History, viewed as a series of cumulations, may in fact claim to satisfy the intellect by “explaining” a good deal of historical facts. It explains by means of the elemental factor of individual psychology, which every one knows from himself, and by the simple concept that there is a cumulation, supported by language and by writing as its principal factors, which both of course rest on psychology again. Psychology, so we may say, is capable of leading to cumulation phenomena; the cumulations in history are such that we are able to understand them by our everyday psychology; and history, so far as it is of scientific value, consists exclusively of cumulations.
No doubt there is much truth in such a conception of history; but no doubt also, it puts history in the second rank as compared with psychology; just as geology stands in the second rank as compared with chemistry or physics. Geology and human history may lead to generalities in the form of rules, but these rules are known to be not elemental but only cumulative; and moreover, we know the elements concerned in them. The elements, therefore, are the real subjects for further studies in the realm of philosophy, but not the cumulations, not the rules, which are known to be due to accidental constellations. Of course, the “single” is the immediate subject of this sort of history, but the single as such is emphatically pronounced to be insignificant, and the cumulations and the cumulative rules, though “singles” in a higher sense of the word, are shown to be anything but elementalities.
Therefore, on a conception of human history such as that of Buckle, Taine, Lamprecht, and others, we, of course, ought to take an interest in history, because what is “explained” by historical research touches all of us most personally every day and every year. But our philosophy, our view of the world, would remain the same without history as it is with it. We only study history, and especially the history of our own civilisation, because it is a field of actuality which directly relates to ourselves, just as we study for practical purposes the railway time-tables of our own country, but not of Australia; just as we study the local time-table in particular.
If the mere rerum cognoscere causas is regarded as the criterium of science, history of Lamprecht’s type of course is a science, for its explanations rest upon the demonstration of the typical constellations and of the elemental factor or law from which together the next constellations are known necessarily to follow. But history of this kind is not a science in the sense of discovering den ruhenden Pol in der Erscheinungen Flucht.
HUMAN HISTORY NOT AN “EVOLUTION”
Quite another view of history has been maintained by Hegel, if his explanations about the Entwicklung des objectiven Geistes (“the development of the objective mind”) may be co-ordinated with our strictly logical categories of the possible aspects of history. But I believe we are entitled to say that it was a real evolution of mankind that Hegel was thinking of; an evolution regarding mankind as spiritual beings and having an end, at least ideally. One psychical state was considered by Hegel to generate the next, not as a mere cumulation of elemental stages, but in such a way that each of the states would represent an elementality and an irreducibility in itself; and he assumed that there was a continuous series of such stages of the mind through the course of generations. Is there any sufficient reason in historical facts for such an assumption?
The mind “evolves” itself from error to truth by what might be called a system of contradictions, according to Hegel, with respect to logic as well as to morality; the sum of such contradictions becoming smaller and less complicated with every single step of this evolution. No doubt there really occurs a process of logical and moral refining, so to say, in the individual, and no doubt also, the results of this process, as far as attained, can be handed down to the next generation by the spoken word or by books. But it is by no means clear, I think, that this process is of the type of a real evolution towards an end, so far as it relates to the actual series of generations as such. On the contrary, it seems to me that we have here simply what we meet everywhere in history—a sort of cumulation resting upon a psychological basis.
The dissatisfaction that exists at any actual stage of contradiction, both moral and logical, is one of the psychical factors concerned; the faculty of reasoning is the other. Now it is a consequence of the reasoning faculty that the dissatisfaction continually decreases, or at least changes in such a way that each partial result of the logical process brings with it the statement of new problems. The number of such problems may become less, as the logical process advances, and, indeed, there is an ideal state, both logical and moral, in which there are no more problems, but only results, though this ideal could hardly be regarded as attainable by the human mind. In the history of those sciences which are wholly or chiefly of the a priori type, this process of deliverance from contradictions is most advantageously to be seen. It is obvious in mechanics and thermodynamics, and the theory of matter is another very good instance. A certain result is reached; much seems to be gained, but suddenly another group of facts presents itself, which had been previously unknown or neglected. The first result has to be changed or enlarged; many problems of the second order arise; there are contradictions among them, which disappear after a certain alteration of what was the first fundamental result, and so on. And the same is true about morality, though the difficulties are much greater here, as a clear and well-marked standard of measurement of what is good and what is bad, is wanting, or at least, is not conceded unanimously. But even here there is a consensus on some matters: one would hardly go back to slavery again, for instance, and there are still other points in morality which are claimed as ideals at least by a great majority of moral thinkers.
But all this is not true “evolution,” and indeed, I doubt if such an evolution of mankind could be proved at present in the sense in which Hegel thought it possible. The process of logical and moral deliverance from contradictions might come to an end in one individual; at least that is a logical possibility, or it might come to an end in, say, six or ten generations. And there is, unfortunately for mankind, no guarantee that the result will not be lost again and have to be acquired a second time. All this proves that what Hegel regarded as an evolution of the race is only a cumulation. There is nothing evolutionary relating to the generations of mankind as such. At least, nothing is proved about such an evolution.[165]