I
Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but which are entirely alien to its inner content.
What has been missing, till now, is detachment from the objects considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as impersonally as though he himself did not exist in it.
It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern historian, in the very act of priding himself on his “objectivity,” naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be said some day—that so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to admit that any “present” is only such with reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History than others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of personal ideals, set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced by none of the personal hopes and fears and other inward impulses which count for so much in practical life; and such a detachment will—to use the words of Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough of it himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.
Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.
A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint, the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both possible and necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own “modern.” Were they in their turn “modern” in relation to the finished and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world"-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his "world"-history are epoch-making.
To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’ prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that follows.