I.

Consider the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning

of yesterday or to-day, they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from

morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves

and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy nor

satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of

his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishes

simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all

in vain, for he will not change places with it. He may ask the

beast--"Why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?"

The beast wants to answer--"Because I always forget what I wished to

say": but he forgets this answer too, and is silent; and the man is

left to wonder.

He wonders also about himself, that he cannot learn to forget, but

hangs on the past: however far or fast he run, that chain runs with

him. It is matter for wonder: the moment, that is here and gone, that

was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a spectre to

trouble the quiet of a later moment. A leaf is continually dropping

out of the volume of time and fluttering away--and suddenly it

flutters back into the man's lap. Then he says, "I remember...," and

envies the beast, that forgets at once, and sees every moment really

die, sink into night and mist, extinguished for ever. The beast lives

_unhistorically_; for it "goes into" the present, like a number,

without leaving any curious remainder. It cannot dissimulate, it

conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it actually is, and

thus can be nothing that is not honest. But man is always resisting

the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses

him down, and bows his shoulders; he travels with a dark invisible

burden that he can plausibly disown, and is only too glad to disown

in converse with his fellows--in order to excite their envy. And so

it hurts him, like the thought of a lost Paradise, to see a herd

grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has nothing yet of the past

to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between the walls of the

past and the future. And yet its play must be disturbed, and only too

soon will it be summoned from its little kingdom of oblivion. Then it

learns to understand the words "once upon a time," the "open sesame"

that lets in battle, suffering and weariness on mankind, and reminds

them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never

becomes a present. And when death brings at last the desired

forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the

seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been,"

a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting

itself.

If happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense

the will to live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the

cynic's: for the beast's happiness, like that of the perfect cynic,

is the visible proof of the truth of cynicism. The smallest pleasure,

if it be only continuous and make one happy, is incomparably a

greater happiness than the more intense pleasure that comes as an

episode, a wild freak, a mad interval between ennui, desire, and

privation. But in the smallest and greatest happiness there is always

one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or, in

more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling "unhistorically"

throughout its duration. One who cannot leave himself behind on the

threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a

single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness,

will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do

anything to make others happy. The extreme case would be the man

without any power to forget, who is condemned to see "becoming"

everywhere. Such a man believes no more in himself or his own

existence, he sees everything fly past in an eternal succession, and

loses himself in the stream of becoming. At last, like the logical

disciple of Heraclitus, he will hardly dare to raise his finger.

Forgetfulness is a property of all action; just as not only light but

darkness is bound up with the life of every organism. One who wished

to feel everything historically, would be like a man forcing himself

to refrain from sleep, or a beast who had to live by chewing a

continual cud. Thus even a happy life is possible without

remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is

absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. Or, to put my conclusion

better, there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of

"historical sense," that injures and finally destroys the living

thing, be it a man or a people or a system of culture.

To fix this degree and the limits to the memory of the past, if it is

not to become the gravedigger of the present, we must see clearly how

great is the "plastic power" of a man or a community or a culture; I

mean the power of specifically growing out of one's self, of making

the past and the strange one body with the near and the present, of

healing wounds, replacing what is lost, repairing broken moulds.

There are men who have this power so slightly that a single sharp

experience, a single pain, often a little injustice, will lacerate

their souls like the scratch of a poisoned knife. There are others,

who are so little injured by the worst misfortunes, and even by their

own spiteful actions, as to feel tolerably comfortable, with a fairly

quiet conscience, in the midst of them,--or at any rate shortly

afterwards. The deeper the roots of a man's inner nature, the better

will he take the past into himself; and the greatest and most

powerful nature would be known by the absence of limits for the

historical sense to overgrow and work harm. It would assimilate and

digest the past, however foreign, and turn it to sap. Such a nature

can forget what it cannot subdue; there is no break in the horizon,

and nothing to remind it that there are still men, passions, theories

and aims on the other side. This is a universal law; a living thing

can only be healthy, strong and productive within a certain horizon:

if it be incapable of drawing one round itself, or too selfish to

lose its own view in another's, it will come to an untimely end.

Cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in the future, the joyful

deed, all depend, in the individual as well as the nation, on there

being a line that divides the visible and clear from the vague and

shadowy: we must know the right time to forget as well as the right

time to remember; and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel

historically, and when unhistorically. This is the point that the

reader is asked to consider; that the unhistorical and the historical

are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community,

and a system of culture.

Every one has noticed that a man's historical knowledge and range of

feeling may be very limited, his horizon as narrow as that of an

Alpine valley, his judgments incorrect and his experience falsely

supposed original, and yet in spite of all the incorrectness and

falsity he may stand forth in unconquerable health and vigour, to the

joy of all who see him; whereas another man with far more judgment

and learning will fail in comparison, because the lines of his

horizon are continually changing and shifting, and he cannot shake

himself free from the delicate network of his truth and righteousness

for a downright act of will or desire. We saw that the beast,

absolutely "unhistorical," with the narrowest of horizons, has yet a

certain happiness, and lives at least without hypocrisy or ennui; and

so we may hold the capacity of feeling (to a certain extent)

