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.