Now, on the other hand, it is worth noticing that, even if there were generally accepted “values,” history as the doctrine of singularities would be deprived of philosophical importance. Its single cases would then be merely instances of certain types of actions and occurrences which have been proved to be “valuable,” i.e. to be centres of interest, before-hand. Rickert has observed that the relation to any judgments about moral values would render history unhistorical, for the generalities to which it is related would be the main thing in such a case. But he did not notice, as far as I can see, that history, if related to any “values” whatever—if there were any generally conceded—would become “non-historical” just as well: for the generalities as expressed in the “values” would be the main thing in this case also. In fact, there is no escape from the dilemma:—either no general centres of interest, and therefore a mere subjective “history”; or general “values,” and therefore history a mere collection of instances.
The “limits of concepts in natural sciences” then are the same as the limits of intellectual concepts in general. For intellectual, i.e. logical, “values” are the only centres of interest that can lay claim to universality. There are indeed other groups of important concepts, the ethical ones, but they are outside intellectuality and may enter philosophy only as problems, not as solutions. Therefore, history in its true sense, even if related to the ethical group of concepts, has no bearing on philosophy. Philosophically it remains a sum of contingencies, in which certain laws of cumulation and certain series of cumulation may be discovered. But these series and these laws, if taken scientifically, only offer us instances of psychological elementalities. They also might be instances of primary ethical states and relations, if there were such relations of more than a mere subjective and personal validity, which at present at least seems not to be the case.
Conclusions about Systematics and History in General
We have finished our analysis of the history of mankind as the only instance of an historical biological process that is actually known to exist and is not only assumed hypothetically.
What we have learnt from this analysis, though certainly important in itself, has not afforded us any new result for theoretical biology.
The history of mankind is proved to be of philosophical importance, at present, so far only as it offers instances to the science of psychology; besides that it may be of value and importance to many conditions of practical and emotional life.
There is only one science, and only one kind of logic too. “In one sense the only science”—that was the predicate attached to natural sciences by Lord Gifford, as you will remember from our first lecture. It is not without interest to note that at the end of our course of this year, we find occasion to realise on what a deep insight into logical and philosophical relations that sentence was grounded.
We now leave the theory of human history, which has been to us nothing more than a branch of biological phylogeny in general. We have dealt with it from quite a simple realistic point of view, not burdened by any epistemology. We have taken psychical states as realities, just as we have taken as realities all parts of the animal body; and it seems to me that we were entitled to do so, as it was only history about the actions of men we were dealing with, not their actions themselves. Next summer we shall begin with studying action as action, and then, in fact, a well-founded epistemology will be among our first requirements. And history also will come on the scene once more.