TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE

Science still young.—Its miscarriage in Greece.—Its timid reappearance

in modern times.—Distinction between science and myth.—Platonic status

of hypothesis.—Meaning of verification.—Possible validity of

myths.—Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.—But science follows

the movement of its subject-matter.—Moral value of science.—Its

continuity with common knowledge.—Its intellectual essence.—Unity of

science.—In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of

waste.—Sciences converge from different points of origin.—Two chief

kinds of science, physics and dialectic.—Their mutual

implication.—Their coöperation.—No science _a priori_.—Role of

criticism. Pages 3-38

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

History an artificial memory.—Second sight requires control.—Nature

the theme common to various memories.—Growth of legend.—No history

without documents.—The aim is truth.—Indirect methods of attaining

it.—Historical research a part of physics.—Verification here

indirect.—Futile ideal to survey all facts.—Historical theory.—It is

arbitrary.—A moral critique of the past is possible.—How it might be

just.—Transition to historical romance.—Possibility of genuine

epics.—Literal truth abandoned.—History exists to be transcended.—Its

great rôle. Pages 39-68

CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

Recurrent forms in nature.—Their discovery makes the flux

calculable.—Looser principles tried first.—Mechanism for the most part

hidden.—Yet presumably pervasive.—Inadequacy of consciousness.—Its

articulation inferior to that of its objects.—Science consequently

retarded, and speculation rendered necessary.—Dissatisfaction with

mechanism partly natural, and partly artificial.—Biassed judgments

inspired by moral inertia.—Positive emotions proper to

materialism.—The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especially

cruel.—Mechanism to be judged by its fruits. Pages 69-94

CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.—Men of science not

speculative.—Confusion in semi-moral subjects.—“Physic of metaphysic

begs defence.”—Evolution by mechanism.—Evolution by ideal

attraction.—If species are evolved they cannot guide

evolution.—Intrusion of optimism.—Evolution according to Hegel.—The

conservative interpretation.—The radical one.—Megalomania.—Chaos in

the theory of mind.—Origin of self-consciousness.—The notion of

spirit.—The notion of sense.—Competition between the two.—The rise of

scepticism. Pages 95-125

CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

Mind reading not science.—Experience a reconstruction.—The honest art

of education.—Arbitrary readings of the mind.—Human nature appealed to

rather than described.—Dialectic in psychology.—Spinoza on the

passions.—A principle of estimation cannot govern events.—Scientific

psychology a part of biology.—Confused attempt to detach the psychic

element.—Differentia of the psychic.—Approach to irrelevant

sentience.—Perception represents things in their practical relation to

the body.—Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.—Attempt at

idealistic physics.—Association not efficient.—It describes

coincidences.—Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in

dialectic.—Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will

another.—Double attachment of mind to nature.—Is the subject-matter of

psychology absolute being?—Sentience is representable only in

fancy.—The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not

sentience, are also real.—Mind knowable and important in so far as it

represents other things. Pages 126-166

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

Dialectic better than physics.—Maladjustments to nature render physics

conspicuous and unpleasant.—Physics should be largely virtual, and

dialectic explicit.—Intent is vital and indescribable.—It is analogous

to flux in existence.—It expresses natural life.—It has a material

basis.—It is necessarily relevant to earth.—The basis of intent

becomes appreciable in language.—Intent starts from a datum, and is

carried by a feeling.—It demands conventional expression.—A fable

about matter and form. Pages 167-186

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence

by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous

intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is

empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits

easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in

intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the

scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of

dialectic.—Hegel’s satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given

intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous. Pages 187-209

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its

emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of

dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of

philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice

of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial

moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative exuberance and political

discipline.—Sterility of Greek example.—Prerational morality among the

Jews.—The development of conscience.—Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek

aims.—Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme.

Pages 210-232

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may

supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational

morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an

autonomous will.—Socrates’ science.—Its opposition to sophistry and

moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural

self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to

harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is

happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its

unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a

conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and

particular. Pages 233-261

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The

illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic

recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in

arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral

ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a

mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of

dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in

Christianity.—Consequent eclecticism.—The negation of naturalism never

complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of

India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless

involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and

perennial realities. Pages 262-300

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

Various modes of revising science.—Science its own best

critic.—Obstruction by alien traditions.—Needless anxiety for moral

interests.—Science an imaginative and practical art.—Arrière-pensée in

transcendentalism.—Its romantic sincerity.—Its constructive

impotence.—Its dependence on common-sense.—Its futility.—Ideal

science is self-justified.—Physical science is presupposed in

scepticism.—It recurs in all understanding of perception.—Science

contains all trustworthy knowledge.—It suffices for the Life of Reason.

