[29] La Valeur de la science, Paris, 1904.
[III]
THE THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT
Secular neglect of the theory of history.
The theory of the individual judgment and therefore of historical thought, has been the least elaborated of all logical theories in the course of philosophic history. It is a very true and profound remark that the historical sense is a modern thing, and that the nineteenth century is the first great century of historical thinking. Of course, since history has always been made and individual judgments pronounced, theoretic observations upon historical judgments have not been altogether wanting in the past. The spirit is, as we know, the whole spirit at every instant, and in this respect nothing is ever new under the sun, indeed, nothing is new, either before or after the sun.[1] But history, and in particular, the theory of history, did not formerly arouse interest nor attract attention, nor was its importance felt, nor was it the object of anxious and wide investigations to the degree witnessed in the nineteenth century and in our times, when the consciousness of immanence triumphs more and more—and immanence means history.
Græco-Roman world's ideas of history.
Transcendence, then, which has for centuries been more or less dominant, supplies the reason why the study of the individual and the theory of history were neglected. In Greek philosophy, individual judgments were either despised, as in Platonism, or superseded by and confused with logical judgments of the universal, as in Aristotle. In the Poetics[2] the character of history did not escape him. Differing from science (which was directed to the universal) and from poetry (which was directed to the possible), it expresses things that have happened in their individuality, ta genomena (what Alcibiades did and experienced). But in the Organon, although he distinguished between the universal (ta katholou) and the individual (ta kath' ekastou), between man and Callias,[3] he made no use of the distinction, and divided judgments into universal, particular and indefinite. The theory of history was not raised to the rank of philosophic treatment in antiquity, like the other forms of knowledge, and especially philosophy, mathematics and poetry. What mark the ancients have left upon the argument is limited to incidental observations, and some altogether empirical remarks here and there upon the method of writing history. They were wont to assign extrinsic ends to it, such as utility and advice upon the conduct of life. Such utterances of good common sense as that of Quintilian, to the effect that history is written ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, do not possess great philosophic weight. Nor had the rules of the rhetoricians philosophic value, such as that of Dionysus of Halicarnassus, that historical narrative, without becoming quite poetical, should be somewhat more elevated in tone than ordinary discourse; or that of Cicero, who demanded for historical style verba ferme poëtarum, "perhaps" (wrote Vico, making the rhetorical rule profound) "in order that historians might be maintained in their most ancient possession, since, as has been demonstrated in the Scienza nuova, the first historians of the nations were the first poets."[4] More important, on the other hand, are the demands (as expressed especially by Polybius) of what is indispensable to history. Besides the element of fact, there is needful (Polybius observed) knowledge of the nature of the things of which the happenings are portrayed, of military art for military things, of politics for things political. History is written, not from books, as is the way with compilers and men of letters, but from original documents, by visiting the places where it has occurred and by penetrating it with experience and with thought.[5]
The theory of history in mediæval and modern philosophy