know it?" "Who told you this?" Recourse has been had to the methodological theory of "imagination necessary for the historian who does not wish to become a mere chronicler," to an imagination, that is to say, which shall be reconstructive and integrating; or, as is also said, to "the necessity of integrating the historical datum with our personal psychology or psychological knowledge." This theory, similar to that of value in history, also contains an equivocation. For doubtless imagination is indispensable to the historian: empty criticism, empty narrative, the concept without intuition or imagination, are altogether sterile; and this has been said and said again in these pages, when we have demanded the vivid experience of the events whose history we have undertaken to relate, which also means their re-elaboration as intuition and imagination. Without this imaginative reconstruction or integration it is not possible to write history, or to read it, or to understand it. But this sort of imagination, which is really quite indispensable to the historian, is the imagination that is inseparable from the historical synthesis, the imagination in and for thought, the concreteness of thought, which is never an abstract concept, but always a relation and a judgment, not indetermination but determination. It is nevertheless to be radically distinguished from the free poetic imagination, dear to those historians who see and hear the face and the voice of Jesus on the Lake of Tiberias, or follow Heraclitus on his daily walks among the hills of Ephesus, or repeat again the secret colloquies between Francis of Assisi and the sweet Umbrian countryside.
Here too we shall be asked of what error, then, we can accuse poetical history, if it be poetry (a necessary form of the spirit and one of the dearest to the heart of man) and not history. But here also we must reply—in manner analogous to our reply in the case of philological history—that the error does not lie in what is done, but in what is claimed to be done: not in creating poetry, but in calling histories that are poetry poetical histories, which is a contradiction in terms. So far am I from entertaining the thought of objecting to poetry woven out of historical data that I wish to affirm that a great part of pure poetry, especially in modern times, is to be found in books that are called histories. The epic, for instance, did not, as is believed, die in the nineteenth century, but it is not to be found in the 'epic poems' of Botta, of Bagnoli, of Bellini, or of Bandettini, where it is sought by short-sighted classifiers of literature, but in narratives of the history of the Risorgimento, where are poured forth epic, drama, satire, idyll, elegy, and as many other 'kinds of poetry' as may be desired. The historiography of the Risorgimento is in great part a poetical historiography, rich in legends which still await the historian, or have met with him only occasionally and by chance, exactly like ancient or medieval epic, which, if it were really poetry, was yet believed by its hearers, and often perhaps by its composers themselves, to be history. And I claim for others and for myself the right to imagine history as dictated by my personal feeling; to imagine, for instance, an Italy as fair as a beloved woman, as dear as the tenderest of mothers, as austere as a venerated ancestress, to seek out her doings through the centuries and even to prophesy her future, and to create for myself in history idols of hatred and of love, to embellish yet more the charming, if I will, and to make the unpleasant yet more unpleasant. I claim to seek out every memory and every particular, the expressions of countenance, the gestures, the garments, the dwellings, every kind of insignificant particular (insignificant for others or in other respects, but not for me at that moment), almost physically to approach my friends and my mistresses, of both of which I possess a fine circle or harem in history. But it remains evident that when I or others have the intention of writing history, true history and not poetical history, we shall clear away myths and idols, friends and mistresses, devoting our attention solely to the problem of history, which is spirit or value (or if less philosophical and more colloquial terms be preferred, culture, civilization, progress), and we shall look upon them with the two eyes and the single sight of thought. And when some one, in that sphere or at that altitude, begins to talk to us of the sentiments that but a short while ago were tumultuous in our breasts, we shall listen to him as to one who talks of things that are henceforth distant and dead, in which we no longer participate, because the only sentiment that now fills our soul is the sentiment of truth, the search for historical truth.
[1] See Appendix I.
III
With poetical history—that is to say, with the falling back of history into a form ideally anterior, that of poetry—the cycle of erroneous forms of history (or of erroneous theoretical forms) is complete. But my discourse would not perhaps be complete were I to remain silent as to a so-called form of history which had great importance in antiquity when it developed its own theory. It continues to have some importance in our own day, although now inclined to conceal its face, to change its garments, and to disguise itself. This is the history known in antiquity as oratory or rhetoric. Its object was to teach philosophy by example, to incite to virtuous conduct, to impart instruction as to the best political and military institutions, or simply to delight, according to the various intentions of the rhetoricians. And even in our own day this type of history is demanded and supplied not only in the elementary schools (where it seems to be understood that the bitter of wisdom should be imbibed by youth mingled with the sweet of fable), but among grown men. It is closely linked up with politics, where it is a question of politics, or with religion, philosophy, morality, and the like, where they are concerned, or with diversions, as in the case of anecdotes, of strange events, of scandalous and terrifying histories. But can this, I ask, be considered, I do not say history, but an erroneous (theoretical) form of history? The structure of rhetorical history presupposes a history that already exists, or at least a poetical history, narrated with a practical end. The end would be to induce an emotion leading to virtue, to remorse, to shame, or to enthusiasm; or perhaps to provide repose for the soul, such as is supplied by games; or to introduce into the mind a historical, philosophical, or scientific truth (movere, delectare, docere, or in whatever way it may be decided to classify these ends); but it will always be an end—that is to say, a practical act, which avails itself of the telling of the history as a means or as one of its means. Hence rhetorical history (which would be more correctly termed practicistical history) is composed of two elements, history and the practical end, converging into one, which is the practical act. For this reason one cannot attack it, but only its theory, which is the already mentioned theory, so celebrated in antiquity, of history as opus oratorium, as φιλοσοφία ἐκ παραδειγμάτων, as ἀποδεικτική, as νίκης γύμνασμα (if warlike), or γνωμης παίδενμα (if political), or as evocative of ἡδονή, and the like. This doctrine is altogether analogous to the hedonistic and pedagogic doctrine relating to poetry which at that time dominated. It was believed possible to assign an end to poetry, whereas an extrinsic end was assigned to it, and poetry was thus passed over without being touched. Practicistical history (which, however, is not history) is exempt from censure as a practical act: each one of us is not content with inquiring into history, but also acts, and in acting can quite well avail himself of the re-evocation of this or that image, with a view to stimulating his own work, or (which comes to the same thing) the work of others. He can, indeed, read and re-read all the books that have from time to time been of assistance to him, as Cato the younger had recourse to reading the Phædo in order to prepare himself for suicide, while others have prepared themselves for it by reading Werther, Ortis, or the poems of Leopardi. From the time of the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, many others prepared themselves for conspiracies and tyrannicides by reading Plutarch, and so much was this the case that one of them, the youthful Boscoli, when condemned to death for a conspiracy against the Medici, remarked in his last hour to Della Robbia (who recounts the incident), "Get Brutus out of my head!"—Brutus, not, that is to say, the history of Brutus that he had read and thought about, but that by which he had been fascinated and urged on to commit the crime. For the rest, true and proper history is not that Brutus which procreated the modern Bruti with their daggers, but Brutus as thought and situated in the world of thought.
One might be induced to assign a special place to the history now known as biased, because, on the one hand, it seems that it is not a simple history of sentiment and poetry, since it has an end to attain, and on the other because such end is not imposed upon it from without, but coincides with the conception of history itself. Hence it would seem fitting to look upon it as a form of history standing half-way between poetry and practicism, a mixture of the two. But mixed forms and hybrid products exist only in the fictitious classifications of empiricists, never in the reality of the spirit, and biased history, when closely examined, is really either poetical history or practicistical history. An exception must always be made of the books in which the two moments are sometimes to be found side by side, as indeed one usually finds true history and chronicle and the document and philological and poetical history side by side. What gives the illusion of a mingling or of a special form of history is the fact that many take their point of departure from poetical inspiration (love of country, faith in their country, enthusiasm for a great man, and so on) and end with practical calculations: they begin with poetry and end with the allegations of the special pleader, and sometimes, although more rarely, they follow an opposite course. This duplication is to be observed in the numerous histories of parties that have been composed since the world was a world, and it is not difficult to discover in what parts of them we have manifestations of poetry and in what parts of calculation. Good taste and criticism are continually effecting this separation for history, as for art and poetry in general.
It is true that good taste loves and accepts poetry and discriminates between the practical intentions of the poet and those of the historian-poet; but those intentions are received and admitted by the moral conscience, provided always that they are good intentions and consequently good actions; and although people are disposed to speak ill of advocates in general, it is certain that the honest advocate and the prudent orator cannot be dispensed with in social life. Nor has so-called practicistical history ever been dispensed with, either according to the Græco-Roman practice, which was that of proposing portraits of statesmen, of captains, and of heroic women as models for the soul, or according to that of the Middle Ages, which was to repeat the lives of saints and hermits of the desert, or of knights strong of arm and of unshakable faith, or in our own modern world, which recommends as edifying and stimulating reading the lives and 'legends' of inventors, of business men, of explorers, and of millionaires. Educative histories, composed with the view of promoting definite practical or moral dispositions, really exist, and every Italian knows how great were the effects of Colletta's and Balbo's histories and the like during the period of the Risorgimento, and everyone knows books that have 'inspired' him or inculcated in him the love of his own country, of his town and steeple.
This moral efficacy, which belongs to morality and not to history, has had so strong a hold upon the mind that the prejudice still survives of assigning a moral function to history (as also to poetry) in the field of teaching. This prejudice is still to be found inspiring even Labriola's pedagogic essay on The Teaching of History. But if we mean by the word 'history' both history that is thought as well as that which, on the contrary, is poetry, philology, or moral will, it is clear that 'history' will enter the educational process not under one form alone, but under all these forms. But as history proper it will only enter it under one of them, which is not that of moral education, exclusively or abstractly considered, but of the education or development of thought.
IV
Much is said, now even more than formerly, of the necessity of a 'reform of history,' but to me there does not seem to be anything to reform. Nothing to reform in the sense attributed to such a demand—namely, that of moulding a new form of history or of creating for the first time true history. History is, has been, and always will be the same, what we have called living history, history that is (ideally) contemporary; and chronicle, philological history, poetical history, and (let us call it history nevertheless) practicistical history are, have been, and always will be the same. Those who undertake the task of creating a new history always succeed in setting up philological history against poetical history, or poetical history against philological history, or contemporary history against both of them, and so on. Unless, indeed, as is the case with Buckle and the many tiresome sociologists and positivists of the last ten years, they lament with great pomposity and no less lack of intelligence as to what history is that it lacks the capacity of observation and of experiment (that is to say, the naturalistic abstraction of observation and experiment), boasting that they 'reduce history to natural science'—that is to say, by the employment of a circle, as vicious as it is grotesque, to a mental form which is its pale derivative.
In another sense, everything is certainly to be reformed in history, and history is at every moment labouring to render herself perfect—that is to say, is enriching herself and probing more deeply into herself. There is no history that completely satisfies us, because any construction of ours generates new facts and new problems and solicits new solutions. Thus the history of Rome, of Greece, and of Christianity, of the Reformation, of the French Revolution, of philosophy, of literature, and of any other subject is always being told afresh and always differently. But history reforms herself, remaining herself always, and the strength of her development lies precisely in thus enduring.
The demand for radical or abstract reform also cannot be given that other meaning of a reform of the 'idea of history,' of the discovery that is to be made or is finally made of the true concept of history. At all periods the distinction has to some extent been made between histories that are histories and those others that are works of imagination or chronicles. This could be demonstrated from the observations met with at all times among historians and methodologists, and from the confessions that even the most confused of them involuntarily let fall. It is also to be inferred with certainty from the nature itself of the human spirit, although the words in which those distinctions are expressed have not been written or are not preserved. And such a concept and distinction are renewed at every moment by history itself, which becomes ever more copious, more profound. This is to be looked upon as certain, and is for that matter made evident by the history of historiography, which has certainly accomplished some progress since the days of Diogenes of Halicarnassus and of Cicero to those of Hegel and of Humboldt. Other problems have been formed in our own day, some of which I attempt to solve in this book. I am well aware that it affords solutions only to some among the many, and especially that it does not solve (simply because it cannot) those that are not yet formed, but which will inevitably be formed in the future.
In any case it will be thought that the clearness acquired by the historical consciousness as to the nature of its own work will at least avail to destroy the erroneous forms of history, that since we have shown that philological history or chronicle is not history, and that poetical history is poetry and not history, the 'facts' that correspond to those beliefs must disappear, or become ever more limited in extension, to the point of disappearing altogether in a near or distant future, as catapults have disappeared before guns and as we see carriages disappearing before, automobiles.
And this would be truly possible were these erroneous forms to become concrete in 'facts,' were they not, as I have said above, mere 'claims.' If error and evil were a fact, humanity would have long ago abolished it—that is to say, superseded it, in the same way as it has superseded slavery and serfdom and the method of simple barter and so many other things that were facts, that is to say, its own transitory forms. But error (and evil, which is one with it) is not a fact; it does not possess empirical existence; it is nothing but the negative or dialectical moment of the spirit, necessary for the concreteness of the positive moment, for the reality of the spirit. For this reason it is eternal and indestructible, and to destroy it by abstraction (since it cannot be done by thought) is equivalent to imagining the death of the spirit, as confirmed in the saying that abstraction is death.
And without occupying further space with the ex-position of a doctrine that would entail too wide a digression,[1] I shall observe that a glance at the history of history proves the salutary nature of error, which is not a Caliban, but rather an Ariel, who breathes everywhere, calling forth and exciting, but can never be grasped as a solid thing. And with a view to seeking examples only in those general forms that have been hitherto examined, polemical and tendencious historiography is certainly to be termed error. This prevailed during the period of the enlightenment, and reduced history to a pleading against priests and tyrants. But who would have wished simply to return from this to the learned and apathetic history of the Benedictines and of the other authors of folios? The polemic and its direction expressed the need for living history, though not in an altogether satisfactory form, and this need was followed by the creation of a new historiography during the period of romanticism. The type of merely philological history, promulgated in Germany after 1820, and afterward disseminated throughout Europe, was also certainly error; but it was likewise an instrument of liberation from the more or less fantastic and arbitrary histories improvised by the philosophers. But who would wish to turn back from them to the 'philosophies of history'? The type of history, sometimes tendencious, but more often poetical, which followed in the wake of the national Italian movement, was also error—that is to say, it led to the loss of historical calm. But that poetical consciousness which surpassed itself when laying claim to historical truth was bound sooner or later to generate (as had been the case on a larger scale in the eighteenth century) a history linked with the interests of life without becoming servile and allowing itself to be led away by the phantoms of love and hate suggested by them. Further examples could be adduced, but the example of examples is that which happens within each of us when we are dealing with historical material. We see our sympathies and antipathies arise in turn as we proceed (our poetical history), our intentions as practical men (our rhetorical history), our chroniclistical memories (our philological history); we mentally supersede these forms in turn, and in doing so find ourselves in possession of a new and more profound historical truth. Thus does history affirm itself, distinguishing itself from non-histories and conquering the dialectical moments which arise from these. It was for this reason that I said that there is never anything of anything to reform in the abstract, but everything of everything in the concrete.
[1] See Logic as Science of Pure Concept.—D. A.
[III]
HISTORY AS HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSAL CRITICISM OF 'UNIVERSAL HISTORY
I
Returning from this dialectical round to the concept of history as 'contemporary history,' a new doubt assails and torments us. For if the proof given has freed that concept from one of the most insistent forms of historical scepticism (the scepticism that arises from the lack of reliability of 'testimony'), it does not seem that it has been freed or ever can be freed from that other form of scepticism, more properly termed 'agnosticism,' which does not absolutely deny the truth of history, but denies to it complete truth. But in ultimate analysis this is to deny to it real knowledge, because unsound knowledge, half knowledge, also reduces the vigour of the part that it asserts to be known. It is, however, commonly asserted that only a part of history, a very small part, is known to us: a faint glimmer which renders yet more sensible the vast gloom that surrounds our knowledge on all sides.
In truth, what do we know of the origins of Rome or of the Greek states, and of the people who preceded the Greek and Roman civilizations in those countries, notwithstanding all the researches of the learned? And if a fragment of the life of these people does remain to us, how uncertain is its interpretation! If some tradition has been handed down to us, how poor, confused, and contradictory it is! And we know still less of the people who preceded those people, of the immigrations from Asia and Africa into Europe or inversely, and of relations with other countries beyond the ocean, even with the Atlantis of the myths. And the monogenesis or polygenesis of the human race is a desperate head-splitter, open to all conjectures. The appearance upon the earth of the genus homo is open to vain conjectures, as is his affinity or relationship to the animals. The history of the earth, of the solar system, of the whole cosmos, is lost in the obscurity of its origin. But obscurity does not dwell alone among the 'origins'; the whole of history, even that of modern Europe which is nearest to us, is obscure. Who can really say what motives determined a Danton or a Robespierre, a Napoleon or an Alexander of Russia? And how numerous are the obscurities and the lacunæ that relate to the acts themselves—that is to say, to their externalization! Mountains of books have been written upon the days of September, upon the eighteenth of Brumaire, upon the burning of Moscow; but who can tell how these things really happened? Even those who were direct witnesses are not able to say, for they have handed down to us diverse and conflicting narratives. But let us leave great history. Will it not at least be possible for us to know a little history completely, we will not say that of our country, of our town, or of our family, but the least little history of any one of ourselves: what he really wanted when (many years ago or yesterday) he abandoned himself to this or that motive of passion, and uttered this or that word; how he reached this or that particular conclusion or decided upon some particular course of action; whether the motives that urged him in a particular direction were lofty or base, moral or egoistic, inspired by duty or by vanity, pure or impure?
It is enough to make one lose one's head, as those scrupulous people are aware, who the more they attempt to perfect their examination of conscience the more they are confused. No other counsel can be offered to them than that of examining themselves certainly, but not overmuch, of looking rather ahead than behind, or only looking behind to the extent that it is necessary to look. We certainly know our own history and that of the world that surrounds us, but how little and how meagrely in comparison with our infinite desire for knowledge!
The best way of ending this vexation of spirit is that which I have followed, that of pushing it to its extreme limit, and then of imagining for a moment that all the interrogations mentioned, together with the infinite others that could be mentioned, have been satisfied; satisfied as interrogations that continued to the infinite can be satisfied—that is to say, by affording an immediate answer to them, one after the other, and by causing the spirit to enter the path of a vertiginous process of satisfactions, always obtained to the infinite. Now, were all those interrogations satisfactorily answered, were we in possession of all the answers to them, what should we do? The road of progress to the infinite is as wide as that to hell, and if it does not lead to hell it certainly leads to the madhouse. And that infinite, which grows bigger the moment we first touch it, does not avail us; indeed it fills us with fear. Only the poor finite assists us, the determined, the concrete, which is grasped by thought and which lends itself as base for our existence and as point of departure for our action. Thus even were all the particular infinities of infinite history offered for the gratification of our desire, there would be nothing else left for us to do but to clear our minds of them, to forget them, and to concentrate upon that particular point alone which corresponds to a problem and constitutes living, active history, contemporary history.
