To do justice to the pluralistic character of history is not, however, simply to write other histories than one's own with commendable impartiality. It is also to be keenly alive to the philosophical implications of this pluralism. The most significant of them is doubtless this: since philosophically considered history is a thing not written, but evolved and acted, to no one history can absolute superiority or preference be assigned. Absolutely considered the history of man can not claim preëminence over the history of the stars. He is no more the darling of the universe than is the remotest nebula. It is just as intelligible and just as true to say that man exists as an illustration of stellar evolution as to say that the sun exists to divide light from darkness for the good of man. Absolutely considered the cosmos is impartial to its many histories. But even that is not well said, for it implies that the cosmos might be partial if it chose. We should rather say that there is no considering of history absolutely at all. For history is just the denial of absolute considerations. It is the affirmation of relative considerations, of considerations which are relative to a selected career. There is no other kind of history possible.
The recognition of this fact does not, however, imply the futility of all history. It does not imply that any history is good enough for men since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. So to conclude is to disregard completely the implications of pluralism. If no history can claim absolute distinction, all histories are distinguished, nevertheless, from one another. If no history can claim preëminence over any other, it is true also that none can be robbed by any other of its own distinction and character. The fact that the morning stars do not sing together is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. The fact that the rain falls equally upon the just and the unjust is evidence neither of the impartial dispensations of deity nor of the equal issue of vice and virtue. Each event in its own history and illustrative of its own career is the law.
Yet men have been prone to write their own history as if it were something else than a human enterprise, as if it were something else than the history of humanity. Those who seek to read their destiny from the constellations ascendant at their birth are generally called superstitious; but those who seek to read it from the constitution of matter, or from the mechanism of the physical world, or from the composition of chemical substances, although no less superstitious, are too frequently called scientists. But "dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return" is an essential truth only about the history of dust; it is only an incidental truth about the history of man. One learns nothing peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. It affords no measure of the appreciation of poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the passion for happiness. Human history is human history only. The hopes and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more satisfying to understand.
Yet some there are who stop worshipping the stars when they discover that the stars neither ask for worship nor respond to it, and who dismiss reverence and piety when they discover that a god did not create the world. Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God, but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found that the stars have a different history from his own.
The inevitable failure of astronomy and geology to afford man gods suitable for his worship is not a recommendation that he should vigorously embrace the superstitions of his ancestors. To counsel that would be an infamy equal to that which has just been condemned. The counsel is rather that what is not human should not be taken as the standard and measure of what is human. Human history can not be wholly resolved into physical processes nor the enterprises of men be construed solely as the by-product of material forces. Such resolution of it appears to be unwarranted in view of the conclusions to which a consideration of what history is, leads. The obverse error has long since been sufficiently condemned. We have been warned often enough that water does not seek its own level or nature abhor a vacuum. Even literary criticism warns us against the pathetic fallacy. But in refusing to anthropomorphize matter, we ought not to be led to materialize man. We should rather be led to recognize that the reasons which condemn anthropomorphic science are precisely the reasons which commend humanistic philosophy. It is just because history is pluralistic that it is unpardonable to confound different histories with one another. So we may conclude that the pluralism of history which makes all histories, when absolutely considered, of equal rank and of indifferent importance, does not rob them, therefore, of their specific characters, nor make human history a presumptuous enterprise for them that write it not in the language of nature, but in the language of man.
This conclusion needs greater refinement of statement if it is to be freed from ambiguity. For the distinction between nature and man is an artifice. It is not a distinction which philosophy can ultimately justify. Undoubtedly man is a part or instance of nature, governed by nature's laws and intimately involved in her processes. But he is so governed and involved not as matter without imagination, but as a being whose distinction is the historical exercise of his intelligence. Nature is not what she would be without him and that is why his history can never be remembered or understood if he is forgotten. He can not be taken out of nature and nature be then called upon to explain him. As a part or instance of nature man is to be remembered and understood, but as the part or instance which he himself is, and not another. His history, consequently, can never be adequately written solely in terms of physics or chemistry, or even of biology; it must be written also in terms of aspiration.
All time processes are histories, but man only is the writer of them, so that historical comprehension becomes the significant trait of human history. To live in the light of a past remembered and understood is to live, not the life of instinct and emotion, but the life of intelligence. It is to see how means converge upon ends, and so to discover means for the attainment of ends desired. Human history becomes thus the record of human progress. From it we may learn how that progress is to be defined and so discover the purpose of man in history. For him the study of his own history is his congenial task to which all his knowledge of other histories is contributory; and for him the conscious, reflective, and intelligent living of his own history is his congenial purpose.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] See especially his "Données immédiates de la conscience," 1888. (Eng. tr. "Time and Free Will," by F. L. Pogson. The Macmillan Company, 1912.) "L'évolution créatrice," 1908. (Eng. tr. "Creative Evolution," by Arthur Mitchell. Henry Holt and Company, 1913.)