I am anxious to avoid here any metaphysical obscurity. My assertion is, that the chief impulses of nations and peoples are abstract ideas and ideals, unreal and unrealizable; and that it is in pursuit of these that the great as well as the small movements on the arena of national life and on the stage of history have taken place.
You are doubtless aware that this is no new discovery of mine. Early in this century Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: “The last and highest duty of the historian is to portray the effort of the Idea to attain realization in fact;” and the most recent lecture on the philosophy of history which I have read, that by Lord Acton, contains this maxim: “Ideas which in religion and politics are truths, in history are living forces.”
I do claim that it is timely for me to repeat these doctrines and to urge them with vehemence, for they are generally repudiated by the prevailing schools of ethnology and history in favor of the opinion that objective, mechanical influences alone suffice to explain all the phenomena of human life. This I pronounce an inadequate and an unscientific opinion.
There is in living matter everywhere something which escapes the most exhaustive investigation, some subtle center of impulse, which lies beyond the domain of correlated energy, and which acts directively, without increasing or diminishing the total of that energy. Also in the transformations of organic forms, there are preparations and propulsions which no known doctrine of the mechanical, natural causes can interpret. We must accept the presence of the same powers, and in a greater degree, in the life and the history of man.[17-1]
It may be objected that abstract ideas are far beyond the grasp of the uncultivated intellect. The reply is, consciously to regard them as abstract, may be; but they exist and act for all that. All sane people think and talk according to certain abstract laws of grammar and logic; and they act in similar unconsciousness of the abstractions which impel them. Moreover, the Idea is usually clothed in a concrete Ideal, a personification, which brings it home to the simplest mind. This was long ago pointed out by the observant Machiavelli in his statement that every reform of a government or religion is in the popular mind personified as the effort of one individual.
In every nation or ethnos there is a prevailing opinion as to what the highest typical human being should be. This “Ideal of Humanity,” as it has been called, is more or less constantly and consciously pursued, and becomes a spur to national action and to a considerable degree an arbiter of national destiny. If the ideal is low and bestial, the course of that nation is downward, self-destroying; if it is lofty and pure, the energies of the people are directed toward the maintenance of those principles which are elevating and preservative. These are not mechanical forces, in any rational sense of the term; but they are forces the potent directive and formative influence of which cannot be denied and must not be underestimated.
Just in proportion as such ideas are numerous, clear and true in the national mind, do their power augment and their domain extend; just so much more quickly and firmly do they express themselves, in acts, forms and institutions, and thus enable the nation to enrich, beautify and strengthen its own existence. We have but to glance along the nations of the world and to reflect on the outlines of their histories, to perceive the correctness of the conclusion which Prof. Lazarus, perhaps the most eminent analyst of ethnic character of this generation, reaches in one of his essays: “A people which is not rich in ideas, is never rich; one that is not strong in its thinking powers, is never strong.”[18-1]
I claim, therefore, that the facts of ethnology and the study of racial psychology justify me in formulating this maxim for the guidance of the historian: The conscious and deliberate pursuit of ideal aims is the highest causality in human history.
The historian who would fulfil his mission in its amplest sense must trace his facts back to the ideas which gave them birth; he must recognize and define these as the properties of specific peoples; and he must estimate their worth by their tendency to national preservation or national destruction.
This is the maxim, the axiom, if you please, which both the ethnologist and the historian must bear ever present in mind if they would comprehend the meaning of institutions or the significance of events. They must be referred to, and explained by, the ideas which gave them birth. As an American historian has tersely put it, “The facts relating to successive phases of human thought constitute History.”[18-2]