And this is what the spirit in its development accomplishes, because there is no fact that is not known at the moment of its being done, by means of the consciousness that germinates perpetually upon action; and there is no fact that is not forgotten sooner or later, but may be recalled, as we remarked when speaking of dead history revived at the touch of life, of the past that by means of the contemporaneous becomes again contemporaneous. Tolstoi got this thought fixed in his mind: not only is no one, not even a Napoleon, able to predetermine with exactitude the happenings of a battle, but no one can know how it really did happen, because on the very evening of its ending an artificial, legendary history appears, which only a credulous spirit could mistake for real history; yet it is upon this that professional historians work, integrating or tempering imagination with imagination. But the battle is known as it gradually develops, and then as the turmoil that it causes is dissipated, so too is dissipated the turmoil of that consciousness, and the only thing of importance is the actuality of the new situation and the 'new disposition of soul that has been produced, expressed in poetical legends or availing itself of artificial fictions. And each one of us at every moment knows and forgets the majority of his thoughts and acts (what a misfortune it would be if he did not do so, for his life would be a tiresome computation of his smallest movements!); but he does not forget, and preserves for a greater or less time, those thoughts and sentiments which represent memorable crises and problems relating to his future. Sometimes we assist with astonishment at the awakening in us of sentiments and thoughts that we had believed to be irrevocable. Thus it must be said that we know at every moment all the history that we need to know; and since what remains over does not matter to us, we do not possess the means of knowing it, or we shall possess it when the need arises. That 'remaining' history is the eternal phantom of the 'thing in itself,' which is neither 'thing' nor 'in itself,' but only the imaginative projection of the infinity of our action and of our knowledge.
The imaginative projection of the thing in itself, with the agnosticism that is its result, is caused in philosophy by the natural sciences, which posit a reality made extrinsic and material and therefore unintelligible. Chroniclism also occasions historical agnosticism in an analogous manner at the naturalistic moment of history, for it posits a dead and unintelligible history. Allowing itself to be seduced by this allurement it strays from the path of concrete truth, while the soul feels itself suddenly filled with infinite questions, most vain and desperate. In like manner, he who strays from or has not yet entered the fruitful path of a diligent life, feels his soul full to overflowing of infinite desires, of actions that cannot be realized, of pleasures out of reach, and consequently suffers the pains of a Tantalus. But the wisdom of life warns us not to lose ourselves in absurd desires, as the wisdom of thought warns us not to lose ourselves in problems that are vain.
II
But if we cannot know anything but the finite and the particular, always indeed only this particular and this finite, must we then renounce (a dolorous renunciation 1) knowledge of universal history? Without doubt, but with the double corollary that we are renouncing what we have never possessed, because we could not possess it, and that in consequence such renunciation is not at all painful.
'Universal history,' too, is not a concrete act or tact, but a 'claim,' and a claim due to chroniclism and to its 'thing in itself,' and to the strange proposal of closing the infinite progression, which had been improperly opened, by means of progress to the infinite. Universal history really tries to form a picture of all the things that have happened to the human race, from its origins upon the earth to the present moment. Indeed, it claims to do this from the origin of things, or the creation, to the end of the world, since it would not otherwise be truly universal. Hence its tendency to fill the abysses of prehistory and of the origins with theological or naturalistic fictions and to trace somehow the future, either with revelations and prophecies, as in Christian universal history (which went as far as Antichrist and the Last Judgment), or with previsions, as in the universal histories of positivism, democratism, and socialism.
Such was its claim, but the result turns out to be different from the intention, and it gets what it can—that is to say, a chronicle that is always more or less of a mixture, or a poetical history expressing some aspiration of the heart of man, or a true and proper history, which is not universal, but particular, although it embraces the lives of many peoples and of many times. Most frequently these different elements are to be discerned side by side in the same literary composition. Omitting chronicles more or less wide in scope (though always narrow), poetical histories, and the various contaminations of several different forms, we immediately perceive, not as a result of logical deduction alone, but with a simple glance at any one of the 'universal histories,' that 'universal histories,' in so far as they are histories, or in that part of them in which they are histories, resolve themselves into nothing else but particular histories'—that is to say, they are due to a particular interest centred in a particular problem, and comprehend only those facts that form part of that interest and afford an answer to that particular problem. For antiquity the example of the work of Polybius should suffice for all, since it was he who most vigorously insisted upon the need for a 'universal history' (καθολική ιστορία, ή των καθόλου πραγμάτων σΰνταξις). For the Christian period we may cite the Civitas Dei of Augustine, and for modern times the Philosophy of History of Hegel (he also called it universal history, or philosophische Weltgeschichte). But we observe here that the universal history which Polybius desired and created was that more vast, more complex, more political, and graver history which Roman hegemony and the formation of the Roman world required, and therefore that it embraced only those peoples which came into relation and conflict with Rome, and limited itself almost altogether to the history of political institutions and of military dispositions, according to the spiritual tendencies of the author. Augustine, in his turn, attempted to render intelligible the penetration of Paganism by Christianity, and with this object in view he made use of the idea of two enemy cities, the terrestrial and the celestial, of which the first was sometimes the adversary of and sometimes preparatory to the second. Finally, Hegel treated the same problem in his universal history as in his particular history of philosophy—that is to say, the manner in which the spirit of a philosophy of servitude to nature, or to the transcendental God, has elevated itself to the consciousness of liberty. He cut out prehistory from the philosophy of history, as he had cut it out from the history of philosophy, and considered Oriental history very summarily, since it did not offer much of interest to the prosecution of his design.
Naturalistic or cosmological romances will always be composed by those who feel inspired to write them, and they will always find eager and appreciative readers, especially among the lazy, who are pleased to possess the 'secret of the world' in a few pages. And more or less vast compilations will always be made of the histories of the East and the West, of the Americas and Africa and Oceania. The strength of a single individual does not suffice for these, even as regards their compilation, so we now find groups of learned men or compilers associated in that object (as though to give ocular evidence of the absence of all intimate connexion). We have even seen recently certain attempts at universal histories arranged on geographical principles, like so many histories set side by side—European, Asiatic, African, and so on—which insensibly assume the form of a historical dictionary. And this or that particular history can always usefully take the name of a 'universal history,' in the old sense of Polybius—that is to say, as opposed to books that are less actual, less serious, and less satisfactory, the books of those 'writers of particular things' (οἱ τάς ἐπί μέρους γράφοντες πράξεις) who are led to make little things great (τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλα ποιεῑν) and to indulge in lengthy anecdotes unworthy of being recorded (περὶ τῶν μηδὲ μνήμης άξιων), and that owing to the lack of a criterion (δί' ἀκρισίαν). In this sense, those times and peoples whose politico-social development had produced, as it were, a narrowing of the historical circle would be well advised to break away from minute details and to envisage 'universal history'—that is to say, a vaster history, which lies beyond particular histories. This applies in particular to our Italy, which, since it had a universalistic function at the time of the Renaissance, had universal vision, and told the history of all the peoples in its own way, and then limited itself to local history, then again elevated itself to national history, and should now, even more than in the past, extend itself over the vast fields of the history of all times past and present. But the word 'universal,' which has value for the ends above mentioned, will never designate the possession of a 'universal history,' in the sense that we have refused to it. Such a history disappears in the world of illusions, together with similar Utopias, such, for instance, as the art that should serve as model for all times, or universal justice valid for all time.
III
But in the same way that by the dissipation of the illusion of universal art and of universal justice the intrinsically universal character of particular art and of particular justice is not cancelled (of the Iliad or of the constitution of the Roman family), to negate universal history does not mean to negate the universal in history. Here, too, must be repeated what was said of the vain search for God throughout the infinite series of the finite and found at every point of it: Und du bist ganz vor mir! That particular and that finite is determined, in its particularity and finitude, by thought, and therefore known together with the universal, the universal in that particular form. The merely finite and particular does not exist save as an abstraction. There is no abstract finite in poetry and in art itself, which is the reign of the individual; but there is the ingenuous finite, which is the undistinguished unity of finite and infinite, which will be distinguished in the sphere of thought and will in that way attain to a more lofty form of unity. And history is thought, and, as such, thought of the universal, of the universal in its concreteness, and therefore always determined in a particular manner. There is no fact, however small it be, that can be otherwise conceived (realized and qualified) than as universal. In its most simple form—that is to say, in its essential form—history expresses itself with judgments, inseparable syntheses of individual and universal. And the individual is called the subject of the judgment, the universal the predicate, by old terminological tradition, which it will perhaps be convenient to preserve. But for him who dominates words with thought, the true subject of history is just the predicate, and the true predicate the subject—that is to say, the universal is determined in the judgment by individualizing it. If this argument seems too abstruse and amounts to a philosophical subtlety, it may be rendered obvious and altogether different from a private possession of those known as philosophers by means of the simple observation that everyone who reflects, upon being asked what is the subject of the history of poetry, will certainly not reply Dante or Shakespeare, or Italian or English poetry, or the series of poems that are known to us, but poetry—that is to say, a universal; and again, when asked what is the subject of social and political history, the answer will not be Greece or Rome, France or Germany, or even all these and others such combined, but culture, civilization, progress, liberty, or any other similar word—that is to say, a universal.
And here we can remove a great stumbling-block to the recognition of the identity of philosophy with history. I have attempted to renovate, modify, and establish this doctrine with many analyses and with many arguments in another volume of my works.[1] It is, however, frequently very difficult, being rather an object of irresistible argument than of complete persuasion and adhesion. Seeking for the various causes of this difficulty, I have come upon one which seems to me to be the principal and fundamental. This is precisely the conception of history not as living contemporary history, but as history that is dead and belongs to the past, as chronicle (or philological history, which, as we know, can be reduced to chronicle). It is undeniable that when history is taken as chronicle its identity with philosophy cannot be made clear to the mind, because it does not exist. But when chronicle has been reduced to its proper practical and mnemonical function, and history has been raised to the knowledge of the eternal present, it reveals itself as all one with philosophy, which for its part is never anything but the thought of the eternal present. This, be it well understood, provided always that the dualism of ideas and facts has been superseded, of vérités de raison and vérités de fait, the concept of philosophy as contemplation of vérités de raison, and that of history as the amassing of brute facts, of coarse vérités de fait. We have recently found this tenacious dualism in the act of renewing itself, disguised beneath the axiom that le propre de l'histoire est de savoir, le propre de la philosophie est de comprendre. This amounts to the absurd distinction of knowing without understanding and of understanding without knowing, which would thus be the doubly dis-heartening theoretical fate of man. But such a dualism and the conception of the world which accompanies it, far from being true philosophy, are the perpetual source whence springs that imperfect attempt at philosophizing which is called religion when one is within its magic circle, mythology when one has left it. Will it be useful to attack transcendency, and to claim the character of immanence for reality and for philosophy? It will certainly be of use; but I do not feel the necessity of doing so, at any rate here and now.
And since history, properly understood, abolishes the idea of a universal history, so philosophy, immanent and identical with history, abolishes the idea of a universal philosophy—that is to say, of the closed system. The two negations correspond and are indeed fundamentally one (because closed systems, like universal histories, are cosmological romances), and both receive empirical confirmation from the tendency of the best spirits of our day to refrain from 'universal histories' and from 'definitive systems,' leaving both to compilers, to believers, and to the credulous of every sort. This tendency was implicit in the last great philosophy, that of Hegel, but it was opposed in its own self by old survivals and altogether betrayed in execution, so that this philosophy also converts itself into a cosmological romance. Thus it may be said that what at the beginning of the nineteenth century was merely a simple presentiment becomes changed into firm consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth. This defies the fears of the timid lest the knowledge of the universal should be thus compromised, and indeed maintains that only in this way can such knowledge be truly and perpetually acquired, because dynamically obtained. Thus history becoming actual history and philosophy becoming historical philosophy have freed themselves, the one from the anxiety of not being able to know that which is not known, only because it was or will be known, and the other from the despair of never being able to attain to definite truth—that is to say, both are freed from the phantom of the 'thing in itself.'
[1] In the Logic, especially in Part II, Chapter IV.
[IV]
IDEAL GENESIS AND DISSOLUTION OF THE 'PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'
I
The conception of the so-called 'philosophy of history' is perpetually opposed to and resisted by the deterministic conception of history. Not only is this clearly to be seen from inspection, but it is also quite evident logically, because the 'philosophy of history' represents the transcendental conception of the real, determinism the immanent.
But on examining the facts it is not less certain that historical determinism perpetually generates the 'philosophy of history'; nor is this fact less evidently logical than the preceding, because determinism is naturalism, and therefore immanent, certainly, but insufficiently and falsely immanent. Hence it should rather be said that it wishes to be, but is not, immanent, and whatever its efforts may be in the contrary direction, it becomes converted into transcendency. All this does not present any difficulty to one who has clearly in mind the conceptions of the transcendent and of the immanent, of the philosophy of history as transcendency and of the deterministic or naturalistic conception of history as a false immanence. But it will be of use to see in more detail how this process of agreements and oppositions is developed and solved with reference to the problem of history.
"First collect the facts, then connect them causally"; this is the way that the work of the historian is represented in the deterministic conception. Après la collection des faits, la recherche des causes, to repeat the very common formula in the very words of one of the most eloquent and picturesque theorists of that school, Taine. Facts are brute, dense, real indeed, but not illumined with the light of science, not intellectualized. This intelligible character must be conferred upon them by means of the search for causes. But it is very well known what happens when one fact is linked to another as its cause, forming a chain of causes and effects: we thus inaugurate an infinite regression, and we never succeed in finding the cause or causes to which we can finally attach the chain that we have been so industriously putting together.
Some, maybe many, of the theorists of history get out of the difficulty in a truly simple manner: they break or let fall at a certain point their chain, which is already broken at another point at the other end (the effect which they have undertaken to consider). They operate with their fragment of chain as though it were something perfect and closed in itself, as though a straight line divided at two points should include space and be a figure. Hence, too, the doctrine that we find among the methodologists of history: that it is only necessary for history to seek out 'proximate' causes. This doctrine is intended to supply a logical foundation to the above process. But who can ever say what are the 'proximate causes'? Thought, since it is admitted that it is unfortunately obliged to think according to the chain of causes, will never wish to know anything but 'true' causes, be they near or distant in space and time (space, like time, ne fait rien à l'affaire). In reality, this theory is a fig-leaf, placed there to cover a proceeding of which the historian, who is a thinker and a critic, is ashamed, an act of will which is useful, but which for that very reason is wilful. The fig-leaf, however, is a sign of modesty, and as such has its value, because, if shame be lost, there is a risk that it will finally be declared that the 'causes' at which an arbitrary halt has been made are the 'ultimate' causes, the 'true' causes, thus raising the caprice of the individual to the rank of an act creative of the world, treating it as though it were God, the God of certain theologians, whose caprice is truth. I should not wish again to quote Taine just after having said this, for he is a most estimable author, not on account of his mental constitution, but of his enthusiastic faith in science; yet it suits me to quote him nevertheless. Taine, in his search for causes, having reached a cause which he sometimes calls the 'race' and sometimes the 'age,' as for instance in his history of English literature, when he reaches the concept of the 'man of the North' or 'German,' with the character and intellect that would be suitable to such a person—coldness of the senses, love of abstract ideas, grossness of taste, and contempt for order and regularity—gravely affirms: Là s'arrête la recherche: on est tombé sur quelque disposition primitive, sur quelque trait propre à toutes les sensations, à toutes les conceptions d'un siècle ou d'une race, sur quelque particularité inséparable de toutes les démarches de son esprit et de son cour. Ce sont là les grandes causes, les causes universelles et permanentes. What that primitive and insurmountable thing contained was known to Taine's imagination, but criticism is ignorant of it; for criticism demands that the genesis of the facts or groups of facts designated as 'age' and 'race' should be given, and in demanding their genesis declares that they are neither 'universal' nor 'permanent,' because no universal and permanent 'facts' are known, as far as I am aware, certainly not le Germain and l'homme du Nord; nor are mummies facts, though they last some thousands of years, but not for ever—they change gradually, but they do change.
Thus whoever adopts the deterministic conception of history, provided that he decides to abstain from cutting short the inquiry that he has undertaken in an arbitrary and fanciful manner, is of necessity obliged to recognize that the method adopted does not attain the desired end. And since he has begun to think history, although by means of an insufficient method, no course remains to him save that of beginning all over again and following a different path, or that of going forward but changing his direction. The naturalistic presupposition, which still holds its ground ("first collect the facts, then seek the causes": what is more evident and more unavoidable than that?), necessarily leads to the second alternative. But to adopt the second alternative is to supersede determinism, it is to transcend nature and its causes, it is to propose a method opposite to that hitherto followed—that is to say, to renounce the category of cause for another, which cannot be anything but that of end, an extrinsic and transcendental end, which is the analogous opposite, corresponding to the cause. Now the search for the transcendental end is the 'philosophy of history.'
The consequent naturalist (I mean by this he who 'continues to think,' or, as is generally said, to draw the consequences) cannot avoid this inquiry, nor does he ever avoid it, in whatever manner he conceive his new inquiry. This he cannot even do, when he tries, by declaring that the end or 'ultimate cause' is unknowable, because (as elsewhere remarked) an unknowable affirmed is an unknowable in some way known. Naturalism is always crowned with a philosophy of history, whatever its mode of formulation: whether it explain the universe as composed of atoms that strike one another and produce history by means of their various shocks and gyrations, to which they can also put an end by returning to their primitive state of dispersion, whether the hidden God be termed Matter or the Unconscious or something else, or whether, finally, He be conceived as an Intelligence which avails itself of the chain of causes in order to actualize His counsels. And every philosopher of history is on the other hand a naturalist, because he is a dualist and conceives a God and a world, an idea and a fact in addition to or beneath the Idea, a kingdom of ends and a kingdom or sub-kingdom of causes, a celestial city and one that is more or less diabolical or terrene. Take any deterministic historical work and you will find or discover in it, explicit or understood, transcendency (in Taine, for example, it goes by the name of 'race' or of 'siècle,' which are true and proper deities); take any work of 'philosophy of history' and dualism and naturalism will be found there (in Hegel, for example, when he admits rebellious and impotent facts which resist or are unworthy the dominion of the idea). And we shall see more and more clearly how from the entrails of naturalism comes inevitably forth the 'philosophy of history.'
II
But the 'philosophy of history' is just as contradictory as the deterministic conception from which it arises and to which it is opposed. Having both accepted and superseded the method of linking brute facts together, it no longer finds facts to link (for these have already been linked together, as well as might be, by means of the category of cause), but brute facts, on which it must confer rather a 'meaning' than a linking, representing them as aspects of a transcendental process, a theophany. Now those facts, in so far as they are brute facts, are mute, and the transcendency of the process requires an organ, not that of thought that thinks or produces facts, but an extra-logical organ, in order to be conceived and represented (such, for example, as thought which proceeds abstractly a priori, in the manner of Fichte), and this is not to be found in the spirit, save as a negative moment, as the void of effective logical thought. The void of logical thought is immediately filled with praxis, or what is called sentiment, which then appears as poetry, by theoretical refraction. There is an evident poetical character running through all 'philosophies of history.' Those of antiquity represented historical events as strife between the gods of certain peoples or of certain races or protectors of certain individuals, or between the god of light and truth and the powers of darkness and lies. They thus expressed the aspirations of peoples, groups, or individuals toward hegemony, or of man toward goodness and truth. The most modern of modern forms is that inspired by various national and ethical feelings (the Italian, the Germanic, the Slav, etc.), or which represents the course of history as leading to the kingdom of liberty, or as the passage from the Eden of primitive communism, through the Middle Ages of slavery, servitude, and wages, toward the restoration of communism, which shall no longer be unconscious but conscious, no longer Edenic but human. In poetry, facts are no longer facts but words, not reality but images, and so there would be no occasion to censure them, if it remained pure poetry. But it does not so remain, because those images and words are placed there as ideas and facts—that is to say, as myths: progress, liberty, economy, technique, science are myths, in so far as they are looked upon as agents external to the facts. They are myths no less than God and the Devil, Mars and Venus, Jove and Baal, or any other cruder forms of divinity. And this is the reason why the deterministic conception, after it has produced the 'philosophy of history,' which opposes it, is obliged to oppose its own daughter in its turn, and to appeal from the realm of ends to that of causal connexions, from imagination to observation, from myths to facts.
