When, however, in the unfolding of mind we reach the stage of notions, we observe a growing power to accomplish desire, not only by altering the individual or race organism, but also by bringing external objects into unison with the desire, reversing the process common in the life of sensation. This spectacle, however, is confined to man alone, and man as guided by prospective volition, that is, by an object ahead.
When some such object is common to a nation or race, it exercises a wide influence on its destiny, and is the key to much that otherwise would be inexplicable in its actions. What we call national hopes, ambitions and ideals are such objects. Sometimes they are distinctly recognized by the nation, sometimes they are pursued almost unconsciously. They do not correspond to things as they are, but as they are wished to be. Hence there is nothing in them to insure their realization. They are like an appetite, which may and may not develope the function which can gratify it. They have been called “historic ideas,” and their consideration is a leading topic in modern historical science.
Reason claims the power of criticizing such ideas, and of distinguishing in them between what is true and therefore obtainable, and what is false and therefore chimerical or even destructive. This is the province of the philosophy of history. It guides itself by those general principles for the pursuit of truth which have been noticed in brief in the earlier pages of this book. Looking before as well as after, it aspires in the united light of experience and the laws of mind, to construct for the race an ideal within the reach of its capacities, yet which will develope them to the fullest extent, a pole-star to which it can trust in this night teeming with will-o’-the wisps.
The opinion that the history of mind is a progress whose end will be worth more than was its beginning, may not prove true in fact—the concrete expression never wholly covers the abstract requirements—but it is undoubtedly true in theory. The progress, so far, has been by no means a lineal one—each son a better man than his father—nor even, as some would have it, a spiral one—periodical recurrences to the same historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the philosophical idea—but it has been far more complex and irregular than any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do not express it.
Following the natural laws of thought man has erred infinitely, and his errors have worked their sure result—they have destroyed him. There is no “relish of salvation” in an error; otherwise than that it is sure to kill him who obstructs the light by harboring it. There is no sort of convertability of the false into the true, as shallow thinkers of the day teach.
Man has only escaped death when at first by a lucky chance, and then by personal and inherited experience, his thoughts drifted or were forced into conformity with the logical laws of thought.
A historic idea is a complex product formed of numerous conceptions, some true and others false. Its permanency and efficacy are in direct proportion to the number and clearness of the former it embraces. When it is purging itself of the latter, the nation is progressive; when the false are retained, their poison spreads and the nation decays.
The periodical recurrence of historic ideas is one of their most striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various. The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it; and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source. Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an invaluable clue to the unravelment of the tangled skein of human endeavor.
Historic periodicity is on the one side an organic law of memory, dependent upon the revival of transmitted ancestral impressions. A prevailing idea though over-cultivation exhausts its organic correlate, and leads to defective nutrition of that part in the offspring. Hence they do not pursue the same idea as their fathers, but revert to a remoter ancestral historic idea, the organic correlate of which has lain fallow, thus gained strength. It is brought forth as new, receives additions by contiguity and similarity, is ardently pursued, over-cultivated, and in time supplanted by another revival.
But this material side corresponds to an all-important mental one. As an organic process only, the history of periodic ideas is thus satisfactorily explained, but he who holds this explanation to be exhaustive sees but half the problem.