Human history is something more than the lives of great men, the rise and fall of states, the growth of institutions and customs, the vagaries of religion and philosophy, or the controlling influence of economic forces. It is also a rational enterprise. Expressed in naturalistic terms it is history conscious of what history is. To remember and to understand what has happened is not, therefore, simply an interesting and profitable study; it may be also an illustration of rational living. It may be an indication that man, in finally discovering what his history genuinely is, is at the same time making it minister constantly and consciously to its own enlargement and perfection. That intelligent beings should recover their history is no reason why they should repudiate it, even if they find many things of which to be ashamed; for they are examples of the recovery of the past with the prospect of a future. In reading their own history, they may smile at that which once they reverenced, and laugh at that which once they feared. They may have to unlearn many established lessons and renounce many cherished hopes. They may have to emancipate themselves continually from their past; but note that it is from their past that they would be emancipated and that it is freedom that they seek. It is not a new form of slavery. Into what greater slavery could they fall than into that implied by the squandering of their inheritance or by blaming their ancestors for preceding them? They will be ancestors themselves one day and others will ask what they have bequeathed. These others may not ask for Greece again or for Rome or for Christianity, but they will ask for the like of these, things which can live perennially in the imagination, even if as institutions they are past and dead. He is not freed from the past who has lost it or who regards himself simply as its product. In the one case he would have no experience to guide him and no memories to cherish. In the other he would have no enthusiasm. To be emancipated is to have recovered the past untrammeled in an enlightened pursuit of that enterprise of the mind which first begot it. It is not to renounce imagination, but to exercise it illumined and refreshed.
History is, then, not only the conserving, the remembering, and the understanding of what has happened: it is also the completing of what has happened. And since in man history is consciously lived, the completing of what has happened is also the attempt to carry it to what he calls perfection. He looks at a wilderness, but, even as he looks, beholds a garden. For him, consequently, the purpose of history is not a secret he vainly tries to find, but a kind of life his reason enables him to live. As he lives it well, the fragments of existence are completed and illumined in the visions they reveal.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Tylor, Edward B. "Primitive Culture." Henry Holt & Co., 1889. Vol. I, pages 17 ff.
[6] Cornford, Francis M. "From Religion to Philosophy." Longmans, Green & Co., 1912.
[7] See Dedekind, Richard. "Continuity and Irrational Numbers," in "Essays on the Theory of numbers." Tr. by Wooster W. Beman. Open Court Publishing Co., 1901.
[8] If space permitted, this same limitation could be abundantly illustrated from the sciences, especially the biological sciences. They have made very clear what an essential difference there is between the continuity of living forms and the origin of new forms. This difference can be readily appreciated by comparing a work on "evolution" or "natural history" with a work on "experimental biology."
[9] Santayana, George. "The Life of Reason," 1905. Vol. I, pages 3-4.