The reciprocal confutation of historical determinism and the philosophy of history, which makes of each a void or a nothing—that is to say, a single void or nothing—seems to the eclectics as usual to be the reciprocal fulfilment of two entities, which effect or should effect an alliance for mutual support. And since eclecticism flourishes in contemporary philosophy, mutato nomine, it is not surprising that besides the duty of investigating the causes to history also is assigned that of ascertaining the 'meaning' or the 'general plan' of the course of history (see the works on the philosophy of history of Labriola, Simmel, and Rickert). Since, too, writers on method are wont to be empirical and therefore eclectic, we find that with them also history is divided into the history which unites and criticizes documents and reconstructs events, and 'philosophy of history' (see Bernheim's manual, typical of all of them). Finally, since ordinary thought is eclectic, nothing is more easy than to find agreement as to the thesis that simple history, which presents the series of facts, does not suffice, but that it is necessary that thought should return to the already constituted chain of events, in order to discover there the hidden design and to answer the questions as to whence we come and whither we go. This amounts to saying that a 'philosophy of history' must be posited side by side with history. This eclecticism, which gives substance to two opposite voids and makes them join hands, sometimes attempts to surpass itself and to mingle those two fallacious sciences or parts of science. Then we hear 'philosophy of history' defended, but with the caution that it must be conducted with 'scientific' and 'positive' method, by means of the search for the cause, thus revealing the action of divine reason or providence.[1] Ordinary thought quickly consents to this programme, but afterward fails to carry it out.[2]
There is nothing new here either for those who know: 'philosophy of history' to be constructed by means of 'positive methods,' transcendency to be demonstrated by means of the methods of false immanence, is the exact equivalent in the field of historical studies to that "metaphysic to be constructed by means of the experimental method" which was recommended by the neocritics (Zeller and others), for it claimed, not indeed to supersede two voids that reciprocally confute one another, but to make them agree together, and, after having given substance to them, to combine them in a single substance. I should not like to describe the impossibilities contained in the above as the prodigies of an alchemist (the metaphor seems to be too lofty), but rather as the medleys of bad cooks.
[1] See, for example, the work of Flint; but since, less radical than Flint, Hegel and the Hegelians themselves also ended in admitting the concourse of the two opposed methods, traces of this perversion are also to be found in their 'philosophies of history.' Here, too, is to be noted the false analogy by which Hegel was led to discover the same relation between a priori and historical facts as between mathematics and natural facts: Man muss mit dem Kreise dessen, worin die Prinzipien fallen, wenn man es so nennen will, a priori vertraut sein, so gut als Kepler mit den Ellipsen, mit Kuben und Quadraten und mit den Gedanken von Verhältnissen derselben a priori schon vorher bekannt sein musste, ehe er aus den empirischen Daten seine unsterblichen Gesetze, welche aus Bestimmungen jener Kreise von Vorstellungen bestehen, erfinden konnte. (Cf. Vorles. üb. d. Philos, d. Gesch., ed. Brunstäd, pp. 107-108.)
[2] Not even the above-mentioned Flint carried it out, for he lost him-self in preliminaries of historical documentation and never proceeded to the promised construction.
III
The true remedy for the contradictions of historical determinism and of the 'philosophy of history' is quite other than this. To obtain it, we must accept the result of the preceding confutation, which shows that both are futile, and reject, as lacking thought, both the 'designs' of the philosophy of history and the causal chains of determinism. When these two shadows have been dispersed we shall find ourselves at the starting-place: we are again face to face with disconnected brute facts, with facts that are connected, but not understood, for which determinism had tried to employ the cement of causality, the 'philosophy of history,' the magic wand of finality. What shall we do with these facts? How shall we make them clear rather than dense as they were, organic rather than inorganic, intelligible rather than unintelligible? Truly, it seems difficult to do anything with them, especially to effect their desired transformation. The spirit is helpless before that which is, or is supposed to be, external to it. And when facts are understood in that way we are apt to assume again that attitude of contempt of the philosophers for history which has been well-nigh constant since antiquity almost to the end of the eighteenth century (for Aristotle history was "less philosophical" and less serious than poetry, for Sextus Empiricus it was "unmethodical material"; Kant did not feel or understand history). The attitude amounts to this: leave ideas to the philosophers and brute facts to the historians—let us be satisfied with serious things and leave their toys to the children.
But before having recourse to such a temptation, it will be prudent to ask counsel of methodical doubt (which is always most useful), and to direct the attention precisely upon those brute and disconnected facts from which the causal method claims to start and before which we, who are now abandoned by it and by its complement, the philosophy of history, appear to find ourselves again. Methodical doubt will suggest above all things the thought that those facts are a presupposition that has not been proved, and it will lead to the inquiry as to whether the proof can be obtained. Having attempted the proof, we shall finally arrive at the conclusion that those facts really do not exist.
For who, as a matter of fact, affirms their existence? Precisely the spirit, at the moment when it is about to undertake the search for causes. But when accomplishing that act the spirit does not already possess the brute facts (d'abord la collection des faits) and then seek the causes (après, la recherche des causes); but it makes the facts brute by that very act—that is to say, it posits them itself in that way, because it is of use to it so to posit them. The search for causes, undertaken by history, is not in any way different from the procedure of naturalism, already several times illustrated, which abstractly analyses and classifies reality. And to illustrate abstractly and to classify implies at the same time to judge in classifying—that is to say, to treat facts, not as acts of the spirit, conscious in the spirit that thinks them, but as external brute facts. The Divine Comedy is that poem which we create again in our imagination in all its particulars as we read it and which we understand critically as a particular determination of the spirit, and to which we therefore assign its place in history, with all its surroundings and all its relations. But when this actuality of our thought and imagination has come to an end—that is to say, when that mental process is completed—we are able, by means of a new act of the spirit, separately to analyse its elements. Thus, for instance, we shall classify the concepts relating to 'Florentine civilization,' or to 'political poetry,' and say that the Divine Comedy was an effect of Florentine civilization, and this in its turn an effect of the strife of the communes, and the like. We shall also thus have prepared the way for those absurd problems which used to annoy de Sanctis so much in relation to the work of Dante, and which he admirably described when he said that they arise only when lively æsthetic expression has grown cold and poetical work has fallen into the hands of dullards addicted to trifles. But if we stop in time and do not enter the path of those absurdities, if we restrict ourselves purely and simply to the naturalistic moment, to classification, and to the classificatory judgment (which is also causal connexion), in an altogether practical manner, without drawing any deductions from it, we shall have done nothing that is not perfectly legitimate; indeed, we shall be exercising our right and bowing to a rational necessity, which is that of naturalizing, when naturalization is of use, but not beyond those limits. Thus the materialization of the facts and the external or causal binding of them together are altogether justified as pure naturalism. And even the maxim which bids us to stop at 'proximate' causes—that is to say, not to force classification so far that it loses all practical utility—will find its justification. To place the concept of the Divine Comedy in relation to that of 'Florentine civilization' may be of use, but it will be of no use whatever, or infinitely less use, to place it in relation to the class of 'Indo-European civilization' or to the 'civilization of the white man.'
IV
Let us then return with greater confidence to the point of departure, the true point of departure—that is to say, not to that of facts already disorganized and naturalized, but to that of the mind that thinks and constructs the fact. Let us raise up the debased countenances of the calumniated 'brute facts,' and we shall see the light of thought resplendent upon their foreheads. And that true point of departure will reveal itself not merely as a point of departure, but both as a point of arrival and of departure, not as the first step in historical construction, but the whole of history in its construction, which is also its self-construction. Historical determinism, and all the more 'philosophy of history,' leave the reality of history behind them, though they directed their journey thither, a journey which became so erratic and so full of useless repetitions.
We shall make the ingenuous Taine confess that what we are saying is the truth when we ask him what he means by the collection des faits and learn from him in reply that the collection in question consists of two stages or moments, in the first of which documents are revived in order to attain, à travers la distance des temps, l'homme vivant, agissant, doué de passions, muni d'habitudes, avec sa voix et sa physionomie, avec ses gestes et ses habits, distinct et complet comme celui que tout à l'heure nous avons quitté dans la rue; and in the second is sought and found sous l'homme extérieur l'homme intérieur, "l'homme invisible," "le centre," "le groupe des facultés et des sentiments qui produit le reste," "le drame intérieur," "la psychologie." Something very different, then, from collections de faits I If the things mentioned by our author really do come to pass, if we really do make live again in imagination individuals and events, and if we think what is within them—that is to say, if we think the synthesis of intuition and concept, which is thought in its concreteness—history is already achieved: what more is wanted? There is nothing more to seek. Taine replies: "We must seek causes." That is to say, we must slay the living 'fact' thought by thought, separate its abstract elements—a useful thing, no doubt, but useful for memory and practice. Or, as is the custom of Taine, we must misunderstand and exaggerate the value of the function of this abstract analysis, to lose ourselves in the mythology of races and ages, or in other different but none the less similar things. Let us beware how we slay poor facts, if we wish to think as historians, and in so far as we are such and really think in that way we shall not feel the necessity for having recourse either to the extrinsic bond of causes, historical determinism, or to that which is equally extrinsic of transcendental ends, philosophy of history. The fact historically thought has no cause and no end outside itself, but only in itself, coincident with its real qualities and with its qualitative reality. Because (it is well to note in passing) the determination of facts as real facts indeed, but of unknown nature, asserted but not understood, is itself also an illusion of naturalism (which thus heralds its other illusion, that of the 'philosophy of history'). In thought, reality and quality, existence and essence, are all one, and it is not possible to affirm a fact as real without at the same time knowing what fact it is—that is, without qualifying it.
Returning to and remaining in or moving in the concrete fact, or, rather, making of oneself thought that thinks the fact concretely, we experience the continual formation and the continual progress of our historical thought and also make clear to ourselves the history of historiography, which proceeds in the same manner. And we see how (I limit myself to this, in order not to allow the eye to wander too far) from the days of the Greeks to our own historical understanding has always been enriching and deepening itself, not because abstract causes and transcendental ends of human things have ever been recovered, but only because an ever increasing consciousness of them has been acquired. Politics and morality, religion and philosophy and art, science and culture and economy, have become more complex concepts and at the same time better determined and unified both in themselves and with respect to the whole. Correlatively with this, the histories of these forms of activity have become ever more complex and more firmly united. We know 'the causes' of civilization as little as did the Greeks; and we know as little as they of the god or gods who control the fortunes of humanity. But we know the theory of civilization better than did the Greeks, and, for instance, we know (as they did not know, or did not know with equal clearness and security) that poetry is an eternal form of the theoretic spirit, that regression or decadence is a relative concept, that the world is not divided into ideas and shadows of ideas, or into potencies and acts, that slavery is not a category of the real, but a historical form of economic, and so forth. Thus it no longer occurs to anyone (save to the survivals or fossils, still to be found among us) to write the history of poetry on the principle of the pedagogic ends that the poets are supposed to have had in view: on the contrary, we strive to determine the forms expressive of their sentiments. We are not at all bewildered when we find ourselves before what are called 'decadences,' but we seek out what new and greater thing was being developed by means of their dialectic. We do not consider the work of man to be miserable and illusory, and aspiration and admiration for the skies and for the ascesis joined thereunto and averse to earth as alone worthy of admiration and imitation. We recognize the reality of power in the act, and in the shadows the solidity of the ideas, and on earth heaven. Finally, we do not find that the possibility of social life is lost owing to the disappearance of the system of slavery. Such a disappearance would have been the catastrophe of reality, if slaves were natural to reality—and so forth.
This conception of history and the consideration of historiographical work in itself make it possible for us to be just toward historical determinism and to the 'philosophy of history,' which, by their continual reappearance, have continually pointed to the gaps in our knowledge, both historical and philosophical, and with their false provisional solutions have heralded the correct solutions of the new problems which we have been propounding. Nor has it been said that they will henceforth cease to exercise such a function (which is the beneficial function of Utopias of every sort). And although historical determinism and the 'philosophy of history' have no history, because they do not develop, they yet receive a content from the relation in which they stand to history, which does develop—that is to say, history develops in them, notwithstanding their covering, extrinsic to their content, which compels to think even him who proposes to schematize and to imagine without thinking. For there is a great difference between the determinism that can now appear, after Descartes and Vico and Kant and Hegel, and that which appeared after Aristotle; between the philosophy of history of Hegel and Marx and that of gnosticism and Christianity. Transcendency and false immanency are at work in both these conceptions respectively; but the abstract forms and mythologies that have appeared in more mature epochs of thought contain this new maturity in themselves. In proof of this, let us pause but a moment (passing by the various forms of naturalism) at the case of the 'philosophy of history.' We observe already a great difference between the philosophy of history, as it appears in the Homeric world, and that of Herodotus, with whom the conception of the anger of the gods is a simulacrum of the moral law, which spares the humble and treads the proud underfoot; from Herodotus to the Fate of the Stoics, a law to which the gods themselves are subjected, and from this to the conception of Providence, which appears in late antiquity as wisdom that rules the world; from this pagan providence again to Christianity, which is divine justice, evangelical preparation, and educative care of the human race, and so on, to the refined providence of the theologians, which as a rule excludes divine intervention and operates by means of secondary causes, to that of Vico, which operates as dialectic of the spirit, to the Idea of Hegel, which is the gradual conquest of the consciousness of self, which liberty achieves during the course of history, till we finally reach the mythology of progress and of civilization, which still persists and is supposed to tend toward the final abolition of prejudices and superstitions, to be carried out by means of the increasing power and divulgation of positive science.
In this way the 'philosophy of history' and historical determinism sometimes attain to the thinness and transparency of a veil, which covers and at the same time reveals the concreteness of the real in thought. Mechanical causes thus appear idealized, transcendent deities humanized, and facts are in great part divested of their brutal aspect. But however thin the veil may be, it remains a veil, and however clear the truth may be, it is not altogether clear, for at bottom the false persuasion still persists that history is constructed with the 'material' of brute facts, with the 'cement' of causes, and with the 'magic' of ends, as with three successive or concurrent methods. The same thing occurs with religion, which in lofty minds liberates itself almost altogether from vulgar beliefs, as do its ethics from the heteronomy of the divine command and from the utilitarianism of rewards and punishments. Almost altogether, but not altogether, and for this reason religion will never be philosophy, save by negating itself, and thus the 'philosophy of history' and historical determinism will become history only by negating themselves. The reason is that as long as they proceed in a positive manner dualism will also persist, and with it the torment of scepticism and agnosticism as a consequence.
The negation of the philosophy of history, in history understood concretely, is its ideal dissolution, and since that so-called philosophy is nothing but an abstract and negative moment, our reason for affirming that the philosophy of history is dead is clear. It is dead in its positivity, dead as a body of doctrine, dead in this way, with all the other conceptions and forms of the transcendental. I do not wish to attach to my brief (but in my opinion sufficient) treatment of the argument the addition of an explanation which to some will appear to be (as it appears to me) but little philosophical and even somewhat trivial. Notwithstanding, since I prefer the accusation of semi-triviality to that of equivocation, I shall add that since the criticism of the 'concepts' of cause and transcendental finality does not forbid the use of these 'words,' when they are simple words (to talk, for example, in an imaginative way of liberty as of a goddess, or to say, when about to undertake a study of Dante, that our intention is to 'seek the cause' or 'causes' of this or that work or act of his), so nothing forbids our continuing to talk of 'philosophy of history' and of philosophizing history, meaning the necessity of treating or of a better treatment of this or that historical problem. Neither does anything forbid our calling the researches of historical gnoseology 'philosophy of history,' although in this case we are treating the history, not properly of history, but of historiography, two things which are wont to be designated with the same word in Italian as in other languages. Neither do we wish to prevent the statement (as did a German professor years ago) that the 'philosophy of history' must be treated as 'sociology'—that is to say, the adornment with that ancient title of so-called sociology, the empirical science of the state, of society and of culture.
These denominations are all permissible in virtue of the same right as that invoked by the adventurer Casanova when he went before the magistrates in order to justify himself for having changed his name—"the right of every man to the letters of the alphabet." But the question treated above is not one of the letters of the alphabet. The 'philosophy of history,' of which we have briefly shown the genesis and the dissolution, is not one that is used in various senses, but a most definite mode of conceiving history—the transcendental mode.
[V]
THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY
We therefore meet the well-known saying of Fustel de Coulanges that there are certainly "history and philosophy, but not the philosophy of history," with the following: there is neither philosophy nor history, nor philosophy of history, but history which is philosophy and philosophy which is history and is intrinsic to history. For this reason, all the controversies—and foremost of all those concerned with progress—which philosophers, methodologists of history, and sociologists believe to belong to their especial province, and flaunt at the beginning and the end of their treatises, are reduced for us to simple problems of philosophy, with historical motivation, all of them connected with the problems of which philosophy treats.
In controversies relating to progress it is asked whether the work of man be fertile or sterile, whether it be lost or preserved, whether history have an end, and if so of what sort, whether this end be attainable in time or only in the infinite, whether history be progress or regress, or an interchange between progress and regress, greatness and decadence, whether good or evil prevail in it, and the like. When these questions have been considered with a little attention we shall see that they resolve themselves substantially into three points: the conception of development, that of end, and that of value. That is to say, they are concerned with the whole of reality, and with history only when it is precisely the whole of reality. For this reason they do not belong to supposed particular sciences, to the philosophy of history, or to sociology, but to philosophy and to history in so far as it is philosophy. When the ordinary current terminology has been translated into philosophical terms it calls forth immediately the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis by means of which those problems have been thought and solved during the course of philosophy, to which the reader desirous of instruction must be referred. We can only mention here that the conception of reality as development is nothing but the synthesis of the two one-sided opposites, consisting of permanency without change and of change without permanency, of an identity without diversity and of a diversity without identity, for development is a perpetual surpassing, which is at the same time a perpetual conservation. From this point of view one of the conceptions that has had the greatest vogue in historical books, that of historical circles, is revealed as an equivocal attempt to issue forth from a double one-sidedness and a falling back into it, owing to an equivocation. Because either the series of circles is conceived as composed of identicals and we have only permanency, or it is conceived as of things diverse and we have only change. But if, on the contrary, we conceive it as circularity that is perpetually identical and at the same time perpetually diverse, in this sense it coincides with the conception of development itself.
In like manner, the opposite theses, as to the attainment or the impossibility of attainment of the end of history, reveal their common defect of positing the end as extrinsic to history, conceiving of it either as that which can be reached in time (progressus ad finitum), or as that which can never be attained, but only infinitely approximated (progressus ad infinitum). But where the end has been correctly conceived as internal—that is to say, all one with development itself—we must conclude that it is attained at every instant, and at the same time not attained, because every attainment is the formation of a new prospect, whence we have at every moment the satisfaction of possession, and arising from this the dissatisfaction which drives us to seek a new possession.[1]
Finally, the conceptions of history as a passage from evil to good (progress), or from good to evil (decadence, regression), take their origin from the same error of entifying and making extrinsic good and evil, joy and sorrow (which are the dialectical construction of reality itself). To unite them in the eclectic conception of an alternation of good and evil, of progress and regress, is incorrect. The true solution is that of progress understood not as a passage from evil to good, as though from one state to another, but as the passage from the good to the better, in which the evil is the good itself seen in the light of the better.
