"I Believe" and other essays

by Guy Thorne

I purpose a comprehensive summary of this question, and have spared no trouble to make the indictment as fair and accurate as I can. For a considerable period I have been steadily gathering data and forming opinions. Documents of importance and value have been furnished to me, and if something actual and conclusive does not result, then the fault is that of the writer, who has failed to deal adequately with the material which he has himself collected and with which he has been lavishly and generously supplied.

“Doest thou well to be angry?” was the question asked of the Hebrew prophet, who thereupon “went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” And finally came the answer of Jonah, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” My friends and I have built our modest place of espial, and we have our idea of what would become of the city were it left in the hands of certain rulers. That we do well to be angry I hope to show.

In the first place, it is really necessary to define history, and the duties of the historian. Until we have done this we have no standpoint. The axiom must always precede the syllogism just as the epithet concludes it. No one can build a basis in a vacuum. Innumerable minds have been at pains to define history.

From the remote time when Lucian published his treatise How History ought to be Written until the depressing moment when Bishop Stubbs first attempted to write it, there has been an enormous divergence of thought on this point. Kant believed that Dynasty and Nation, Emperor and Clown were alike incidents and puppets illustrating the theory that an irresistible, all-pervading Force works through history towards one end—the development of a perfect constitution. If Kant had written history and applied his method instead of indicating it, he would have had us believe that history is a science to be studied under the limiting influence of a rigid formula.

Ranke thought, and thought rightly, that the analysis of original documents alone made possible the synthesis of the past, while the trained historian in his endeavour to get at the truth should be chary of accepting contemporary authors, unless eye-witnesses of the events they chronicled. Yet Ranke definitely placed himself with those who were beginning to believe that history was a science and nothing more.

Guizot, who edited Gibbon, freshly defined the labours of the historian. Guizot’s view was that faithful research, with its results duly applied, ought to enable the historian to supply such a picture of the past that it should be both to his readers and himself a veritable present. I know of no more illuminating conception. But how can an historian supply the picture unless he has a competent knowledge of psychology? To write about human beings in the past without a knowledge of psychology is exactly like writing a history of locomotives without understanding anything whatever about the nature and properties of steam.

It is only quite lately that the scientists have allowed psychology to be a science, with, for example, as fixed a place and purpose as biology. If any one asked me for a list of authors from whom he would learn something of psychology I should probably commend to him Maher (1900), Spencer (1890), Stout (1899), James (1892), M’Cosh (1886), and so on.

You see the dates, do you not? You realize what every one who lives in the realm of thought, as also many who work in the sphere of action, must realize? Briefly it is this. The old historians were concerned only with the simple results of investigation; the best modern historian adds to his equipment a knowledge of the processes of thought. The older sciences are joining hands with the new science of psychology. It is discerned that the individual temperament must clothe the bones of fact with the colour and movement that psychological knowledge alone can give.

It is discerned, but only by the important people as yet—only by the people who matter and count. The Oxford historians whom I am attacking have not realized it and will never realize it, which is the precise reason why we must reform them or give them the alternative of staffing the upper grade board schools.