In this category are to be included all religious and political histories. Their pages are intended to show the dealings of God with man; or the evidences of Christianity, or of one of its sects, Catholicism or Protestantism; or the sure growth of republican or of monarchial institutions; or the proof of a divine government of the world; or the counter-proof that there is no such government; and the like.
You will find that most general histories may be placed in this class. Probably a man cannot himself have very strong convictions about politics or religion, and not let them be seen in his narrative of events where such questions are prominently present. A few familiar instances will illustrate this. No one can take either Lingard’s or Macauley’s History of England as anything more than a plea for either writer’s personal views. Gibbon’s anti-Christian feeling is as perceptibly disabling to him in many passages as in the church historians is their search for “acts of Providence,” and the hand of God in human affairs.
All such histories suffer from fatal flaws. They are deductive instead of inductive; they are a defensio sententiarum instead of an investigatio veri; they assume the final truth as known, and go not forth to seek it. They are therefore “teleologic,” that is, they study the record of man as the demonstration of a problem the solution of which is already known. In this they are essentially “divinatory,” claiming foreknowledge of the future; and, as every ethnologist knows, divination belongs to a stadium of incomplete intellectual culture, one considerably short of the highest. As has been well said by Wilhelm von Humboldt, any teleologic theory “disturbs and falsifies the facts of history;”[6-1] and it has been acutely pointed out by the philosopher Hegel, that it contradicts the notion of progress and is no advance over the ancient tenet of a recurrent cycle.[6-2]
I need not dilate upon these errors. They must be patent to you. No matter how noble the conviction, how pure the purpose, there is something nobler and purer than it, and that is, unswerving devotion to rendering in history the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I now turn to another opinion, that which teaches that—
3. History should be a portraiture, more or less extended, of the evolution of the human species.
This is claimed to be the “scientific” view of history. It was tersely expressed by Alexander von Humboldt in the phrase: “The history of the world is the mere expression of a predetermined, that is, fixed, evolution.”[6-3]
It is that advocated by Auguste Comte, Draper and Spencer, and a few years ago Prof. Gerland, of Strasburg, formulated its basic maxim in these words: “Man has developed from the brute through the action of purely mechanical, therefore fixed, laws.”[7-1]
The scientist of to-day who hesitates to subscribe to these maxims is liable to be regarded as of doubtful learning or of debilitated intellect. I acknowledge that I am one such, and believe that I can show sound reasons for denying the assumption on which this view is based.
It appears to me just as teleologic and divinatory as those I have previously named. It assumes Evolution as a law of the universe, whereas in natural science it is only a limited generalization, inapplicable to most series of natural events, and therefore of uncertain continuance in any series. The optimism which it inculcates is insecure and belongs to deductive, not inductive, reasoning. The mechanical theory on which it is based lacks proof, and is, I maintain, insufficient to explain motive, and, therefore, historic occurrences. The assumption that history is the record of a necessary and uninterrupted evolution, progressing under ironclad mechanical laws, is a preconceived theory as detrimental to clear vision as are the preoccupations of the theologian or the political partisan.