These are all philosophical solutions which are at variance with the superficial theses of controversialists (dictated to them by sentimental motives or imaginative combinations, really mythological or resulting in mythologies), to the same extent that they are in accordance with profound human convictions and with the tireless toil, the trust, the courage, which constitute their ethical manifestations.
By drawing the consequences of the dialectical conception of progress something more immediately effective can be achieved in respect to the practice and history of historiography. For we find in that conception the origin of a historical maxim, in the mouth of every one, yet frequently misunderstood and frequently violated—that is to say, that to history pertains not to judge, but to explain, and that it should be not subjective but objective.
Misunderstood, because the judging in question is often taken in the sense of logical judgment, of that judgment which is thinking itself, and the subjectivity, which would thus be excluded, would be neither more nor less than the subjectivity of thought. In consequence of this misunderstanding we hear historians being advised to purge themselves of theories, to refrain from the disputes arising from them, to restrict themselves to facts, collecting, arranging, and squeezing out the sap (even by the statistical method). It is impossible to follow such advice as this, as may easily be seen, for such 'abstention from thought' reveals itself as really abstention from 'seriousness of thought,' as a surreptitious attaching of value to the most vulgar and contradictory thoughts, transmitted by tradition, wandering about idly in the mind, or flashing out as the result of momentary caprice. The maxim is altogether false, understood or misunderstood in this way, and it must be taken by its opposite—namely, that history must always judge strictly, and that it must always be energetically subjective without allowing itself to be confused by the conflicts in which thought engages or by the risks that it runs. For it is thought itself, and thought alone, which gets over its own difficulties and dangers, without falling even here into that frivolous eclecticism which tries to find a middle term between our judgment and that of others, and suggests various neutral and insipid forms of judgment.
But the true and legitimate meaning, the original motive for that 'judging,' that 'subjectivity,' which it condemns, is that history should not apply to the deeds and the personages that are its material the qualifications of good and evil, as though there really were good and evil facts in the world, people who are good and people who are evil. And it is certainly not to be denied that innumerable historiographers, or those who claim to be historiographers, have really striven and still strive along those lines, in the vain and presumptuous attempt to reward the good and punish the evil, to qualify historical epochs as representing progress or decadence—in a word, to settle what is good and what is evil, as though it were a question of separating one element from another in a compound, hydrogen from, oxygen.
Whoever desires to observe intrinsically the above maxim, and by doing so to set himself in accordance with the dialectic conception of progress, must in truth look upon every trace or vestige of propositions affirming evil, regression, or decadence as real facts, as a sign of imperfection—in a word, he must condemn every trace or vestige of negative judgments. If the course of history is not the passage from evil to good, or alternative good and evil, but the passage from the good to the better, if history should explain and not condemn, it will pronounce only positive judgments, and will forge chains of good, so solid and so closely linked that it will not be possible to introduce into them even a little link of evil or to interpose empty spaces, which in so far as they are empty would not represent good but evil. A fact that seems to be only evil, an epoch that appears to be one of complete decadence, can be nothing but a non-historical fact—that is to say, one which has not been historically treated, not penetrated by thought, and which has remained the prey of sentiment and imagination.
Whence comes the phenomenology of good and evil, of sin and repentance, of decadence and resurrection, save from the consciousness of the agent, from the act which is in labour to produce a new form of life?[2] And in that act the adversary who opposed us is in the wrong; the state from which we wish to escape, and from which we are escaping, is unhappy; the new one toward which we are tending becomes symbolized as a dreamed-of felicity to be attained, or as a past condition to restore, which is therefore most beautiful in recollection (which here is not recollection, but imagination). Every one knows how these things present them-selves to us in the course of history, manifesting themselves in poetry, in Utopias, in stories with a moral, in detractions, in apologies, in myths of love, of hate, and the like. To the heretics of the Middle Ages and to the Protestant reformers the condition of the primitive Christians seemed to be most lovely and most holy, that of papal Christians most evil and debased. The Sparta of Lycurgus and the Rome of Cincinnatus seemed to the Jacobins to be as admirable as France under the Carlovingians and the Capetians was detestable. The humanists looked upon the lives of the ancient poets and sages as luminous and the life of the Middle Ages as dense darkness. Even in times near our own has been witnessed the glorification of the Lombard communes and the depreciation of the Holy Roman Empire, and the very opposite of this, according as the facts relating to these historical events were reflected in the consciousness of an Italian longing for the independence of Italy or of a German upholding the holy German empire of Prussian hegemony. And this will always happen, because such is the phenomenology of the practical consciousness, and these practical valuations will always be present to some extent in the works of historians. As works, these are not and cannot ever be pure history, quintessential history; if in no other way, then in their phrasing and use of metaphors they will reflect the repercussion of practical needs and efforts directed toward the future. But the historical consciousness, as such, is logical and not practical consciousness, and indeed makes the other its object; history once lived has become in it thought, and the antitheses of will and feeling that formerly offered resistance have no longer a place in thought.
For if there are no good and evil facts, but facts that are always good when understood in their intimate being and concreteness, there are not opposite sides, but that wider side that embraces both the adversaries and which happens just to be historical consideration. Historical consideration, therefore, recognizes as of equal right the Church of the catacombs and that of Gregory VII, the tribunes of the Roman people and the feudal barons, the Lombard League and the Emperor Barbarossa. History never metes out justice, but always justifies; she could not carry out the former act without making herself unjust—that is to say, confounding thought with life, taking the attractions and repulsions of sentiment for the judgments of thought.
Poetry is satisfied with the expression of sentiment, and it is worthy of note that a considerable historian, Schlosser, wishing to reserve for himself the right and duty of judging historical facts with Kantian austerity and abstraction, kept his eyes fixed on the Divine Comedy—that is to say, a poetical work—as his model of treatment. And since there are poetical elements in all myths, we understand why the conception of history known as dualistic—that is to say, of history as composed of two currents, which mix but never resolve in one another their waters of good and evil, truth and error, rationality and irrationality—should have formed a conspicuous part, not only of the Christian religion, but also of the mythologies (for they really are such) of humanism and of illuminism. But the detection of this problem of the duality of values and its solution in the superior unity of the conception of development is the work of the nineteenth century, which on this account and on account of other solutions of the same kind (certainly not on account of its philological and archæological richness, which was relatively common to the four preceding centuries) has been well called 'the century of history.'
Not only, therefore, is history unable to discriminate between facts that are good and facts that are evil, and between epochs that are progressive and those that are regressive, but it does not begin until the psychological conditions which rendered possible such antitheses have been superseded and substituted by an act of the spirit, which seeks to ascertain what function the fact or the epoch previously condemned has fulfilled—that is to say, what it has produced of its own in the course of development, and therefore what it has produced. And since all facts and epochs are productive in their own way, not only is not one of them to be condemned in the light of history, but all are to be praised and venerated. A condemned fact, a fact that is repugnant, is not yet a historical proposition, it is hardly even the premiss of a historical problem to be formulated. A negative history is a non-history so long as its negative process substitutes itself for thought, which is affirmative, and does not maintain itself within its practical and moral bounds and limit itself to poetical expressions and empirical modes of representation, in respect of all of which we can certainly speak (speak and not think), as we do speak at every moment, of bad men and periods of decadence and regression.
If the vice of negative history arises from the separation, the solidification, and the opposition of the dialectical antitheses of good and evil and the transformation of the ideal moments of development into entities, that other deviation of history which may be known as elegiac history arises from the misunderstanding of another necessity of that conception—that is to say, the perpetual constancy, the perpetual conservation of what has been acquired. But this is also false by definition. What is preserved and enriched in the course of history is history itself, spirituality. The past does not live otherwise than in the present, as the force of the present, resolved and transformed in the present. Every particular form, individual, action, institution, work, thought, is destined to perish: even art, which is called eternal (and is so in a certain sense), perishes, for it does not live, save to the extent that it is reproduced, and therefore transfigured and surrounded with new light, in the spirit of posterity. Finally, truth itself perishes, particular and determined truth, because it is not rethinkable, save when included in the system of a vaster truth, and therefore at the same time transformed. But those who do not rise to the conception of pure historical consideration, those who attach themselves with their whole soul to an individual, a work, a belief, an institution, and attach themselves so strongly that they cannot separate themselves from it in order to objectify it before themselves and think it, are prone to attribute the immortality which belongs to the spirit in universal to the spirit in one of its particular and determined forms; and since that form, notwithstanding their efforts, dies, and dies in their arms, the universe darkens before their gaze, and the only history that they can relate is the sad one of the agony and death of beautiful things. This too is poetry, and very lofty poetry. Who can do otherwise than weep at the loss of a beloved one, at separation from something dear to him, cannot see the sun extinguished and the earth tremble and the birds cease their flight and fall to earth, like Dante, on the loss of his beloved "who was so beautiful"? But history is never history of death, but history of life, and all know that the proper commemoration of the dead is the knowledge of what they did in life, of what they produced that is working in us, the history of their life and not of their death, which it behoves a gentle soul to veil, a soul barbarous and perverse to exhibit in its miserable nakedness and to contemplate with unhealthy persistence. For this reason all histories which narrate the death and not the life of peoples, of states, of institutions, of customs, of literary and artistic ideals, of religious conceptions, are to be considered false, or, we repeat, simply poetry, where they attain to the level of poetry. People grow sad and suffer and lament because that which was is no longer. This would resolve itself into a mere tautology (because if it was, it is evident that it is no longer), were it not conjoined to the neglect of recognizing what of that past has not perished—that is to say, that past in so far as it is not past but present, the eternal life of the past. It is in this neglect, in the incorrect view arising out of it, that the falsity of such histories resides.
It sometimes happens that historians, intent upon narrating those scenes of anguish in a lugubrious manner and upon celebrating the funerals which it pleases them to call histories, remain partly astounded and partly scandalized when they hear a peal of laughter, a cry of joy, a sigh of satisfaction, or find an enthusiastic impulse springing up from the documents that they are searching. How, they ask, could men live, make love, reproduce their species, sing, paint, discuss, when the trumps were sounding east and west to announce the end of the world? But they do not see that such an end of the world exists only in their own imaginations, rich in elegiac motives, but poor in understanding. They do not perceive that such importunate trumpet-calls have never in reality existed. These are very useful, on the other hand, for reminding those who may have forgotten it that history always pursues her indefatigable work, and that her apparent agonies are the travail of a new birth, and that what are believed to be her expiring sighs are moans that announce the birth of a new world. History differs from the individual who dies because, in the words of Alcmæon of Crete, he is not able τὴν ἀρχήν τῷ τέλει προσάψαι, to join his beginning to his end: history never dies, because she always joins her beginning to her end.
[1] For the complete development of these conceptions, see my study of The Conception of Becoming, in the Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, pp. 149-175 (Bari, 1913). (English translation of the work on Hegel by Douglas Ainslie. Macmillan, London.)
[2] For what relates to this section, see my treatment of Judgments of Value, in the work before cited.
[VI]
THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY
Enfranchising itself from servitude to extra-mundane caprice and to blind natural necessity, freeing itself from transcendency and from false immanence (which is in its turn transcendency), thought conceives history as the work of man, as the product of human will and intellect, and in this manner enters that form of history which we shall call humanistic. This humanism first appears as in simple contrast to nature or to extra-mundane powers, and posits dualism. On the one side is man, with his strength, his intelligence, his reason, his prudence, his will for the good; on the other there is something that resists him, strives against him, upsets his wisest plans, breaks the web that he has been weaving and obliges him to weave it all over again. History, envisaged from the view-point of this conception, is developed entirely from the first of these two sides, because the other does not afford a dialectical element which can be continually met and superseded by the first, giving rise to a sort of interior collaboration, but represents the absolutely extraneous, the capricious, the accidental, the meddler, the ghost at the feast. Only in the former do we find rationality combined with human endeavour, and thus the possibility of a rational explication of history. What comes from the other side is announced, but not explained: it is not material for history, but at the most for chronicle. This first form of humanistic history is known under the various names of rationalistic, intellectualistic, abstractistic, individualistic, psychological history, and especially under that of pragmatic history. It is a form generally condemned by the consciousness of our times, which has employed these designations, especially rationalism and pragmatism, to represent a particular sort of historiographical insufficiency and inferiority, and has made proverbial the most characteristic pragmatic explanations of institutions and events, as types of misrepresentation into which one must beware of falling if one wish to think history seriously. But as happens in the progress of culture and science, even if the condemnation be cordially accepted and no hesitation entertained as to drawing practical consequences from it in the field of actuality, there is not an equally clear consciousness of the reasons for this, or of the thought process by means of which it has been attained. This process we may briefly describe as follows.
Pragmatic finds the reasons for historical facts in man, but in man in so far as he is an individual made abstract, and thus opposed as such not only to the universe, but to other men, who have also been made abstract. History thus appears to consist of the mechanical action and reaction of beings, each one of whom is shut up in himself. Now no historical process is intelligible under such an arrangement, for the sum of the addition is always superior to the numbers added. To such an extent is this true that, not knowing which way to turn in order to make the sum come out right, it became necessary to excogitate the doctrine of 'little causes,' which were supposed to produce 'great effects.' This doctrine is absurd, for it is clear that great effects can only have real causes (if the illegitimate conceptions of great and small, of cause and effect, be applicable here). Such a formula, then, far from expressing the law of historical facts, unconsciously expresses the defects of the doctrine, which is inadequate for its purpose. And since the rational explanation fails, there arise crowds of fancies to take its place, which are all conceived upon the fundamental motive of the abstract individual. The pragmatic explanation of religions is characteristic of this; these are supposed to have been produced and maintained in the world by the economic cunning of the priests, taking advantage of the ignorance and credulity of the masses. But historical pragmatic does not always present itself in the guise of this egoistic and pessimistic inspiration. It is not fair to accuse it of egoism and utilitarianism, when the true accusation should, as we have already said, be levelled at its abstract individualism. This abstract individualism could be and sometimes was conceived even as highly moral, for we certainly find among the pragmatics sage legislators, good kings, and great men, who benefit humanity by means of science, inventions, and well-organized institutions. And if the greedy priest arranged the deceit of religions, if the cruel despot oppressed weak and innocent people, and if error was prolific and engendered the strangest and most foolish customs, yet the goodness of the enlightened monarch and legislator created the happy epochs, caused the arts to flourish, encouraged poets, aided discoveries, encouraged industries. From these pragmatic conceptions is derived the verbal usage whereby we speak of the age of Pericles, of that of Augustus, of that of Leo X, or of that of Louis XIV. And since fanciful explanations do not limit themselves merely to individuals physically existing, but also employ facts and small details, which are also made abstract and shut up in themselves, being thus also turned into what Vico describes as 'imaginative universals,' in like manner all these modes of explanation known as 'catastrophic' and making hinge the salvation or the ruin of a whole society upon the virtue of some single fact are also derived from pragmatic. Examples of this, which have also become proverbial, because they refer to concepts that have been persistently criticized by the historians of our time, are the fall of the Roman Empire, explained as the result of barbarian invasions, European civilization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the result of the Crusades, the renascence of classical literatures, as the result of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and of the immigration of the learned Byzantines into Italy—and the like. And in just the same way as when the conception of the single individual did not furnish a sufficient explanation recourse was for that reason had to a multiplicity of individuals, to their co-operation and conflicting action, so here, when the sole cause adduced soon proved itself too narrow, an attempt was made to make up for the insufficiency of the method by the search for and enumeration of multiple historical causes. This enumeration threatened to proceed to the infinite, but, finite or infinite as it might be, it never explained the process to be explained, for the obvious reason that the continuous is never made out of the discontinuous, however much the latter may be multiplied and solidified. The so-called theory of the causes or factors of history, which survives in modern consciousness, together with several other mental habits of pragmatic, although generally inclined to follow other paths, is rather a confession of powerlessness to dominate history by means of individual causes, or causes individually conceived, than a theory; far from being a solution, it is but a reopening of the problem.
Pragmatic therefore fails to remain human—that is to say, to develop itself as rationality; even in the human side to which it clings and in which it wishes to maintain and oppose itself to the natural or extra-natural; and having already made individuals irrational and unhuman by making them abstract, it gradually has recourse to other historical factors, and arrives finally at natural causes, which do not differ at all in their abstractness from other individual causes. This means that pragmatic, which had previously asserted itself as humanism, falls back into naturalism, from which it had distinctly separated itself. And it falls into it all the more, seeing that, as has been noted, human individuals have been made abstract, not only among themselves, but toward the rest of the universe, which remains facing them, as though it were an enemy. What is it that really rules history according to this conception? Is it man, or extra-human powers, natural or divine? The claim that history exists only as an individual experience is not maintainable; and in the pragmatic conception another agent in history is always presumed, an extra-human being which, at different times and to different thinkers, is known as fate, chance, fortune, nature, God, or by some other name. During the period at which pragmatic history flourished, and there was much talk of reason and wisdom, an expression of a monarchical or courtly tinge is to be found upon the lips of a monarch and of a philosopher who was his friend: homage was paid to sa Majesté le Hasard! Here too there is an attempt to patch up the difficulty and to seek eclectic solutions; in order to get out of it, we find pragmatic affirming that human affairs are conducted half by prudence and half by fortune, that intelligence contributes one part, fortune another, and so on. But who will assign the just share to the two competitors? Will not he who does assign it be the true and only maker of history? And since he who does assign it cannot be man, we see once again how pragmatic leads directly to transcendency and irrationality through its naturalism. It leads to irrationality, accompanied by all its following of inconveniences and by all the other dualisms that it brings with it and which are particular aspects of itself, such as the impossibility of development, regressions, the triumph of evil. The individual, engaged with external forces however conceived, sometimes wins, at other times loses; his victory itself is precarious, and the enemy is always victorious, inflicting losses upon him and making his victories precarious. Individuals are ants crushed by a piece of rock, and if some ant escapes from the mass that falls upon it and reproduces the species, which begins again the labour from the beginning, the rock will fall, or always may fall, upon the new generation and may crush all of its members, so that it is the arbiter of the lives of the industrious ants, to which it does much injury and no good. This is as pessimistic a view as can be conceived.
These difficulties and vain-tentatives of pragmatic historiography have caused it to be looked upon with disfavour and to be rejected in favour of a superior conception, which preserves the initial humanistic motive and, removing from it the abstractness of the atomicized individual, assures it against any falling back into agnosticism, transcendency, or the despair caused by pessimism. The conception that has completed the criticism of pragmatic and the redemption of humanism has been variously and more or less well formulated in the course of the history of thought as mind or reason that constructs history, as the 'providence' of mind or the 'astuteness' of reason.
