One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness, paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,—so Plato long ago well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,—are we to go from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known: for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical method is notorious. To explain Homo sapiens, one is told to study the ape,—the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or however his early prototype may be at present named and recognised. And in all this there is a truth—or least a half-truth. But let us equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.
The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all false pre-conceptions, of all idola, is one which it is easy to mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness, the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest, self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant—though, as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he sometimes overshot himself in statement—was to insist on the eternal wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole and sufficient condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the mind;—or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things: for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,—being otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even permanent—or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental constitutive element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises only the positive side.
He therefore who would understand—or would write—the history of Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends—both at the Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise. A day may come—or may have come—for example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes—into their ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true vice versa.
Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance, it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an intelligence ready to welcome it,—prepared with its complement in the spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means to its own end, to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it, because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a truth—which we are only too ready to forget or discount—that the savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,' and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally' in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely—as the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar breed—to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other, but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of the advance made in the 'last new thing.'
If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what is already there, or if we could change this, and leave that unchanged,—as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,—if it be what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is expected to do—is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,—the same yet not the mere same[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth, inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed, retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress is possible, except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore, progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.
Development then has two faces, one to the future and another to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added, practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,—not unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears—over the lowly hole of the pit—it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical, the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense the past contained the present—that, as the poet says, the child is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily lie prefigured—if we had the proper microscope to see it—as a germ in the first and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.
But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature, and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy. Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind: Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being. Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it runs in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, we can see how misleading it may be to take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled, more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony—the irony of the Absolute.
[1] Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean a great deal more than this,—how much will depend on the context. These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their apparent simplicity imposes upon us.