CHAPTER XX.
GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the process by which in history the past throws light on the present and gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems, each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer and clearer appreciation of another.
The present medium of general intelligence and theory in which we live embraces in a way the results of all that has preceded it, of all the steps of culture through which the world has risen. But in this body of intellectual beliefs and ideas with which our single soul is clad,—in this common soil of thought,—the several contributions of the past have been half or even wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of their old selves. What in a former day was a question of all-engrossing interest has left but a trace: the complete and detailed formations of ancient thought have lost their distinctness of outline, and have shrunk into mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual world. Questions, from which the ancient philosophers could never shake themselves loose, are now only a barely perceptible nuance in the complex questions of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of the 'one' and the 'many,' puzzles like those of Zeno, and the casuistry of statesmanship such as is found in the Politics of Aristotle, have for most people little else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely detect the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions' of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the past is never altogether annihilated, and that every step, however slight it may seem, which has once been taken in the movement of intellect, must be traversed again in order to understand the constitution of our present intellectual world. To outward appearance the life and work of past generations have so completely lost their organic nature, with its unified and vital variety, that in their present phase they have turned into hard and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of growth, as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the vegetables of one period are suspended and put in abeyance: and these vegetables turn into what we call the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth. Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or rendered torpid in the structures of thought, they sink into the material from which individuals draw their means of intellectual support. This inorganic material of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way as the earth and its products stand to the body of a man. If the one is our material, the other is our spiritual substance. In the one our mind, as in the other our body, lives, moves, and has its being.
But in each case besides the practical need, which bids us consume the substance as dead matter, and apply it to use, there is the theoretical bent which seeks to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully developed organism. 'This past,' says Hegel, 'is traversed by the individual, in the same way as one who begins to study a more advanced science repeats the preliminary lessons with which he had long been acquainted, in order to bring their information once more before his mind. He recalls them: but his interest and study are devoted to other things. In the same way the individual must go through all that is contained in the several stages in the growth of the universal mind: but all the while he feels that they are forms of which the mind has divested itself,—that they are steps on a road which has been long ago completed and levelled. Thus, points of learning, which in former times tasked the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the level of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood: and in the progress of the schoolroom we may recognise the course of the education of the world, drawn, as it were, in shadowy outline[2].'
The scope of historical investigation therefore is this. It shows how every shading in the present world of thought, which makes our spiritual environment, has been once living and actual with an independent being of its own. But it also reveals the presence of shades and elements in the present which if our eyes had looked on the present alone we should scarcely have suspected: and it thus enables us to interpolate stages in development of which the result preserves only rudimentary traces. And, when carried out in a philosophical spirit, it shows further, that in those formations, which are produced in each period of the structural development of reason, the universe of thought, or the Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised in some special mode which for that period seems absolute and final. Each form or 'dimension' of thought, in which the totality is grasped and unified, is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may seem to casual observers regarding only the simplicity of language: it is a total, embracing more or less of simpler elements, each of which was once an inferior total, though in this larger sphere they are reduced to unity. Thus each term or period in the process is really an individualised whole, with a complex interconnexion and contrast included in it: it is concrete. No single word or phrase explains it: yet it is one totality,—a rounded life, from which its several spheres of life must be explained. But when that period is passing away, the form of its idea is separated, and retained, apart from the life and mass of the elements which constituted it a real totality; and then the mere shading or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is left abstract. When that time has come, a special form, a whole act in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and is only a name.
The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something more than sensation,—that the deliverances of sense-perception rest upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid the first foundations of that world of reason in which the civilised nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has only a secondary interest for the culture of the West.