The great value of this conception is that it changes humanism from abstract to concrete, from monadistic or atomistic to idealistic, from something barely human into something cosmic, from unhuman humanism, such as that of man shut up in himself and opposed to man, into humanism that is really human, the humanity common to men, indeed to the whole universe, which is all humanity, even in its most hidden recesses—that is to say, spirituality. And history, according to this conception, as it is no longer the work of nature or of an extra-mundane God, so it is not the impotent work of the empirical and unreal individual, interrupted at every moment, but the work of that individual which is truly real and is the eternal spirit individualizing itself. For this reason it has no adversary at all opposed to it, but every adversary is at the same time its subject —that is to say, is one of the aspects of that dialecticism which constitutes its inner being. Again, it does not seek its principle of explanation in a particular act of thought or will, or in a single individual or in a multitude of individuals, or in an event given as the cause of other events, or in a collection of events that form the cause of a single event, but seeks and places it in the process itself, which is born of thought and returns to thought, and is intelligible through the auto-intelligibility of thought, which never has need of appealing to anything external to itself in order to understand itself. The explanation of history becomes so truly, because it coincides with its explication; whereas explanation by means of abstract causes is a breaking up of the process; the living having been slain, there is a forced attempt made to obtain life by setting the severed head again upon the shoulders.
When the historians of our day, and the many sensible folk who do not make a profession of philosophy, repeat that the history of the world does not depend upon the will of individuals, upon such accidents as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or upon anecdotes; that no historical event has ever been the result of deception or misunderstanding, but that all have been due to persuasion and necessity; that there is some one who has more intelligence than any individual whatever—the world; that the explanation of a fact is always to be sought in the entire organism and not in a single part torn from the other parts; that history could not have been developed otherwise than it has developed, and that it obeys its own iron logic; that every fact has its reason and that no individual is completely wrong; and numberless propositions of the same sort, which I have assembled promiscuously—they are perhaps not aware that with such henceforth obvious statements they are repeating the criticism of pragmatic history (and implicitly that of theological and naturalistic history) and affirming the truth of idealistic history. Were they aware of this, they would not mingle with these propositions others which are their direct contradiction, relating to causes, accidents, decadences, climates, races, and so on, which represent the detritus of the conception that has been superseded. For the rest, it is characteristic of the consciousness called common or vulgar to drag along with it an abundant detritus of old, dead concepts mingled with the new ones; but this does not detract from the importance of its enforced recognition of the new concept, which it substantially follows in its judgments.
Owing to the already mentioned resolution of all historiographical questions into general philosophy, it would not be possible to give copious illustrations of the new concept of history which the nineteenth century has accepted in place of the pragmatic conception without giving a lengthy exposition of general philosophy, which, in addition to the particular inconvenience its presence would have here, would lead to the repetition of things elsewhere explained. Taking the position that history is the work, not of the abstract individual, but of reason or providence, as admitted, I intend rather to correct an erroneous mode of expressing that doctrine which I believe that I have detected. I mean the form given to it by Vico and by Hegel, according to which Providence or Reason makes use of the particular ends and passions of men, in order to conduct them unconsciously to more lofty spiritual conditions, making use for this purpose of benevolent cunning.
Were this form exact, or were it necessary to take it literally (and not simply as an imaginative and provisional expression of the truth), I greatly fear that a shadow of dualism and transcendency would appear in the heart of the idealistic conception. For in this position of theirs toward the Idea or Providence, individuals would have to be considered, if not as deluded (satisfied indeed beyond their desires and hopes), then certainly as illuded, even though benevolently illuded. Individuals and Providence, or individuals and Reason, would not make one, but two; and the individual would be inferior and the Idea superior—that is to say, dualism and the reciprocal transcendency of God and the world would persist. This, on the other hand, would not be at variance from the historical point of view with what has been several times observed as to the theological residue at the bottom of Hegel's, and yet more of Vico's, thought. Now the claim of the idealistic conception is that individual and Idea make one and not two—that is to say, perfectly coincide and are identified. For this reason, there must be no talking (save metaphorically) of the wisdom of the Idea and of the folly or illusion of individuals.
Nevertheless it seems indubitably certain that the individual acts through the medium of infinite illusions, proposing to himself ends that he fails to attain and attaining ends that he has not seen. Schopenhauer (imitating Hegel) has made popular the illusions of love, by means of which the will leads the individual to propagate the species; and we all know that illusions are not limited to those that men and women exercise toward one another (les tromperies réciproques), but that they enter into our every act, which is always accompanied by hopes and mirages that are not followed by realization. And the illusion of illusions seems to be this: that the individual believes himself to be toiling to live and to intensify his life more and more, whereas he is really toiling to die. He wishes to see his work completed as the affirmation of his life, and its completion is the passing away of the work; he toils to obtain peace in life, but peace is on the contrary death, which alone is peace. How then are we to deny this dualism between the illusion of the individual and the reality of the work, between the individual and the Idea? How are we to refute the only explanation which seems to compose in some measure the discord—namely, that the Idea turns the illusions of the individual to its own ends, even though this doctrine lead inevitably to a sort of transcendency of the Idea?
But the real truth is that what results from the observations and objections above exposed is not the illusion of the individual who loves, who tries to complete his work, who sighs for peace, but rather the illusion of him who believes that the individual is illuded: the illusory is the illusion itself. And this illusion appears in the phenomenology of the spirit as the result of the well-known abstractive process, which breaks up unity in an arbitrary manner and in this case separates the result from the process or actual acting, in which alone the former is real; the accompaniment from the accompanied, which is all one with the accompaniment, because there is not spirit and its escort, but only the one spirit in its development, the single moments of the process, of the continuity, which is their soul; and so on. That illusion arises in the individual when he begins to reflect upon himself, and at the beginning of that reflection, which is at the same time a dialectical process. But in concrete reflection, or rather in concrete consciousness, he discovers that there is no end that has not been realized, as well as it could, in the process, in which it was never an absolute end—that is to say, an abstract end, but both a means and an end.
To return to the popular theory of Schopenhauer, only he who looks upon men as animals, or worse than animals, can believe that love is a process that leads only to the biological propagation of the species, when every man knows that he fecundates his own soul above all prior to the marriage couch, and that images and thoughts and projects and actions are created before children and in addition to them. Certainly, we are conscious of the moments of an action as it develops—that is to say, of its passage and not of its totality seen in the light of a new spiritual situation, such as we strive to obtain when, as we say, we leave the tumult behind us and set ourselves to write our own history. But there is no illusion, either now or then; neither now nor then is there the abstract individual face to face with a Providence who succeeds in deceiving him for beneficial ends, acting rather as a doctor than as a serious educator, and treating the race of men as though they were animals to train and make use of, instead of men to educate—that is to say, develop.
After having concentrated the mind upon a thought of Vico and of Hegel, can it be possible to set ourselves down to examine those of others which afford material to the controversies of historians and methodologists of history of our time? These represent the usual form in which appear the problems concerning the relation between the individual and the Idea, between pragmatic and idealistic history. Perhaps the patience necessary for the descent into low haunts is meritorious and our duty; perhaps there may be some useful conclusion to be drawn from these common disputes; but I must beg to be excused for not taking part in them and for limiting myself to the sole remark that the question which has been for some time discussed, whether history be the history of 'masses' or of 'individuals,' would be laughable in its very enunciation, if we were to understand by 'mass' what the word implies, a complex of individuals. And since it is not a good method to attribute laughable ideas to adversaries, it may be supposed that on this occasion what is meant by 'mass' is something else, which moves the mass of individuals. In this case, anyone can see that the problem is the same as that which has just been examined. The conflict between 'collectivistic' and 'individualistic' historiography will never be composed so long as the former assigns to collectivity the power that is creative of ideas and institutions, and the latter assigns it to the individual of genius, for both affirmations are true in what they include and false in what they exclude—that is to say, not only in their exclusion of the opposed thesis, but also in the tacit exclusion, which they both make, of totality as idea.
A warning as to a historiographical method, so similar in appearance to that which I have been defending as to be confounded with it, may perhaps be more opportune. This method, which is variously called sociological, institutional, and of values, preserves among the variety of its content and the inequality of mental level noticeable in its supporters the general and constant characteristic of believing that true history consists of the history of societies, institutions, and human values, not of individual values. The history of individuals, according to this view, is excluded, as being a parallel or inferior history, and its inferiority is held to be due either to the slight degree of interest that it is capable of arousing or to its lack of intelligibility. In the latter case (by an inversion on this occasion of the attitude of contempt which was noted in pragmatic history) it is handed over to chronicle or romance. But in such dualism as this, and in the disagreement which persists owing to that dualism, lies the profound difference between the empirical and naturalistic conceptions of value, of institutions, and of societies, and the idealistic conception. This conception does not contemplate the establishment of an abstract history of the spirit, of the abstract universal, side by side with or beyond abstract individualistic or pragmatic history, but the understanding that individual and idea, taken separately, are two equivalent abstractions, each equally unfitted for supplying its subject to history, and that true history is the history of the individual in so far as he is universal and of the universal in so far as individual. It is not a question of abolishing Pericles to the advantage of politics, or Plato to the advantage of philosophy, or Sophocles to the advantage of tragedy; but to think and to represent politics, philosophy, and tragedy as Pericles, Plato, and Sophocles, and these as each one of the others in one of their particular moments. Because if each one of these is the shadow of a dream outside its relation with the spirit, so likewise is the spirit outside its individualizations, and to attain to universality in the conception of history is to render both equally secure with that security which they mutually confer upon one another. Were the existence of Pericles, of Sophocles, and of Plato indifferent, would not the existence of the idea have for that very reason been pronounced indifferent? Let him who cuts individuals out of history but pay close attention and he will perceive that either he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he has cut out with them history itself.
[VII]
CHOICE AND PERIODIZATION
Since a fact is historical in so far as it is thought, and since nothing exists outside thought, there can be no sense whatever in the question, What are historical facts and what are non-historical facts? A non-historical fact would be a fact that has not been thought and would therefore be non-existent, and so far no one has yet met with a non-existent fact. A historical thought links itself to and follows another historical thought, and then another, and yet another; and however far we navigate the great sea of being, we never leave the well-defined sea of thought. But it remains to be explained how the illusion is formed that there are two orders of facts, historical and non-historical. The explanation is easy when we recollect what has been said as to the chroniclizing of history which dies as history, leaving behind it the mute traces of its life, and also as to the function of erudition or philology, which preserves these traces for the ends of culture, arranging scattered items of news, documents, and monuments in an orderly manner. News, documents, and monuments are innumerable, and to collect them all would not only be impossible, but contrary to the ends themselves of culture, which, though aided in its work by the moderate and even copious supply of such things, would be hindered and suffocated by their exuberance, not to say infinity. We consequently observe that the annotator of news transcribes some items and omits the rest; the collector of papers arranges and ties up in a bundle a certain number of them, tearing up or burning or sending to the dealer in such things a very large quantity, which forms the majority; the collector of antiques places some objects in glass cases, others in temporary safe custody, others he resolutely destroys or allows to be destroyed; if he does otherwise, he is not an intelligent collector, but a maniacal amasser, well fitted to provide (as he has provided) the comic type of the antiquarian for fiction and comedy. For this reason, not only are papers jealously collected and preserved in public archives, and lists made of them, but efforts are also made to discard those that are useless. It is for this reason that in the recensions of philologists we always hear the same song in praise of the learned man who has made a 'sober' use of documents, of blame for him who has followed a different method and included what is vain and superfluous in his volumes of annals, of selections from archives, or of collections of documents. All learned men and philologists, in fact, select, and all are advised to select. And what is the logical criterion of this selection? There is none: no logical criterion can be named that shall determine what news or what documents are or are not useful and important, just because we are here occupied with a practical and not with a scientific problem. Indeed, this lack of a logical criterion is the foundation of the sophism that tyrannizes over maniacal collectors, who reasonably affirm that everything can be of use, and would therefore unreasonably preserve everything—they wear themselves out in accumulating old clothes and odds and ends of all sorts, over which they mount guard with jealous affection. The criterion is the choice itself, conditioned, like every economic act, by knowledge of the actual situation, and in this case by the practical and scientific needs of a definite moment or epoch. This selection is certainly conducted with intelligence, but not with the application of a philosophic criterion, and is justified only in and by itself. For this reason we speak of the fine tact, or scent, or instinct of the collector or learned man. Such a process of selection may quite well make use of apparent logical distinctions, as those between public and private facts, capital and secondary documents, beautiful or ugly, significant or insignificant monuments; but in final analysis the decision is always given from practical motives, and is summed up in the act of preserving or neglecting. Now from this preserving or neglecting, in which our action is realized, is afterward invented an objective quality, attributed to facts, which leads to their being spoken of as 'facts that are worthy' and 'facts that are not worthy of history,' of 'historical' and 'non-historical' facts. But all this is an affair of imagination, of vocabulary, and of rhetoric, which in no way changes the substance of things.
When history is confounded with erudition and the methods of the one are unduly transferred to the other, and when the metaphorical distinction that has just been noted is taken in a literal sense, we are asked how it is possible to avoid going astray in the infinity of facts, and with what criterion it is possible to effect the separation of 'historical' facts from 'those that are not worthy of history.' But there is no fear of going astray in history, because, as we have seen, the problem is in every case prepared by life, and in every case the problem is solved by thought, which passes from the confusion of life to the distinctness of consciousness; a given problem with a given solution: a problem that generates other problems, but is never a problem of choice between two or more facts, but on each occasion a creation of the unique fact, the fact thought. Choice does not appear in it, any more than in art, which passes from the obscurity of sentiment to the clearness of the representation, and is never embarrassed between the images to be chosen, because itself creates the image, the unity of the image.
By thus confounding two things, not only is an insoluble problem created, but the very distinction between facts that can and facts that cannot be neglected is also denaturalized and rendered void. This distinction is quite valid as regards erudition, for facts that can be neglected are always facts—that is to say, they are traces of facts, in the form of news, documents, and monuments, and for this reason one can understand how they can be looked upon as a class to be placed side by side with the other class of facts that cannot be neglected. But non-historical facts—that is to say, facts that have not been thought—would be nothing, and when placed beside historical facts—that is to say, thought as a species of the same genus—they would communicate their nullity to those also, and would dissolve their own distinctness, together with the concept of history.
After this, it does not seem necessary to examine the characteristics that have been proposed as the basis for this division of facts into historical and non-historical. The assumption being false, the manner in which it is treated in its particulars remains indifferent and without importance in respect to the fundamental criticism of the division itself. It may happen (and this is usually the case) that the characteristics and the differences enunciated have some truth in themselves, or at least offer some problem for solution: for example, when by historical facts are meant general facts and by non-historical facts those that are individual. Here we find the problem of the relation of the individual and the universal. Or, again, by historical facts are sometimes meant those that treat of history proper, and by non-historical the stray references of chronicles, and here we find the problem as to the relation between history and chronicle. But regarded as an attempt to decide logically of what facts history should treat and what neglect, and to assign to each its quality, such divisions are all equally erroneous.
The periodization of history is subject to the same criticism. To think history is certainly to divide it into periods, because thought is organism, dialectic, drama, and as such has its periods, its beginning, its middle, and its end, and all the other ideal pauses that a drama implies and demands. But those pauses are ideal and therefore inseparable from thought, with which they are one, as the shadow is one with the body, silence with sound: they are identical and changeable with it. Christian thinkers divided history into that which preceded and that which followed the redemption, and this periodization was not an addition to Christian thought, but Christian thought itself. We modern Europeans divide it into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. This periodization has been subject to a great deal of refined criticism on the part of those who hold that it came to be introduced anyhow, almost dishonestly, without the authority of great names, and without the advice of the philosophers and the methodologists being asked on the matter. But it has maintained itself and will maintain itself so long as our consciousness shall persist in its present phase. The fact of its having been insensibly formed would appear to be rather a merit than a demerit, because this means that it was not due to the caprice of an individual, but has followed the development of modern consciousness itself. When antiquity has nothing more to tell us who still feel the need of studying Greek and Latin, Greek philosophy and Roman law; when the Middle Ages have been superseded (and they have not been superseded yet); when a new social form, different from that which emerged from the ruins of the Middle Ages, has supplanted our own; then the problem itself and the historical outlook which derives from it will also be changed, and perhaps antiquity and the Middle Ages and modern times will all be contained within a single epoch, and the pauses be otherwise distributed. And what has been said of these great periods is to be understood of all the others, which vary according to the variety of historical material and the various modes of viewing it. It has sometimes been said that every periodization has a 'relative' value. But we must say 'both relative and absolute,' like all thought, it being understood that the periodization is intrinsic to thought and determined by the determination of thought.
However, the practical needs of chroniclism and of learning make themselves felt here also. Just as in metrical treatises the internal rhythm of a poem is resolved into external rhythm and divided into syllables and feet, into long and short vowels, tonic and rhythmic accents, into strophes and series of strophes, and so on, so the internal time of historical thought (that time which is thought itself) is derived from chroniclism converted into external time, or temporal series, of which the elements are spatially separated from one another. Scheme and facts are no longer one, but two, and the facts are disposed according to the scheme, and divided according to the scheme into major and minor cycles (for example, according to hours, days, months, years, centuries, and millenniums, where the calculation is based upon the rotations and revolutions of the earth upon itself and round the sun). Such is chronology, by means of which we know that the histories of Sparta, Athens, and Rome filled the thousand years preceding Christ, that of the Lombards, the Visigoths, and the Franks the first millennium after Christ, and that we are still in the second millennium. This mode of chronology can be pursued by means of particularizing incidents thus: that the Empire of the West ended in A.D. 476 (although it did not really end then or had already ended previously); that Charlemagne the Frank was crowned Emperor at Rome by Pope Leo III in the year 800; that America was discovered in 1492, and that the Thirty Years War ended in 1648. It is of the greatest use to us to know these things, or (since we really know nothing in this way) to acquire the capacity of so checking references to facts that we are able to find them easily and promptly when occasion arises. Certainly no one thinks of speaking ill of chronologies and chronographies and tables and synoptic views of history, although in using them we run the risk (and in what thing done by man does he not run a risk?) of seeing worthy folk impressed with the belief that the number produces the event, as the hand of the clock, when it touches the sign of the hour, makes the clock strike; or (as an old professor of mine used to say) that the curtain fell upon the acting of ancient history in 476, to rise again immediately afterward on the beginning of the Middle Ages.
But such fancies are not limited to the minds of the ingenuous and inattentive; they constitute the base of that error owing to which a distinction of periods, which shall be what is called objective and natural, is desired and sought after. Christian chronographers had already introduced this ontological meaning into chronology, making the millenniums of the world's history correspond with the days of the creation or the ages of man's life. Finally, Ferrari in Italy and Lorenz in Germany (the latter ignorant of his Italian predecessor) conceived a theory of historical periods according to generations, calculated in periods of thirty-one years and a fraction, or of thirty-three years and a fraction, and grouped as tetrads or triads, in periods of a hundred and twenty-five years or a century. But, without dwelling upon numerical and chronographic schemes, all doctrines that represent the history of nations as proceeding according to the stages of development of the individual, of his psychological development, of the categories of the spirit, or of anything else, are due to the same error, which is that of rendering periodization external and natural. All are mythological, if taken in the naturalistic sense, save when these designations are employed empirically—that is to say, when chronology is used in chroniclism and erudition in a legitimate manner. We must also repeat a warning as to the care to be employed in recognizing important problems, which sometimes have first appeared through the medium of those erroneous inquiries, and as to the truths that have been seen or caught a glimpse of by these means. This exempts us (as we remarked above in relation to the criteria of choice) from examining those doctrines in the particularity of their various determinations, because in this respect, if their assumption be obviously fantastic, their value is consequently nil. Nil, as the value of all those æsthetic constructions is nil which claim to pass from the abstractions, by means of which they reduce the organism of the work of art to fragments for practical ends, to the explanation of the nature of art and to the judgment and history of the creations of human imagination.
