The Purpose of History

by Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

It is well-nigh impossible to avoid the suspicion of paradox in such statements as these. Yet I feel confident that every historical student keenly alive to his task is abundantly sensible of this truth. Where will he end the history of Greece or of Rome? What will be the final chapter of the French Revolution? No: there is no paradox here, but there is an ambiguity. For history is not only a record written to preserve memory and promote understanding, it is also a process in time. "With us," Professor Flint writes, "the word 'history,' like its equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such composition—either a narrative of events, or events which may be narrated. It is impossible to free the term of this doubleness and ambiguity of meaning. Nor is it, on the whole, to be desired. The advantages of having one term which may, with ordinary caution, be innocuously applied to two things so related, more than counterbalance the dangers involved in two things so distinct having the same name. The history of England which actually happened can not easily be confounded with the history of England written by Mr. Green; while by the latter being termed history as well as the former, we are reminded that it is an attempt to reproduce or represent the course of the former. Occasionally, however, the ambiguity of the word gives rise to great confusion of thought and gross inaccuracy of speech. And this occurs most frequently, if not exclusively, just when men are trying and professing to think and speak with especial clearness and exactness regarding the signification of history—i.e., when they are labouring to define it. Since the word history has two very different meanings, it obviously can not have merely one definition. To define an order of facts and a form of literature in the same terms—to suppose that when either of them is defined the other is defined—is so absurd that one would probably not believe it could be seriously done were it not so often done. But to do so has been the rule rather than the exception. The majority of so-called definitions of history are definitions only of the records of history. They relate to history as narrated and written, not to history as evolved and acted; in other words, although given as the only definitions of history needed, they do not apply to history itself, but merely to accounts of history. They may tell us what constitutes a book of history, but they can not tell us what the history is with which all books of history are occupied. It is, however, with history in this latter sense that a student of the science or philosophy of history is mainly concerned."[3]

It is because history is not only something "narrated and written," but also something "evolved and acted" that we are led to say that the history of nothing is complete. The narrative may begin and end where we please; and might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. But the beginning and the end of the action are so interwoven with the whole time process that adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the fundamental reason why Grote's history surpasses that of Herodotus in what we call historical truth. For the truth of history is a progressive truth to which the ages as they continue contribute. The truth for one time is not the truth for another, so that historical truth is something which lives and grows rather than something fixed to be ascertained once for all. To remember what has happened, and to understand it, carries us thus to the recognition that the writing of history is itself an historical process. It, too, is something "evolved and acted." It is perennially fresh even if the events with which it deals are long since past and gone. The record may be final, but our understanding of what has been recorded can make no such claim. The accuracy of the record is not the truth of history. We are well assured, for instance, that the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. The record on that point is not seriously questionable, although we have to rely on documents which have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to our own day, we can have little doubt that the record of this greater Marathon of Europe will surpass all others in fulness and accuracy. There are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, difficulties in the way of exactness even when we are dealing with contemporaneous events. "Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differently as their memories or their sympathies vary." Such difficulties we have learned how to check until our records closely approach truth of fact. Consequently the records of what men have done, or may be doing, may be relatively unimpeachable. But it is quite a different matter to understand what they have done and are doing. Without that understanding, history is no better than a chronicle, a table of events, but not that "thing to possess and keep always" after which the historian aspires.

To understand is not simply difficult, it is also endless. But this fact does not make it hopeless. The understanding of history grows by what it feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, constantly reveals more to be understood. Our illustrations may serve us again. From the accessible records of the battle of Marathon we can understand with tolerable success the immediate antecedents and consequents of that great event. But in calling the event great we do not simply eulogize its participants. We indicate, rather, that its antecedents and consequents have been far-reaching and momentous. Greece, we say, was saved. But what are we to understand by that salvation? To answer we must write and rewrite her own history, the history of what she has been and is; and with every fresh writing the battle of Marathon becomes better understood. It becomes a different battle with a different truth. And more than this: with every rewriting we understand better what went before and what followed after until the battle itself becomes but the symptom of deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's present struggle. Already its history has begun with many volumes. Following the example of Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are writing it contemporaneously by summers and winters. The consequences they can only guess at, but they have done much with the antecedents, so much that the last fifty years of Europe are better understood than they were a year ago. The record of them has changed little; our understanding of them has changed much. It has changed so much that they have already become a different half-century from what they were. The truth about them last year is not the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence what will the truth about them be?

I venture another illustration, one from the history of philosophy. I choose Plato. He is such a commanding figure that the desire to understand him is exceptionally keen. The record of his life and of his conscious aims and purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no assured authorities on these points. That is greatly to be regretted, because a correct record is naturally the best of aids towards a correct understanding. But the unsatisfactory record is not very material to the illustration in hand. The record might be correct, but Plato would, even so, remain an historical figure to be understood. He would continue to be the producer of what we call Platonism, and we should have to understand him as that producer. In that case, evidently, the details of his life, his span of years, his immediate aims and activities would involve but the beginning of an inquiry which would last as long as Plato is studied by those who would understand him. Who, then, would be the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle wrote, or the man about whom Professor Paul Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is the man about whom they both write, but that can mean only that he is the man about whom writers can write so diversely. He is not the same man to Professor Shorey that he was to Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a nice question which of the two disciples has given us the correct estimate of their master. Who was the real Plato? And that question could still be asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its record, what it is not, a continuous and uniformly accepted tradition. For it is quite evident that the Platonic tradition has grown from age to age as students of Plato have tried to understand him and to understand also what other students have understood about him. The true Plato is still the quest of Platonists.

It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth, and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known.

History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. It may afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time. That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date. Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written. It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of history itself.

The writer of history may, consequently, attain his purpose within the limits of the practical and moral difficulties which beset it in either of two ways. He may give us the contemporaneous understanding of what has happened in terms of the outlook and perspective of his own day, giving us a vision of what has gone before as an enlightened mind of his time might see it. His history might then be that of ancient peoples beheld in the new perspective into which they have now been placed. Could he, by miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they would doubtless fail to recognize their own history, truthful as it might be. But comprehension might dawn upon them as they read, and they might exclaim: "These were the things we were really doing, but we did not know it at the time; we have discovered what we were; our history has revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, by the restrained exercise of his imagination, may give us what has happened in the perspective of the time in which it happened, or in a perspective anterior to his own day. He may seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination to days no longer ours and to ways of feeling and acting no longer presently familiar. Such a history would be less comprehensive and complete than the former. It would also be more difficult to write, because historical imagination of this kind is rare and also because it is not easy to divest the past of its present estimate. Yet the imagination has that power and enables us to live again in retrospect what others have lived before us. But in both cases the history would be an active conservation of events in time; it would reveal their truth, their meaning, and their purpose.

If now we ask what may be this truth and meaning, or in what sense may we appropriately speak of a purpose in history, we pass from history to philosophy. No longer shall we be concerned with the purpose of writing history, but rather with the character of the facts which stimulate that purpose and assist in its attainment. From history as the attempt to preserve memory and promote understanding we pass to history as a characteristic of natural processes. We shall try to analyze what the career of things in time involves; but we shall keep this career in mind in those aspects of it which bear most significantly upon the history of man.