When we say to our children, "A little bird told me," both we and our children may be quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent's introduction to the Norse Tales. We may be quite unconscious that we are using an expression traceable to a time when people believed in such language of birds and beasts as gifted persons could understand. It may be that we repeat the words simply because we remember that our parents once successfully deceived us in our childhood by using them, and that our parents did but follow the example of theirs. But evidently we should not explain the trivial saying simply by following it back endlessly into antiquity unless we concluded that it had always been characteristic of parents to deceive children in this manner. In that case we should have discovered a metaphysical truth about the nature of parents, and no further explanation would be required.
If, however, we are not willing to admit that parents are such by nature that they will cite birds as sources of information when it is expedient to keep the real source hidden, but insist that this habit be otherwise explained, we ask for an explanation which the continuity of history alone can not afford. An explanation in contemporaneous terms is required. We do not use the phrase because our ancestors used it, although we may have derived it from them; we use it because of its known efficacy. We may, however, discover that our ancestors—or Norse parents—used it for a different reason, namely, because they believed in a language of beasts and birds. But if we ask why they so believed, it will not profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so doing we come upon the contemporaneous, experimental origin of that belief. For it is evident that if the belief had an origin, there was a time anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can not, therefore, be explained solely in terms of that anterior time. Its origin points, not to continuity, but to action. It indicates not that the originators of the belief had ancestors, but that, in view of their contemporaneous circumstances, they acted in a certain way. To explain the origin of anything, therefore, we can not trust to the continuity of history alone. That continuity may carry us back to the beginnings of beliefs and institutions which have persisted and been transmitted from age to age; it may reveal to us experimental factors which have shaped beliefs and institutions, but which have long since been forgotten; but it can never, of itself, reveal the experimental origin of any belief or institution whatever. That is, in principle, the limitation by which the explanatory value of historical continuity is restricted. To understand origins we must appeal to the contemporaneous experience of their own age, or to experimental science.[8]
Simple as this consideration is, it has been too much neglected by historians and philosophers in recent times on account of the profound influence of the doctrine of evolution. The great service, which that doctrine has rendered, has been to fix our attention on the evident fact of continuity from which our minds had been distracted by a too exclusive preoccupation with theories of the atomic kind. Through several centuries, philosophy had acquired the habit of thinking generally in terms of elements and their compounds, whenever it addressed itself to a consideration of nature, or of the mind, or of the relation between the two. Its principal problem was to discover means of connection and unification which might make clear how that which is essentially discrete and discontinuous might, none the less, be combined into a unity of some sort. As it failed, it usually took refuge in the opposite idea, and attempted to conceive an original unity out of which diversity was generated by some impulsion in this initial and primal being. Philosophy thus vibrated between the contrasted poles of the same fundamental endeavor, between the attempt to combine elements into a unity, and the attempt to resolve unity into elements. The latter attempt, especially in men like Hegel and Spencer, had the advantage of involving the idea of continuity, and became the controlling philosophical enterprise of the latter part of the last century. But it was principally the doctrine of evolution or development as set forth by biologists, anthropologists, and historians that made the fact of continuity convincingly apparent and freed philosophy from the necessity of attempting to explain it. Continuity became a fact to be appreciated and understood, and ceased to be a riddle to be solved. The doctrine of evolution thus wrought a real emancipation of the mind.
But this freedom has been often abused. Relieved of the necessity of explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote ancestors. And this practical advice has sometimes taken the form of metaphysics. If we wish to know the nature of things or to appraise their worth, we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic stuff from which everything has been derived. Thus man and all the varied panorama of the world vanish backward into nebulæ, and life disappears into the impulse to live. Not trailing clouds of glory do we come, but trailing the primitive and the obsolete.
Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and sophistication. That is the usual result of inquisitions into one's ancestry. But disillusionment and sophistication may produce either regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better for us to have lived then when illusions were cherished and vital, than to live now when they are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has been sapped, and we may cry with Matthew Arnold's Obermann
"Oh, had I lived in that great day!"
Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.
But progress is not to be construed in terms of a conservatism which is artificial and reactionary, or of a radicalism which is undisciplined and irresponsible. Conservatism and radicalism are, as already indicated, temperamental affections which a too exclusive and irrational contemplation of our ancestry may produce in us. They are born of fear or impatience, and are not the legitimate offspring of history. For historical continuity, just because it does not of itself reveal the experimental origin of any belief or institution, does not of itself disclose progress or any standard by which progress may be estimated. It teaches no lesson in morals and provides no guide to the perplexed. And the reason for this is simple. History is continuous, and, therefore, there is no point, no date, no occurrence, no incident, no origin, no belief, and no institution, which can claim preëminence simply on account of its position. If men were once superstitious because of their place in history and are now scientific for precisely the same reason, we can not therefore conclude, with any intelligent or rational certainty, that evolution has progressed from superstition to science, or that science is better than superstition. Values are otherwise determined. The continuity of history levels them all.
Yet there may be laws of history. The comparative study of history, whether the history be of civilizations or of living forms or of geological formations, reveals uniformities and sequences which promote our understanding and aid our practice. If we should find that wherever men have lived, their institutions, laws, customs, religion, and philosophy tend to show a uniformity of direction in their development, we should feel justified in concluding that the tendency indicated a law of history. Yet such laws would not be indications of progress. They would indicate rather the conditions under which progress is or can be made. For laws are expressions of the limitations under which things may be done. They show the forms and structures to which actions conform. But whether these actions are good or bad, upward or downward, progressive or retrogressive, they do not show. For decline no less than progress is in conformity with law, and the continuity of history is indifferent to both. Were we, therefore, in possession of all the laws and uniformities of history, we should not have discovered thereby what either decline or progress is; but were we in possession of a knowledge of what decline and progress are, the laws and uniformities of history would teach us better to avoid the one and attain the other.