[VIII]
DISTINCTION (SPECIAL HISTORIES) AND DIVISION
The conception of history that we have reached—namely, that which has not its documents outside itself, but in itself, which has not its final and causal explanation outside itself, but within itself, which has not philosophy outside itself, but coincides with philosophy, which has not the reason for its definite form and rhythm outside itself, but within itself—identifies history with the act of thought itself, which is always philosophy and history together. And with this it debarrasses it of the props and plasters applied to it as though to an invalid in need of external assistance. For they really did produce an infirmity through their very insistence in first imagining and then treating a non-existent infirmity.
Doubtless the autonomy thus attained is a great advantage; but at first sight it is not free from a grave objection. When all the fallacious distinctions formerly believed in have been cancelled, it seems that nothing remains for history as an act of thought but the immediate consciousness of the individual-universal, in which all distinctions are submerged and lost. And this is mysticism, which is admirably adapted for feeling oneself at unity with God, but is not adapted for thinking the world nor for acting in the world.
Nor does it seem useful to add that unity with God does not exclude consciousness of diversity, of change, of becoming. For it can be objected that consciousness of diversity either derives from the individual and intuitive element, and in this case it is incomprehensible how such an element can subsist in its proper form of intuition, in thought, which always universalizes; or if it is said to be the result of the act of thought itself, then the distinction, believed to have been abolished, reappears in a strengthened form, and the asserted indistinct simplicity of thought remains shaken. A mysticism which should insist upon particularity and diversity, a historical mysticism, in fact, would be a contradiction in terms, for mysticism is unhistorical and anti-historical by its very nature.
But these objections retain their validity precisely when the act of thought is conceived in the mystical manner—that is to say, not as an act of thought, but as something negative, the simple result of the negation by reason of empirical distinctions, which certainly leaves thought free of illusions, but not yet truly full of itself. To sum up, mysticism, which is a violent reaction from naturalism and transcendency, yet retains traces of what it has denied, because it is incapable of substituting anything for it, and thus maintains its presence, in however negative a manner. But the really efficacious negation of empiricism and transcendency, their positive negation, is brought about not by means of mysticism, but of idealism; not in the immediate, but in the mediated consciousness; not in indistinct unity, but in the unity that is distinction, and as such truly thought.
The act of thought is the consciousness of the spirit that is consciousness; and therefore that act is auto-consciousness. And auto-consciousness implies distinction in unity, distinction between subject and object, theory and practice, thought and will, universal and particular, imagination and intellect, utility and morality, or however these distinctions of and in unity are formulated, and whatever may be the historical forms and denominations which the eternal system of distinctions, perennis philosophia, may assume. To think is to judge, and to judge is to distinguish while unifying, in which the distinguishing is not less real than the unifying, and the unifying than the distinguishing—that is to say, they are real, not as two diverse realities, but as one reality, which is dialectical unity (whether it be called unity or distinction).
The first consequence to be drawn from this conception of the spirit and of thought is that when empirical distinctions have been overthrown history does not fall into the indistinct; when the will-o'-the-wisps have been extinguished, darkness does not supervene, because the light of the distinction is to be found in history itself. History is thought by judging it, with that judgment which is not, as we have shown, the evaluation of sentiments, but the intrinsic knowledge of facts. And here its unity with philosophy is all the more evident, because the better philosophy penetrates and refines its distinctions, the better it penetrates the particular; and the closer its embrace of the particular, the closer its possession of its own proper conceptions. Philosophy and historiography progress together, indissolubly united.
Another consequence to be deduced from the above, and one which will perhaps seem to be more clearly connected with the practice of historiography, is the refutation of the false idea of a general history, superior to special histories. This has been called a history of histories, and is supposed to be true and proper history, having beneath it political, economic, and institutional histories, moral history or the history of the sentiments and ethical ideals, the history of poetry and art, the history of thought and of philosophy. But were this so, a dualism would arise, with the usual result of every dualism, that each one of the two terms, having been ill distinguished, reveals itself as empty. In this case, either general history shows itself to be empty, having nothing to do when the special histories have accomplished their work, or particular histories do so, when they fail even to pick up the crumbs of the banquet, all of which has been voraciously devoured by the other. Sometimes recourse is had to a feeble expedient, and to general history is accorded the treatment of one of the subjects of the special histories, the latter being then grouped apart from that. Of this arrangement the best that can be said is that it is purely verbal and does not designate a logical distinction and opposition, and the worst that can happen is that a real value should be attributed to it, because in this case a fantastic hierarchy is established, which makes it impossible to understand the genuine development of the facts. And there is practically no special history that has not been promoted to be a general history, now as political or social history, to which those of literature, art, philosophy, religion, and the lesser sides of life should supply an appendix; now as history of the ideas or progress of the mind, where social history and all the others are placed in the second line; now as economic history, where all the others are looked upon as histories or chronicles of 'superstructures' derived from economic development in an illusory manner, while the former is held to have developed in some mysterious way by means of unknown powers, without thought and will, or producing thought and will, in fancies and velleities, like so many bubbles on the surface of its course. We must be firm in maintaining against the theory of general history that there does not exist anything real but special histories, because thought thinks facts to the extent that it discerns a special aspect of them, and only and always constructs histories of ideas, of imaginations, of political actions, of apostolates, and the like.
But it is equally just and advantageous to maintain the opposite thesis: that nothing exists but general history. In this way is refuted the false notion of the speciality of histories, understood as a juxtaposition of specialities. This fallacy is correctly noted by the critics in all histories which expose the various orders of facts one after the other as so many strata and (to employ the critics' word) compartments or little boxes, containing political history, industrial and commercial history, history of customs, religious history, history of literature and of art, and so on, under so many separate headings. These divisions are merely literary, they may possess some utility as such, but in the case under consideration they do not fulfil merely a literary function, but attempt that of historical understanding, and thereby give evidence of their defect, in thus presenting these histories as without relation between one another, not dialecticized, but aggregated. It is quite clear that history remains to be written after the writing of those histories in this disjointed manner. Abstract distinction and abstract unity are both equally misunderstandings of concrete distinction and concrete unity, which is relation.
And when the relation is not broken and history is thought in the concrete, it is seen that to think one aspect is to think all the others at the same time. Thus it is impossible to understand completely the doctrine, say, of a philosopher, without having to some extent recourse to the personality of the man himself, and, by distinguishing the philosopher from the man, at the same time qualifying not only the philosopher but the man, and uniting these two distinct characteristics as a relation of life and philosophy. The same is to be said of the distinction between the philosopher as philosopher and as orator or artist, as subject to his private passions or as rising to the execution of his duty, and so on. This means that we cannot think the history of philosophy save as at the same time social, political, literary, religious, and ethical history, and so on. This is the source of the illusion that one in particular of these histories is the whole of them, or that that one from which a start is made, and which answers to the predilections and to the competence of the writer, is the foundation of all the others. It also explains why it is sometimes said that the 'history of philosophy' is also the 'philosophy of history,' or that 'social history' is the true 'history of philosophy,' and so on. A history of philosophy thoroughly thought out is truly the whole of history (and in like manner a history of literature or of any other form of the spirit), not because it annuls the other in itself, but because all the others are present in it. Hence the demand that historians shall acquire universal minds and a doctrine that shall also be in a way universal, and the hatred of specialist historians, pure philosophers, pure men of letters, pure politicians, or pure economists, who, owing precisely to their one-sidedness, fail even to understand the speciality that they claim to know in its purity, but possess only in skeleton form that is to say, in its abstractness.
And here a distinction becomes clear to us, with which it is impossible to dispense in thinking history: the distinction between form and matter, owing to which, for example, we understand art by referring it to matter (emotions, sentiments, passions, etc.) to which the artist has given form; or philosophy by referring it to the facts which gave rise to the problems that the thinker formulated and solved, or the action of the politician by referring it to the aspirations and ideas with which he was faced, and which supplied the material he has shaped with genius, as an artist of practical life—that is to say, we understand these things by always distinguishing an external from an internal history, or an external history that is made into an internal history. This distinction of matter and form, of external and internal, would give rise again to the worst sort of dualism, would lead us to think of the pragmatical imagination of man who strives against his enemy nature, if it did not assume an altogether internal and dialectical meaning in its true conception. Because from what has been said it is easy to see that external and internal are not two realities or two forms of reality, but that external and internal, matter and form, both appear in turn as form in respect to one another, and this materialization of each to idealize itself in the other is the perpetual movement of the spirit as relation and circle: a circle that is progress just because neither of these forms has the privilege of functioning solely as form, and neither has the misfortune of functioning solely as matter. What is the matter of artistic and philosophical history? What is called social and moral history? And what is the matter of this history? Artistic and philosophical history. From this clearing up of the relation between matter and form, that false mode of history is refuted which sets facts on one side and ideas on the other, as two rival elements, and is therefore never able to pay its debt and show how ideas are generated from facts and facts from ideas, because that generation must be conceived in its truth as a perpetually rendering vain of one of the elements in the unity of the other.
If history is based upon distinction (unity) and coincides with philosophy, the high importance that research into the autonomy of one or the other special history attains in historiographical development is perfectly comprehensible, but this is merely the reflection of philosophical research, and is often troubled and lacking in precision. All know what a powerful stimulus the new conception of imagination and art gave to the conception of history, and therefore also to mythology and religion, which were being developed with slowness and difficulty during the eighteenth to triumph at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is set down to the creation of the history of poetry and myth in the works of Vico in the first place and then of Herder and others, and of the history of the figurative arts in the works of Winckelmann and others. And to the clearer conception of philosophy, law, customs, and language is due their renewal in the respective historiographical fields, at the hands of Hegel, Savigny, and Humboldt, and other creators and improvers of history, celebrated on this account. This also explains why there has been so much dispute as to whether history should be described as history of the state or as history of culture, and as to whether the history of culture represents an original aspect beyond that of the state or greater than it, as to whether the progress narrated in history is only intellectual or also practical and moral, and so on. These discussions must be referred to the fundamental philosophical inquiry into the forms of the spirit, their distinction and relation, and to the precise mode of relation of each one to the other.[1]
But although history distinguishes and unifies, it never divides—that is to say, separates; and the divisions of history which have been and are made do not originate otherwise than as the result of the same practical and abstractive process that we have seen break up the actuality of living history to collect and arrange the inert materials in the temporal scheme, rendered extrinsic. Histories already produced, and as such past, receive in this way titles (every thought is 'without title' in its actuality—that is to say, it has only itself for title), and each one is separated from the other, and all of them, thus separated, are classified under more or less general empirical conceptions, by means of classifications that more or less cross one another. We may admire copious lists of this sort in the books of methodologists, all of them proceeding, as is inevitable, according to one or the other of these general criteria: the criterion of the quality of the objects (histories of religions, customs, ideas, institutions, etc., etc.), and that of temporal-spatial arrangement (European, Asiatic, American, ancient, medieval, of modern times, of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of modern Greece, of the Rome of the Middle Ages, etc.); in conformity with the abstract procedure which, when dividing the concept, is led to posit on the one hand abstract forms of the spirit (objects) and on the other abstract intuitions (space and time). I shall not say that those titles and divisions are useless, nor even those tables, but shall limit myself to the' remark that the history of philosophy, of art, or of any other ideally distinct history, when understood as a definite book or discourse, becomes empirical for the reason already given, that true distinction is ideal, and a discourse or a book in its concreteness contains not only distinction but unity and totality, and to look upon either as incorporating only one side of the real is arbitrary. And I shall also observe that as there are histories of philosophy and of art in the empirical sense, so also nothing forbids our talking in the same sense of a general history, separate from special histories, indeed even of a history of progress and one of decadence, of good and evil, of truth and error.
The confusion between division and distinction—that is to say, between the empirical consideration that breaks up history into special histories and the philosophical consideration which always unifies and distinguishes as it unifies—is the cause of errors analogous to those that we have seen to result from such a process. To this are due above all the many disquisitions on the 'problem' and on the 'limits' of this or that history or group of special histories empirically constituted. The problem does not exist, and the limits are impossible to assign because they are conventional, as is finally recognized with much trouble, and as could be recognized with much less trouble if a start were made, not from the periphery, but from the centre—that is to say, from gnoseological analysis. A graver error is the creation of an infinity of entia imaginationis, taken for metaphysical entities and forms of the spirit, and the pretension that arises from this of developing the history of abstractions as though they were so many forms of the spirit with independent lives of their own, whereas the spirit is one. Hence the innumerable otiose problems with fantastic solutions met with in historical books, which it is here unnecessary to record. Every one is now able to draw these obvious consequences for himself and to make appropriate reflections concerning them. It is further obvious that the entia imaginations, in the same way as the 'choice' of facts, and the chronological schematization or dating of them, enter as a subsidiary element into any concrete exposition of historical thought, because the distinction of thinking and abstraction is an ideal distinction, which operates only in the unity of the spirit.
[1] See Appendix II.
[IX]
THE 'HISTORY OF NATURE' AND HISTORY
We must cease the process of classifying referred to just now, and also that of the illusion of naturalism connected with it, by means of which imaginary entities created by abstraction are changed into historical facts and classificatory schemes into history, if we wish to understand the difference between history that is history and that due to what are called the natural sciences. This is also called history—'history of nature'—but is so only in name. Some few years ago a lively protest was made[1] against the confusion of these two forms of mental labour, one of which offers us genuine history, such as might, for instance, be that of the Peloponnesian War or of Hannibal's wars or of ancient Egyptian civilization, and the other a spurious history, such as that known as the history of animal organisms, of the earth's structure or geology, of the formation of the solar system or cosmogony. It was observed with reason that in many treatises the one has been wrongly connected with the other—that is to say, history of civilization with history of nature, as though the former follows the latter historically. The bottomless abyss between the two was pointed out. This has been observed, however, in a confused way by all, and better by historians of purely historical temperament, who have an instinctive repugnance for natural history and hold themselves carefully aloof from it. It was remembered with reason that the history of historians has always the individually determinate as its object, and proceeds by internal reconstruction, whereas that of the naturalists depends upon types and abstractions and proceeds by analogies. Finally, this so-called history or quasi-history was very accurately defined as an apparently chronological arrangement of things spatially distinct, and it was proposed to describe it with a new and proper name, that of Metastoria.
Indeed, constructions of this sort are really nothing but classificatory schemes, from the more simple to the more complex. Their terms are obtained by abstract analyses and generalization, and their series appears to the imagination as a history of the successive development of the more complex from the more simple. Their right to exist as classificatory schemes is incontestable, and their utility is also incontestable, for they avail themselves of imagination to assist learning and to aid the memory.
This only becomes contestable when they are estranged from themselves, lose their real nature, lay claim to illegitimate functions, and take their imaginary historicity too seriously. We find this in the metaphysic of naturalism, especially in evolutionism, which has been its most recent form. This is due, not so much to the men of science (who are as a rule cautious and possess a more or less clear consciousness of the limits of those schemes and series) as to the dilettante scientists and dilettante philosophers to whom we owe the many books that undertake to narrate the origin of the world, and which, aided by the acrisia of their authors, run on without meeting any obstacle, from the cell, indeed from the nebula, to the French Revolution, and even to the socialist movements of the nineteenth century. 'Universal histories,' and therefore cosmological romances (as we have already remarked in relation to universal histories), are composed, not of pure thought, which is criticism, but of thought mingled with imagination, which finds its outlet in myths. It is useless to prove in detail that the evolutionists of to-day are creators of myths, and that they weary themselves with attempts to write the first chapters of Genesis in modern style (their description is more elaborate, but they confuse such description with history in a manner by no means inferior to that of Babylonian or Israelitish priests), because this becomes evident as soon as such works are placed in their proper position. Their logical origin will at once make clear their true character.
But setting aside these scientific monstrosities, already condemned by the constant attitude of restraint and scepsis toward them on the part of all scientifically trained minds—condemned, too, by the very fact that they have had to seek and have found their fortune at the hands of the crowd or 'great public,' and have fallen to the rank of popular propaganda—we must here determine more precisely how these classificatory schemes of historiographical appearance are formed and how they operate. With this object, it is well to observe that classificatory schemes and apparent histories do not appear to be confined to the field of what are called the natural sciences or sub-human world, but appear also in that of the moral sciences or sciences of the human world. And to adduce simple and perspicuous examples, it often happens that in the abstract analysis of language and the positing of the types of the parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and so on, or in the analysis of the word into syllables and sounds, or of style into proper or metaphorical words and into various classes of metaphors, we construct classes that go from the more simple to the more complex. This gives rise to the illusion of history of language, exposed as the successive acquisition of the various parts of speech or as the passage from the single sound to the syllable (monosyllabic languages), from the syllable to the aggregate of syllables (plurisyllabic languages), from words to propositions, metres, rhymes, and so on. These are imaginary histories that have never been developed elsewhere than in the studies of scientists. In like manner, literary styles that have been abstractly distinguished and arranged in series of increasing complexity (for example, lyric, epic, drama) have given rise and continue to give rise to the thought of a schematic arrangement of poetry, which, for example, should appear during a first period as lyric, a second as epic, a third as drama.
The same has happened with regard to the classifications of abstract political, economic, philosophical forms, and so on, all of which have been followed by their shadows in the shape of imaginative history. The repugnance that historians experience in attaching their narratives to naturalistic-mythological prologues—that is to say, in linking together in matrimony a living being and a corpse—is also proved by their reluctance to admit scraps of abstract history into concrete history, for they at once reveal their heterogeneity in regard to one another by their mere appearance. De Sanctis has often been reproached for not having begun his History of Italian Literature with an account of the origins of the Italian language and of its relations with Latin, and even with the linguistic family of Indo-European languages, and of the races that inhabit the various parts of Italy. An attempt has even been made to correct the design of that classic work by supplying, with a complete lack of historical sense, the introductions and additions that are not needed. But de Sanctis, who took great pains to select the best point of departure for the narrative of the history of Italian literature, and finally decided to begin with a brief sketch of the state of culture at the Suabian court and of the Sicilian poetical school, did not hesitate a moment in rejecting all abstractions of languages and races which to his true historical sense did not appear to be reconcilable with the tenzone of Ciullo, with the rhythms of Friar Jacob, or with the ballades of Guido Cavalcanti, which are quite concrete things.
We must also remember that plans for classification and pseudo-historical arrangements of their analogies are created not only upon the bodies of histories that are living and really reproducible and rethinkable, but also upon those that are dead—that is to say, upon news items, documents, and monuments. This observation makes more complete the identification of imaginary histories arising from the natural sciences with those which have their source in the moral sciences. The foundation of both is therefore very often not historical intelligence, but, on the contrary, the lack of it, and their end not only that of aiding living history and keeping it alive, but also the mediate end of assisting in the prompt handling of the remains and the cinders of the vanished world, the inert residues of history.