unhistorically, to be the more important and elemental, as providing

the foundation of every sound and real growth, everything that is

truly great and human. The unhistorical is like the surrounding

atmosphere that can alone create life, and in whose annihilation life

itself disappears. It is true that man can only become man by first

suppressing this unhistorical element in his thoughts, comparisons,

distinctions, and conclusions, letting a clear sudden light break

through these misty clouds by his power of turning the past to the

uses of the present. But an excess of history makes him flag again,

while without the veil of the unhistorical he would never have the

courage to begin. What deeds could man ever have done if he had not

been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical? Or, to leave

metaphors and take a concrete example, imagine a man swayed and

driven by a strong passion, whether for a woman or a theory. His

world is quite altered. He is blind to everything behind him, new

sounds are muffled and meaningless; though his perceptions were never

so intimately felt in all their colour, light and music, and he Seems

to grasp them with his five senses together. All his judgments of

value are changed for the worse; there is much he can no longer

value, as he can scarcely feel it: he wonders that he has so long

been the sport of strange words and opinions, that his recollections

have run around in one unwearying circle and are yet too weak and

weary to make a single step away from it. His whole case is most

indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger,

deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and

forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and

antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action,

but of every just and justifiable action in the world. No artist will

paint his picture, no general win his victory, no nation gain its

freedom, without having striven and yearned for it under those very

"unhistorical" conditions. If the man of action, in Goethe's phrase,

is without conscience, he is also without knowledge: he forgets most

things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and

only recognises one law, the law of that which is to be. So he loves

his work infinitely more than it deserves to be loved; and the best

works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always

be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.

Should any one be able to dissolve the unhistorical atmosphere in

which every great event happens, and breathe afterwards, he might be

capable of rising to the "super-historical" standpoint of

consciousness, that Niebuhr has described as the possible result of

historical research. "History," he says, "is useful for one purpose,

if studied in detail: that men may know, as the greatest and best

spirits of our generation do not know, the accidental nature of the

forms in which they see and insist on others seeing,--insist, I say,

because their consciousness of them is exceptionally intense. Any one

who has not grasped this idea in its different applications will fall

under the spell of a more powerful spirit who reads a deeper emotion

into the given form." Such a standpoint might be called

"super-historical," as one who took it could feel no impulse from

history to any further life or work, for he would have recognised the

blindness and injustice in the soul of the doer as a condition of

every deed: he would be cured henceforth of taking history too

seriously, and have learnt to answer the question how and why life

should be lived,--for all men and all circumstances, Greeks or Turks,

the first century or the nineteenth. Whoever asks his friends whether

they would live the last ten or twenty years over again, will easily

see which of them is born for the "super-historical standpoint": they

will all answer no, but will give different reasons for their answer.

Some will say they have the consolation that the next twenty will be

better: they are the men referred to satirically by David Hume:--

"And from the dregs of life hope to receive,

What the first sprightly running could not give."

We will call them the "historical men." Their vision of the past

turns them towards the future, encourages them to persevere with

life, and kindles the hope that justice will yet come and happiness

is behind the mountain they are climbing. They believe that the

meaning of existence will become ever clearer in the course of its

evolution, they only look backward at the process to understand the

present and stimulate their longing for the future. They do not know

how unhistorical their thoughts and actions are in spite of all their

history, and how their preoccupation with it is for the sake of life

rather than mere science.

But that question to which we have heard the first answer, is capable

of another; also a "no," but on different grounds. It is the "no" of

the "super-historical" man who sees no salvation in evolution, for

whom the world is complete and fulfils its aim in every single

moment. How could the next ten years teach what the past ten were not

able to teach?

Whether the aim of the teaching be happiness or resignation, virtue

or penance, these super-historical men are not agreed; but as against

all merely historical ways of viewing the past, they are unanimous in

the theory that the past and the present are one and the same,

typically alike in all their diversity, and forming together a

picture of eternally present imperishable types of unchangeable value

and significance. Just as the hundreds of different languages

correspond to the same constant and elemental needs of mankind, and

one who understood the needs could learn nothing new from the

languages; so the "super-historical" philosopher sees all the history

of nations and individuals from within. He has a divine insight into

the original meaning of the hieroglyphs, and comes even to be weary

of the letters that are continually unrolled before him. How should

the endless rush of events not bring satiety, surfeit, loathing? So

the boldest of us is ready perhaps at last to say from his heart with

Giacomo Leopardi: "Nothing lives that were worth thy pains, and the

earth deserves not a sigh. Our being is pain and weariness, and the

world is mud--nothing else. Be calm."

But we will leave the super-historical men to their loathings and

their wisdom: we wish rather to-day to be joyful in our unwisdom and

have a pleasant life as active men who go forward, and respect the

course of the world. The value we put on the historical may be merely

a Western prejudice: let us at least go forward within this prejudice

and not stand still. If we could only learn better to study history

as a means to life! We would gladly grant the super-historical people

their superior wisdom, so long as we are sure of having more life

than they: for in that case our unwisdom would have a greater future

before it than their wisdom. To make my opposition between life and

wisdom clear, I will take the usual road of the short summary.

A historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item

of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead: for he

has found out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and

especially the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of

its power for history. This power has now become, for him who has

recognised it, powerless; not yet, perhaps, for him who is alive.

History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed to sway the intellect

would mean for men the final balancing of the ledger of life.

Historical study is only fruitful for the future if it follow a

powerful life-giving influence, for example, a new system of culture;

only, therefore, if it be guided and dominated by a higher force, and

do not itself guide and dominate.

History, so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power, and

thus will never become a pure science like mathematics. The question

how far life needs such a service is one of the most serious

questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people and a culture.

For by excess of history life becomes maimed and degenerate, and is

followed by the degeneration of history as well.