The efficacy of this enlargement of the concept of abstract history, which is analogical or naturalizing in respect to the field known as 'spiritual' (and thus separated from that empirically known as 'natural'), cannot be doubted by one who knows and remembers the great consequences that philosophy draws from the resolution of the realistic concept of 'nature' in the idealistic conception of 'construction,' which the human spirit makes of reality, looking upon it as nature. Kant worked upon the solution of this problem indefatigably and with subtlety; he gave to it the direction that it has followed down to our own days. And the consequence that we draw from it, in respect to the problem that now occupies us, is that an error was committed when, moved by the legitimate desire of distinguishing abstract from concrete history, naturalizing history from thinking history, genuine from fictitious history, a sort of agnosticism was reached, as a final result, by means of limiting history to the field of humanity, which was said to be cognoscible, and declaring all the rest to be the object of metastoria and the limit of human knowledge. This conclusion would lead again to a sort of dualism, though in a lofty sphere. But if metastoria also appears, as we have seen, in the human field, it is clear that the distinction as formulated stands in need of correction; and the agnosticism founded upon it vacillates and falls. There is not a double object before thought, man and nature, the one capable of treatment in one way, the other in another way, the first cognizable, and the second uncognizable and capable only of being constructed abstractly; but thought always thinks history, the history of reality that is one, and beyond thought there is nothing, for the natural object becomes a myth when it is affirmed as object, and shows itself in its true reality as nothing else but the human spirit itself, which schematized history that has been lived and thought, or the materials of the history that has already been lived and thought. The saying that nature has no history is to be understood in the sense that nature as a rational being capable of thought has not history, because it is not—or, let us say, it is nothing that is real. The opposite saying, that nature is also formative and possesses historical life, is to be taken in the other sense that reality, the sole reality (comprehending man and nature in itself, which are only empirically and abstractly separate), is all development and life.
What substantial difference can ever be discovered on the one hand between geological stratifications and the remains of vegetables and animals, of which it is possible to construct a prospective and indeed a serial arrangement, but which it is never possible to rethink in the living dialectic of their genesis, and on the other hand the relics of what is called human history, and not only that called prehistorical, but even the historical documents of our history of yesterday, which we have forgotten and no longer understand, and which we can certainly classify and arrange in a series, and build castles in the air about or allow our fancies to wander among, but which it is no longer possible really to think again? Both cases, which have been arbitrarily distinguished, are reducible to one single case. Even in what is called 'human history' there exists a 'natural history,' and what is called 'natural history' also was once 'human' history—that is to say, spiritual, although to us who have left it so far behind it seems to be almost foreign, so mummified and mechanicized has it become, if we glance at it but summarily and from the outside. Do you wish to understand the true history of a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man? First of all, try if it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man; and if it be not possible, or you do not care to do this, content yourself with describing and classifying and arranging in a series the skulls, the utensils, and the inscriptions belonging to those neolithic peoples. Do you wish to understand the history of a blade of grass? First and foremost, try to make yourself into a blade of grass, and if you do not succeed, content yourself with analysing the parts and even with disposing them in a kind of imaginative history. This leads to the idea from which I started in making these observations about historiography, as to history being contemporary history and chronicle being past history. We take advantage of the idea and at the same time confirm that truth by solving with its aid the antithesis between a history that is 'history' and a 'history of nature,' which, although it is history, was supposed to obey laws strangely at variance with those of the only history. It solves this antithesis by placing the second in the lower rank of pseudo-history.
[1] By the economist Professor Gotti, at the seventh congress of German historians, held at Heidelberg. The lecture can be read in print under the anything but clear or exact title of Die Grenzen der Geschichte (Leipzig, Duncker u. Humblot, 1904).
[APPENDIX I]
ATTESTED EVIDENCE
If true history is that of which an interior verification is possible, and is therefore history ideally contemporary and present, and if history by witnesses is lacking in truth and is not even false, but just neither false nor true (not a hoc est but a fertur), a legitimate question arises as to the origin and function of those innumerable propositions resumed from evidence critically thrashed out and 'held to be true,' although not verified, and perhaps never to be verified, but nevertheless employed even in most serious historical treatment. When we are writing the history of the doctrine known as the coincidentia oppositorum, or of the poem called I sepolcri, the Latin of the Cardinal di Cusa and the verse of Foscolo obviously belong to us, both as to the thoughts and the actual words, pronounced by ourselves to ourselves, and the certainty of those historical facts is at the same time logical truth. But that the De docta ignorantia was written between the end of 1439 and the early part of 1440, and Foscolo's poem on the return of the poet to Italy after his long military service in France, is evidence founded upon proofs, as to which we can only say that they are to be considered valid, because they have been to some extent attested, but we cannot claim them to be true. No amount of acute mental labour upon them can prevent another document or the better reading of an old document destroying them. Nevertheless, no one will treat of the works of the Cusan or of Foscolo without availing himself of the biographical details as to their authors which have been preserved.
An esteemed methodologist of our day has been tempted to found the faith placed in this order of evidence upon a sort of telepathy of the past, an almost spiritualistic revival. But there is nothing so mysterious in the genesis of that belief as to need a risky and fantastic explanation, to which even Horace's Jew would not give credence. On the contrary, it is a question of something that we can observe in process of formation in our private life of every day. We are noting down in our diary, for instance, certain of our acts, or striking the balance of our account. After a certain interval has elapsed those facts fade from memory and the only way of affirming to ourselves that they have happened and must be considered true is the evidence of our notes: the document bears witness; trust the book. We behave in a similar way in respect to the statements of others on the authority of their diaries or account-books. We presume that if the thing has been written down it answers to the truth. Doubtless this assumption, like every assumption, may turn out to be false in fact, owing to the note having been made in a moment of distraction or of hallucination, or too late, when the memory of the fact was already imprecise and lacking in certainty, or because it was capriciously made or made with the object of deceiving others. But just for this reason, written evidence is not usually accepted with closed eyes; its verisimilitude is examined and we confront it with other written evidence, we investigate the probity and accuracy of the writer or witness. It is just for this reason that the penal code threatens with pains and penalties those who alter or falsify documents. And although these and other subtle and severe precautions do not in certain cases prevent fraud, deception, and error (in the same way that the tribunals established for the purpose of condemning the guilty often send away the guilty unpunished and sometimes condemn the innocent), yet the use of documents and evidence works out on the whole in accordance with the truth; it is held to be useful and worthy of support and encouragement, because the injuries that it is liable to cause are greatly inferior to those that it prevents.
Now what men do with regard to their private affairs in daily life may be said to be done on a large scale by the human race when it delivers itself of the load of innumerable facts and fixes them externally where they are recoverable in a weakened form as unverifiable documentary evidence, yet are nevertheless such that as a whole we are justified in looking upon them end treating them as true. Historical faith then is not the result of telepathy or spiritualism, but of a wise economic provision, which the spirit continues to realize. In this way we understand historical work directed toward the prevention of alterations and deformations, and its acceptation of certain testimony, as 'what must be held to be true in the present state of science,' and its graduation of the rest as uncertain, probable, and most probable to be sometimes accepted in the expectation of ulterior inquiries. Finally, it explains the dislike of 'hypercriticism' when, not content with a constant refinement of criticism, hypercriticism contests the value of the most ingenuous and authoritative testimony. The reason is that it thus breaks the rules of the game that is being played sub regula, and only serves at the most to remind those apt to forget it that history by evidence is at bottom an altogether external history, never fundamental, true history, which is contemporary and present.
This genesis or nature of 'attested' evidence already contains the answer to the other question as to its function. It is clear that this cannot be to posit true history or to take its place, but to supply it with those secondary particulars which it would not be worth while to make the effort of keeping alive and complete in the mind, for this effort would result in damaging what is most important to us. Finally, whether the De docta ignorantia were written some time earlier or later is something that may quite well be determined by a different interpretation of this or that thought of Cusanus, but it does not affect the function that the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites exercises in the formation of logical science. Again, whether the Sepolcri was composed or planned prior to Foscolo's visit to France would without doubt change to some extent our representation of the gradual development of the soul and genius of the poet, but it would hardly at all change our mode of interpreting his great ode. Those who despair of historical truth, owing to the lack of a verifiable certainty of some particulars, or to the uncertainty and dubiety that surrounds it, resemble him who, having forgotten the chronicle of his life in this or that year, should think that he did not know himself in his present condition, which is both the recapitulation of his past and carries with it his past in all that it really concerns him to know. But, on the other hand, attested evidence that has been field to be true is a stimulus to us to search ourselves more closely, an enrichment of what we have found by means of analysis and meditation and a confirmation or proof of our thoughts, which are not to be neglected, especially when true evidence and attested evidence agree with one another. To refuse the assistance and the facilities afforded by attested evidence, owing to the fear that some of it may prove false, or because all of it possesses an external and somewhat general and vague character, would be to refuse the authority of the human race, and so to commit the sin of Descartes and of Malebranche. This great refusal does not concern or assist the understanding of history. All that does matter and does assist is that authority—including the authority of the human race—should never be allowed to take the place of the thought of humanity, to which, in any case, belongs the first place.
[APPENDIX II]
ANALOGY AND ANOMALY OF SPECIAL HISTORIES
In the course of the preceding theoretical explanations we have denied both the idea of a universal history (in time and space)[1] and that of a general history (of the spirit in its indiscriminate generality or unity),[2] and have insisted instead upon the opposite view with its two clauses: that history is always particular and always special, and that these two determinations constitute precisely concrete and effective universality and concrete and effective unity. What has been declared impossible, then, does not represent in any way a loss, for it is on the one hand fictitious universality or the universality of fancy, and on the other abstract universality, or, if it be preferred, confused universality. So-called universal histories have therefore shown themselves to be particular histories, which have assumed that title for purposes of literary notoriety, or as collections, views, and chroniclistical compilations of particular histories, or, finally, as romances. In like manner, general inclusive histories are either so only in name, or set different histories side by side, or they are metaphysical and metaphorical playthings.
As a result of this double but converging negation, it is also advisable to refute a common and deeply rooted belief (which we ourselves at one time shared to some extent)[3] that we should arrive at the re-establishment of the universality of the fancy: or that there are some among the special histories, constituted according to the various forms of the spirit (general and individual only in so far as every form of the spirit is the whole spirit in that form), which require universal treatment and others only treatment as monographs. The typical instance generally adduced is that of the difference between the history of philosophy and the history of poetry or of art. The subject of the former is supposed to be the one great philosophical problem that interests all men, of the latter the sentimental or imaginative problems of particular moments, or at the most of particular artists. Thus the former is supposed to be continuous, the latter discontinuous, the former capable of complete universal vision, the second only of a sequence of particular visions. But a more 'realistic' conception of philosophy deprives it of this privilege as compared with the history of art and poetry or of any other special history; for, appearances notwithstanding, it is not true that men have concentrated upon one philosophical problem only, whose successive solutions, less and less inadequate, compose a single line of progress, the universal history of the human spirit, affording support and unification to all other histories. The opposite is the truth: the philosophical problems that men have treated of and will treat of are infinite, and each one of them is always particularly and individually determined. The illusion as to the uniqueness of the problem is due to logical misapprehension, increased by historical contingencies, whence a problem which owing to religious motives seemed supreme has been looked upon as unique or fundamental, and groupings and generalizations made for practical ends have been held to be real identity and unity.[4] 'Universal' histories of philosophy, too, like the others, when we examine them with a good magnifying glass, are revealed as either particular histories of the problem that engages the philosopher-historian, or arbitrary artificial constructions, or tables and collections of many different historical sequences, in the manner of a manual or encyclopædia of philosophical history. Certainly nothing forbids the composition of abridgments of philosophical histories, containing classifications of particular problems and representing the principal thinkers of all peoples and of all times as occupied with one or another class of problem. This, however, is always a chroniclistical and naturalistic method of treating the history of philosophy, which only really lives when a new thinker connects the problems already set in the past and its intrinsic antecedents with the definite problem that occupies his attention. He provisionally sets aside others with a different connexion, though without for that reason suppressing them, intending rather to recall them when another problem makes their presence necessary. It is for this reason that even in those abridgments that seem to be the most complete and 'objective' (that is to say, 'material') a certain selection does appear, due to the theoretical interest of the writer, who never altogether ceases to be a historiographer-philosopher. The procedure is in fact just that of the history of art and poetry, where what is really historical treatment, living and complete, is the thought or criticism of individual poetical personalities, and the rest a table of criticisms, an abridgment due to contiguity of time or place, affinity of matter or similarity of temperament, or to degrees of artistic excellence. Nor must we say that every philosophic problem is linked to all the others and is always a problem of the whole of philosophy, thus differing from the cases of poetry and art, for there is no diversity here either, and the whole of history and the entire universe are immanent in every single work of art.
Now that we have likewise reduced philosophies of history to the rank of particular histories, it is scarcely necessary to demonstrate that the demand being made in several quarters for a 'universal' or 'general' history of science is without foundation. For such a history would be impossible to write, even if we were able to identify or compare the history of science with chat of philosophy. But it is doubly impossible both because there are comprised under the name of 'science' such diverse forms as sciences of observation and mathematical sciences, and also because in each of these classes themselves the several disciplines remain separate, owing to the irreducible variety of data and postulates from which they spring. If, as we have pointed out, every particular philosophical problem links and places itself in harmony with all other philosophical problems, every scientific problem tends, on the contrary, to shut itself up in itself, and there is no more destructive tendency in science than that of 'explaining' all the facts by means of a 'single principle,' substituting, that is to say, an unfruitful metaphysic for fruitful science, allowing an empty word to act as a magic wand, and by 'explaining everything' to 'explain' nothing at all. The unity admitted by the history of the sciences is not that which connects one theory with another and one science with another in an imaginary general history of science, but that which connects each science and each theory with the intellectual and social complex of the moment in which it appeared. But even here too we must utter the warning that in thus explaining their true nature we do not wish to contest the right to existence of tables and encyclopædias of the history of science, far less to throw discredit upon the present direction of studies, by means of which, at the call of the history of the sciences, useful Research is stimulated in directions that have been long neglected. Nor do we intend to move any objection to histories of science in the form of tables and encyclopædias on the ground that it is impossible for the same student to be equally competent as to problems of quite different nature, such as are those of the various sciences; for it is inconceivable that a philosopher exists with a capacity equal to the understanding of each and every philosophical problem (indeed, the mind of the best solver of certain problems is usually the more closed to others); or that a critic and historian of poetry and art exists who tastes and enjoys equally all forms of poetry and art, however versatile he be. Each one has his sphere marked out more or less narrowly, and each is universal only by means of his particularity.
Finally, we shall not repeat the same demonstration for political history and ethics, where the claim to represent the whole of history in a single line of development has had less occasion to manifest itself. It is usually more readily admitted there that every history is particular—that is to say, determined by the political and ethical problem or problems with which history is concerned in time and place, and which every history therefore occasionally rethinks from the beginning. The analogy, then, between different kinds of special history is to be considered perfect, and the anomaly between them excluded, for they all obey the principle of particularity, that is, particular universality (whatever be the appearance to the contrary). But if, as histories, they all proceed according to the nature of what we have explained as historiography, in so far as they are special each one conforms to the concept of its speciality. It is in this sense alone that each one is anomalous in respect to the others, preserving, that is to say, its own peculiar nature. We have explained that the claim to treat the history of poetry and of art in the same way as philosophy is erroneous, not only because it misconceives the true concept of history, but also because it misrepresents the nature of art, conceiving it as philosophy and dissipating it in a dialectic of concepts, or because it leaves out, in the history of art, just that by reason of which art is art, looking upon it as something secondary, or at best giving it a place beside the social or conceptual activities. This error is precisely analogous to that of those who from time to time suggest what they term the 'psychological' reform of philosophy—that is to say, they would like to treat it as dependent upon the psychology of philosophers and of the social environment, thus placing it on a level, sometimes with the history of the sentiments, at others with that of fancies and Utopias, or with what is not the history of philosophizing. Such persons lack the knowledge of what philosophy is, as the others lack the knowledge of poetry and art. Anyone desirous of arriving at a rapid knowledge of the difference between the history of philosophy and the history of poetry should observe how the one, owing to the nature of its object, is led to examine theories in so far as they are the work of pure mind, and therefore to develop a history in which thoughts represent the dramatis personæ, while the other is led by the nature of its object to examine works of art in so far as they are works of imagination, which gives expression to movements of feeling, and therefore to develop a history of imaginative and sensitive points of view. The former, therefore, though it does not neglect actions, events, and imagination, regards them as the humus of pure thought and takes the form of a history of concepts without persons, either real or imaginary, while the latter, which also does not neglect actions, events, and thoughts in its turn regards them as the humus of imaginary creations and takes the form of a history of ideal or imaginary personalities, which have divested themselves of the ballast of practical interests and of the curb of concepts. The plans, too, which they draw up and with which they cannot dispense, any more than can any human dialectic, answer to these different tendencies—that is to say, with the one they are schemes or general types of modes of thinking, with the other schemes containing ideal personalities.
If the history of philosophy has several times tried to devour the history of poetry and art, it may also be said to have several times tried to devour the history of practice, that of politics and ethics, or 'social history,' as people prefer to call it in our day. It has also been asserted that such history should be set free from the chroniclism in which it had become involved and assume a scientific and rigorous form. To do this, it was heedful to reduce it to a history of 'ideas,' which are the true and essential practical acts, because they generate them—that is to say, the error which we noted above in respect to poetry and art has here been repeated. What is peculiar to practical acts has been neglected, and only the 'ideas,' which are their antecedents and consequents, have been retained. But on other occasions the 'ideas' to which it was claimed to reduce practical acts were not really ideas or intellectual formations, but truly practical acts, sentiments, dispositions, customs, institutions. The originality of political and ethical history was thus unconsciously confirmed. Its object is just what can be designated with the single word institutions, taking the word in its widest signification—that is to say, understanding by it all practical arrangements of human individuals and societies, from the most recondite sentiments to the most obvious modes of life (which, too, are always will in action). All are equally historical productions, the sole effective historical productions perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a long history, of which we become conscious from time to time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we can now practically do, all our sentiments as so-called civilized men—courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, and the like—all our institutions in the strict sense of the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the spirit, utilitarian or moral)—the family, the state, commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on—have a long history; and according as one or other of those sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true 'nature'—that is to say, its historical genesis. Anyone who has followed the developments of modern social historiography with care and attention has been able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the chroniclistic chaos of disaggregated notes of events in ordered series of histories of social values, and that its field of research is the history of the human soul in its practical aspect; either when it produces general histories of civilization (always due to particular motives and limited by them), or when it presents histories of classes, peoples, social currents, sentiments, institutions, and so forth.
Biography, too (only when not limited to a mere chroniclistic collection of the experiences of an individual or to a poetical portrait, improperly regarded as a historical work), is the history of an 'institution' in the philosophical acceptation of the word and forms part of the history of practice: because the individual, in the same way as a people or a social class, is the formation of a character, or complex of specific attitudes and actions consequent upon them; and it is of this that historical biography consists, not of the individual looked upon as external or private or physical, or whatever it be called.
We might be expected to indicate the place or function of the history of science and of religion, in order to render to a certain extent complete this rapid review of special histories, in which general history realizes itself in turn—it never exists outside of them. But if science differs from philosophy in being partly theoretical and partly practical, and religion is an attempt to explain reality by means of myth and to direct the work of man according to an ideal, it is evident that the history of science enters to some extent into the history of philosophical thought and to some extent forms part of that of needs and institutions; indeed, since the moment which sets science to work and endows it with its peculiar character is the practical or suitable moment, it really belongs to the history of institutions in the very wide sense described; and the history of religion forms to some extent part of the history of institutions and to some extent part of the history of philosophy; indeed, since the dominating moment is here mythical conception or philosophical effort, the history of religion is substantially that of philosophy. Other more particular disquisitions in connexion with this argument would be out of place in the present treatise, which is not especially concerned with the theory and methodology of particular special histories (coincident with the treatment of the various spheres of philosophy, æsthetics, logic, etc.), and aims only at indicating the directions in which they must necessarily develop.[5]
[1] Supra, pp. 55-59.
[2] Supra, pp. 119-122.
[3] In the Æsthetic, I, ch. xvii.
[4] See Appendix III.
[5] It will be of further use to draw attention here, in a note, to the already mentioned distinction between the history of practice in politics and in ethics, because thus alone can be set at rest the variance which runs through historiography, between political history or history of states and history of humanity or of civilization, especially from the eighteenth century onward. In Germany it is one of the elements in the intricate debate between Geschichte and Kulturgeschichte, and it has sometimes been described as a conflict between French historiography (Voltaire and his followers), or histoire de la civilisation, and the Germanic (Möser and his followers), or history of the state. One side would absorb and subject the history of culture or social history to that of the state, the other would do the opposite; and the eclectics, as usual, without knowing much about it, place the one beside the other, inert, history of politics and history of civilization, thus destroying the unity of history. The truth is that political history and history of civilization have the same relations between one another in the practical field as those between the history of poetry or of art and the history of philosophy or thought in the theoretical field. They correspond to two eternal moments of the spirit—that of the pure will, or economic moment, and that of the ethical will. Hence we also see why some will always be attracted rather by the one than the other form of history: according as to whether they are moved chiefly by political or chiefly by moral interests.
[APPENDIX III]
PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY
Having established the unity of philosophy and historiography, and shown that the division between the two has but a literary and didactic value, because it is founded upon the possibility of placing in the foreground of verbal exposition now one and now the other of the two dialectical elements of that unity, it is well to make quite clear what is the true object of the treatises bearing the traditional title of philosophic 'theory' or 'system': to what (in a word) philosophy can be reduced.
Philosophy, in consequence of the new relation in which it has been placed, cannot of necessity be anything but the methodological moment of historiography: a dilucidation of the categories constitutive of historical judgments, or of the concepts that direct historical interpretation. And since historiography has for content the concrete life of the spirit, and this life is life of imagination and of thought, of action and of morality (or of something else, if anything else can be thought of), and in this variety of its forms remains always one, the dilucidation moves in distinguishing between æsthetic and logic, between economic and ethic, uniting and dissolving them all in the philosophy of the spirit. If a philosophical problem shows itself to be altogether sterile for the historical judgment, we have there the proof that such problem is otiose, badly stated, and in reality does not exist. If the solution of a problem—that is to say, of a philosophical proposition—instead of making history more intelligible, leaves it obscure or confounds it with others, or leaps over it and lightly condemns or negates it, we have there the proof that such proposition and the philosophy with which it is connected are arbitrary, though it may preserve interest in other respects, as a manifestation of sentiment or of imagination.
The definition of philosophy as 'methodology' is not at first exempt from doubts, even on the part of one ready to accept in general the tendency that it represents; because philosophy and methodology are terms often contrasted, and a philosophy that leads to a methodology is apt to be tainted with empiricism. But certainly the methodology of which we are here speaking is not at all empirical; indeed, it appears just for the purpose of correcting and taking the place of the empirical methodology of professional historians and of other such specialists in all that greater part of it where it is a true and proper, though defective, attempt toward the philosophical solution of the theoretical problems raised by the study of history, or toward philosophical methodology and philosophy as methodology.
If, however, the above-mentioned dispute is settled as soon as stated, this cannot be said of another, where our position finds itself opposed to a widely diffused and ancient conception of philosophy as the solver of the mystery of the universe, knowledge of ultimate reality, revelation of the world of noumena, which is held to be beyond the world of phenomena, in which we move in ordinary life and in which history also moves. This is not the place to give the history of that idea; but we must at least say this, that its origin is religious or mythological, and that it persisted even among those philosophers who were most successful in directing thought toward our earth as the sole reality, and initiated the new philosophy as methodology of the judgment or of historical knowledge. It persisted in Kant, who admitted it as the limit of his criticism; it persisted in Hegel, who framed his subtle researches in logic and philosophy of the spirit in a sort of mythology of the Idea.
Nevertheless, the diversity of the two conceptions manifested itself in an ever-increasing ratio, finding expression in various formulas of the nineteenth century, such as psychology against metaphysic, a philosophy of experience and immanence, aprioristic against transcendental philosophy, positivism against idealism; and although the polemic was as a rule ill conducted, going beyond the mark and ending by unconsciously embracing that very metaphysic, transcendency, and apriority, that very abstract idealism, which it had set out to combat, the sentiment that inspired it was legitimate. And the philosophy of methodology has made it its own, has combated the same adversary with better arms, has certainly insisted upon a psychological view, but a speculative psychological view, immanent in history, but dialectically immanent, differing in this from positivism, that while the latter made necessary the contingent, it made the contingent necessary, thus affirming the right of thought to the hegemony. Such a philosophy is just philosophy as history (and so history as philosophy), and the determination of the philosophical moment in the purely categorical and methodological moment.
The greater vigour of this conception in respect to the opposite, the superiority of philosophy as methodology over philosophy as metaphysic, is shown by the capacity of the former to solve the problems of the latter by criticizing them and pointing out their origin. Metaphysic, on the other hand, is incapable of solving not only the problems of methodology, but even its own problems, without having recourse to the fantastic and arbitrary. Thus questions as to the reality of the external world, of soul-substance, of the unknowable, of dualisms and of antitheses, and so forth, have disappeared in gnoseological doctrines, which have substituted better conceptions for those which we formerly possessed concerning the logic of the sciences, explaining those questions as eternally renascent aspects of the dialectic or phenomenology of knowledge.
The view of philosophy as metaphysic is, however, so inveterate and so tenacious that it is not surprising that it should still give some sign of life in the minds of those who have set themselves free of it in general, but have not applied themselves to eradicating it in all its particulars, nor closed all the doors by which it may return in a more or less unexpected manner. And if we rarely find it openly and directly displayed now, we may yet discern or suspect it in one or other of its aspects or attitudes, persisting like kinks of the mind, or unconscious preconceptions, which threaten to drive philosophy as methodology back into the wrong path, and to prepare the return, though but for a brief period, of the metaphysic that has been superseded.
It seems to me opportune to provide here a clear statement of some of these preconceptions, tendencies, and habits, pointing out the errors which they contain and entail.
First of all the survivals of the past that are still common comes the view of philosophy as having a fundamental problem to solve. Now the conception of a fundamental problem is intrinsically at variance with that of philosophy as history, and with the treatment of philosophy as methodology of history, which posits, and cannot do otherwise than posit, the infinity of philosophical problems, all certainly connected with one another, but not one of which can be considered fundamental, for just the same reason that no single part of an organism is the foundation of all the others, but each one is in its turn foundation and founded. If, indeed, methodology take the substance of its problems from history, history in its most modest but concrete form of history of ourselves, of each one of us as an individual, this shows us that we pass on from one to another particular philosophical problem at the promptings of our life as it is lived, and that one or the other group or class of problems holds the field or has especial interest for us, according to the epochs of our life. And we find the same to be the case if we look at the wider but less definite spectacle afforded by the already mentioned general history of philosophy—that is to say, that according to times and peoples, philosophical problems relating sometimes to morality, sometimes to politics, to religion, or to the natural sciences and mathematics, have in turn the upper hand. Every particular philosophical problem has been a problem of the whole of philosophy, either openly or by inference, but we never meet with a general problem of philosophy, owing to the contradiction thereby implied. And if there does seem to be one (and it certainly does seem so), it is really a question of appearances, due to the fact that modern philosophy, which comes to us from the Middle Ages and was elaborated during the religious struggles of the Renaissance, has preserved a strong imprint of theology in its didactic form, not less than in the psychological disposition of the greater part of those addicted to it. Hence arises the fundamental and almost unique importance usurped by the problem of thought and being, which after all was nothing more than the old problem of this world and the next, of earth and heaven, in a critical and gnoseological form. But those who destroyed or who initiated the destruction of heaven and of the other world and of transcendental philosophy by immanent philosophy began at the same moment to corrode the conception of a fundamental problem, although they were not fully aware of this (for we have said above that they remained trammelled in the philosophy of the Thing in Itself or in the Mythology of the Idea). That problem was rightly fundamental for religious spirits, who held that the whole intellectual and practical dominion of the world was nothing, unless they had saved their own souls or their own thought in another world, in the knowledge of a world of noumena and reality. But such it was not destined to remain for the philosophers, henceforth restricted to the world alone or to nature, which has no skin and no kernel and is all of a piece. What would happen were we to resume belief in a fundamental problem, dominating all others? The other problems would either have to be considered as all dependent upon it and therefore solved with it, or as problems no longer philosophical but empirical. That is to say, all the problems appearing every day anew in science and life would lose their value, either becoming a tautology of the fundamental solution or being committed to empirical treatment. Thus the distinction between philosophy and methodology, between metaphysic and philosophy of the spirit, would reappear, the first transcendental as regards the second, the second aphilosophical as regards the first.
Another view, arising from the old metaphysical conception of the function of philosophy, leads to the rejection of distinction in favour of unity, thus conforming to the theological conception that all distinctions are unified by absorption in God, and to the religious point of view, which forgets the world and its necessities in the vision of God. From this ensues a disposition which may be described as something between indifferent, accommodating, or weak, in respect of particular problems, and the pernicious doctrine of the double faculty is almost tacitly renewed, that is, of intellectual intuition or other superior cognoscitive faculty, peculiar to the philosopher and leading to the vision of true reality, and of criticism or thought prone to interest itself in the contingent and thus greatly inferior in degree and free to proceed with a lack of speculative rigour not permissible in the other. Such a disposition led to the worst possible consequences in the philosophical treatises of the Hegelian school, where the disciples (differing from the master) generally gave evidence of having meditated but little or not at all upon the problems of the various spiritual forms, freely accepting vulgar opinions concerning them, or engaging in them with the indifference of men sure of the essential, and therefore cutting and mutilating them without pity, in order to force them into their pre-established schemes with all haste, thus getting rid of difficulties by means of this illusory arrangement. Hence the emptiness and tiresomeness of their philosophies, from which the historian, or the man whose attention is directed to the understanding of the particular and the concrete, failed to learn anything that could be of use to him in the direction of his own studies and in the clearer formulation of his own judgments. And since the mythology of the idea reappeared in positivism as mythology of evolution, here too particular problems (which are indeed the only philosophical problems) received merely schematic and empty treatment and did not progress at all. Philosophy as history and methodology of history restores honour to the virtue of acuteness or discernment, which the theological unitarianism of metaphysic tended to depreciate: discernment, which is prosaic but severe, hard and laborious but prolific, which sometimes assumes the unsympathetic aspect of scholasticism and pedantry, but is also of use in this aspect, like every discipline, and holds that the neglect of distinction for unity is also intimately opposed to the conception of philosophy as history.
A third tendency (I beg to be allowed to proceed by enumeration of the various sides of the same mental attitude for reasons of convenience), a third tendency also seeks the definitive philosophy, untaught by the historical fact that no philosophy has ever been definitive or has set a limit to thought, or has ever been thoroughly convinced that the perpetual changing of philosophy with the world which perpetually changes is not by any means a defect, but is the nature itself of thought and reality. Or, rather, such teaching, and the proposition that follows it, do not fail altogether of acceptance, and they are led to believe that the spirit, ever growing upon itself, produces thoughts and systems that are ever new. But since they have retained the presupposition of a fundamental problem which (as we have said) substantially consists of the ancient problem of religion alone, and each problem well determined implies a single solution, the solution given of the 'fundamental problem' naturally claims to be the definitive solution of the problem of philosophy itself. A new solution could not appear without a new problem (owing to the logical unity of problem and solution); but that problem, which is superior to all the others, is on the contrary the only one. Thus a definitive philosophy, assumed in the conception of the fundamental problem, is at variance with historical experience, and more irreconcilably, because in a more evidently logical manner, with philosophy as history, which, admitting infinite problems, denies the claim for and the expectation of a definitive philosophy. Every philosophy is definitive for the problem which it solves, but not for the one that appears immediately afterward, at the foot of the first, nor for the other problems which will arise from the solution of this. To close the series would be to turn from philosophy to religion and to rest in God.
Indeed, the fourth preconception, which we now proceed to state, and which links itself with the preceding, and, together with all the preceding, to the theological nature of the old metaphysic, concerns the figure of the philosopher, as Buddha or the Awakened One, who posits himself as superior to others (and to himself in the moments when he is not a philosopher), because he holds himself to be free from human passions, illusions, and agitations by means of philosophy. This is the case with the believer, who fixes his mind upon God and shakes off earthly cares, like the lover, who feels himself blessed in the possession of the beloved and defies the whole world. But the world soon takes its revenge both upon the believer and the lover, and does not fail to insist upon its rights. Such an illusion is impossible for the philosophical historian, who differs from the other in feeling himself irresistibly involved in the course of history, as at once both subject and object, and who is therefore led to negate felicity or beatitude, as he negates every other abstraction (because, as has been well said, le bonheur est le contraire de la sensation de vivre), and to accept life as it is, as joy that overcomes sorrow and perpetually produces new sorrows and new unstable joys. And history, which he thinks as the only truth, is the work of tireless thought, which conditions practical work, as practical work conditions the new work of thought. Thus the primacy formerly attributed to the contemplative life is now transferred not to active life, but to life in its integrity, which is at once thought and action. And every man is a philosopher (in his circle, however wide or narrow it may appear), and every philosopher is a man, indissolubly linked to the conditions of human life, which it is not given to anyone to transcend. The mystical or apocalyptic philosopher of the Græco-Roman decadence was well able to separate himself from the world: the great thinkers, like Hegel, who inaugurated the epoch of modern philosophy, although they denied the primacy of the abstract contemplative life, were liable to fall back into the error of belief in this supremacy and to conceive a sphere of absolute spirit, a process of liberation through art, religion, and philosophy, as a means of reaching it; but the once sublime figure of the philosopher blessed in the absolute, when we try to revive it in this modern world of ours, becomes tinged with the comic. It is true that satire has now but little material upon which to exercise itself, and is reduced to aiming its shafts at the 'professors of philosophy' (according to the type of philosopher that has been created by modern universities, which is partly the heir of the 'master of theology' of the Middle Ages): against the professors, that is to say, to the extent that they continue to repeat mechanically abstract general propositions, and seem to be unmoved by the passions and the problems that press upon them from all sides and vainly ask for more concrete and actual treatment. But the function and the social figure of the philosopher have profoundly changed, and we have not said that the manner of being of the 'professors of philosophy' will not also change in its turn—that is to say, that the way of teaching philosophy in the universities and schools is not on the verge of experiencing a crisis, which will eliminate the last remains of the medieval fashion of formalistic philosophizing. A strong advance in philosophical culture should lead to this result: that all students of human affairs, jurists, economists, moralists, men of letters—in other words, all students of historical matters—should become conscious and disciplined philosophers, and that thus the philosopher in general, the purus philosophus, should find no place left for him among the professional specifications of knowledge. With the disappearance of the philosopher 'in general' would also disappear the last social vestige of the teleologist or metaphysician, and of the Buddha or Awakened One.
There is also a prejudice which to some extent inquinates the manner of culture of students of philosophy. They are accustomed to have recourse almost exclusively to the books of philosophers, indeed of philosophers 'in general,' of the metaphysical system-makers, in the same way as the student of theology formed himself upon the sacred texts. This method of culture, which is perfectly consequent when a start is made from the presupposition of a fundamental or single problem, of which it is necessary to know the different diverging and progressive solutions which have been attempted, is altogether inconsequent and inadequate in the case of a historical and immanent philosophy, which draws its material from all the most varied impressions of life and from all intuitions and reflections upon life. That form of culture is the reason for the aridity of the treatment of certain particular problems, for which is necessary a continued contact with daily experience (art and art criticism for æsthetic, politics, economy, judicial trials for the philosophy of rights, positive and mathematical sciences for the gnoseology of the sciences, and so on). To it is also due the aridity of treatment of those parts of philosophy themselves which are traditionally considered to constitute 'general philosophy,' for they too had their origin in life, and we must refer them back to life if we are to give a satisfactory interpretation of their propositions; we must plunge them into life again to develop them and to find in them new aspects. The whole of history is the foundation of philosophy as history, and to limit its foundation to the history of philosophy alone, and of 'general' or 'metaphysical' philosophy, is impossible, save by unconsciously adhering to the old idea of philosophy, not as methodology but as metaphysic, which is the fifth of the prejudices that we are enumerating.
This enumeration can be both lengthened and ended with the mention of a sixth preconception, relating to philosophical exposition. Owing to this, philosophy is expected to have either an architectural form, as though it were a temple consecrated to the Eternal, or a warm poetical form, as though it were a hymn to the Eternal. But these forms were part of the old content, and that form is now changed. Philosophy shows itself to be a dilucidation of the categories of historical interpretation rather than the grandiose architecture of a temple or a sacred hymn running on conventional lines. Philosophy is discussion, polemic, rigorous didactic exposition, which is certainly coloured with the sentiments of the writer, like every other literary form, able also at times to raise its voice (or on the other hand to become slight and playful, according to circumstances), but not constrained to observe rules which appear to be proper to a theological or religious content. Philosophy treated as methodology has, so to speak, caused philosophical exposition to descend from poetry to prose.
All the preconceptions, habits, and tendencies which I have briefly described should in my opinion be carefully sought out and eliminated, for it is they that impede philosophy from taking the form and proceeding in the mode suitable and adequate to the consciousness of the unity with history which it has reached. If we look merely at the enormous amount of psychological observations and moral doubts accumulated in the course of the nineteenth century by poetry, fiction, and drama, those voices of our society, and consider that in great part it remains without critical treatment, some idea can be formed of the immense amount of work that falls to philosophy to accomplish. And if on the other hand we observe the multitude of anxious questions that the great European War has everywhere raised—as to the state, as to history, as to rights, as to the functions of the different peoples, as to civilization, culture, and barbarism, as to science, art, religion, as to the end and ideal of life, and so on—we realize the duty of philosophers to issue forth from the theologico-metaphysical circle in which they remain confined even when they refuse to hear of theology and metaphysic. For notwithstanding their protests, and notwithstanding the new conception accepted and professed by them, they really remain intellectually and spiritually attached to the old ideas.
Even the history itself of philosophy has hitherto been renewed only to a small extent, in conformity with the new conception of philosophy. This new conception invites us to direct our attention to thoughts and thinkers, long neglected or placed in the second rank and not considered to be truly philosophers because they did not treat directly the 'fundamental problem' of philosophy or the great peut-être, but were occupied with 'particular problems.' These particular problems, how-ever, were destined to produce eventually a change of view as regards the 'general problem,' which emerged itself reduced to the rank of a 'particular' problem. It is simply the result of prejudice to look upon a Machiavelli, who posited the conception of the modern state, a Baltasar Gracian, who examined the question of acuteness in practical matters, a Pascal, who criticized the spirit of Jesuitry, a Vico, who renewed all the sciences of the spirit, or a Hamann, with his keen sense of the value of tradition, as minor philosophers, I do not say in comparison with some metaphysician of little originality, but even when compared with a Descartes or a Spinoza, who dealt with other but not superior problems. A schematic and bloodless history of philosophy corresponded, in fact, with the philosophy of the 'fundamental problem.' A far richer, more varied and pliant philosophy should correspond with philosophy as methodology, which holds to be philosophy not only what appertains to the problems of immanency, of transcendency, of this world and the next, but everything that has been of avail in increasing the patrimony of guiding conceptions, the understanding of actual history, and the formation of the reality of thought in which we live.