Pages 301-320

REASON IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER I

TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Science still young.]

Science is so new a thing and so far from final, it seems to the layman

so hopelessly accurate and extensive, that a moralist may well feel some

diffidence in trying to estimate its achievements and promises at their

human worth. The morrow may bring some great revolution in science, and

is sure to bring many a correction and many a surprise. Religion and art

have had their day; indeed a part of the faith they usually inspire is

to believe that they have long ago revealed their secret. A critic may

safely form a judgment concerning them; for even if he dissents from the

orthodox opinion and ventures to hope that religion and art may assume

in the future forms far nobler and more rational than any they have

hitherto worn, still he must confess that art and religion have had

several turns at the wheel; they have run their course through in

various ages and climes with results which anybody is free to estimate

if he has an open mind and sufficient interest in the subject. Science,

on the contrary, which apparently cannot exist where intellectual

freedom is denied, has flourished only twice in recorded times: once

for some three hundred years in ancient Greece, and again for about the

same period in modern Christendom. Its fruits have scarcely begun to

appear; the lands it is discovering have not yet been circumnavigated,

and there is no telling what its ultimate influence will be on human

practice and feeling.

[Sidenote: Its miscarriage in Greece.]

The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual.

The Greeks’ energy and liberty were too soon spent, and the very

exuberance of their genius made its expression chaotic. Where every mind

was so fresh and every tongue so clever no scientific tradition could

arise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the value of

rival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere

philosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at

the very beginning. Another circumstance that impeded the growth of

science was the forensic and rhetorical turn proper to Greek

intelligence. This mental habit gave a tremendous advantage in

philosophy to the moralist and poet over the naturalist or

mathematician. Hence what survived in Greece after the heyday of

theoretic achievement was chiefly philosophies of life, and these—at

the death of liberty—grew daily more personal and ascetic. Authority in

scientific matters clung chiefly to Plato and Aristotle, and this not

for the sake of their incomparable moral philosophy—for in ethics that

decadent age preferred the Stoics and Epicureans—but just for those

rhetorical expedients which in the Socratic school took the place of

natural science. Worse influences in this field could hardly be

imagined, since Plato’s physics ends in myth and apologue, while

Aristotle’s ends in nomenclature and teleology.

All that remained of Greek physics, therefore, was the conception of

what physics should be—a great achievement due to the earlier

thinkers—and certain hints and guesses in that field. The elements of

geometry had also been formulated, while the Socratic school bequeathed

to posterity a well-developed group of moral sciences, rational in

principle, but destined to be soon overlaid with metaphysical and

religious accretions, so that the dialectical nerve and reasonableness

of them were obliterated, and there survived only miscellaneous

conclusions, fragments of wisdom built topsy-turvy into the new mythical

edifice. It is the sad task reserved for historical criticism to detach

those sculptured stones from the rough mass in which they have been

embedded and to rearrange them in their pristine order, thus

rediscovering the inner Socratic principle of moral philosophy, which is

nothing but self-knowledge—a circumspect, systematic utterance of the

speaker’s mind, disclosing his implicit meaning and his ultimate

preferences.

[Sidenote: Its timid reappearance in modern times.]

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic

theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober

laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries—the

earth’s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the

development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus,

and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a

patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and

without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed

imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the

notion of nature’s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession

in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in

order to maintain the main position.

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a

system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general

physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole

existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their

system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral

world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable

addendum. Similarly Newton’s mechanical principles, broad as they were,

were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the

nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given

their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza’s system, though

naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no

influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which

shall include all existences—gods no less than men, if gods actually

exist—is one not yet current, although it is implied in every

scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary

movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men’s minds

back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements

is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an

irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been

emancipated from authority and has set to work to square men’s

conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally

passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises

the universal empire of law and conceives man’s life as an incident in a

prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are

produced and devoured. This “idealism” is in truth a system of

immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it

works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist

would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except

what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and

expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a

translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which

presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in

that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and

just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not

brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly

and unawares, by their religious speculations.

[Sidenote: Distinction between science and myth.]

The gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a true

physics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle which

everywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things.

This divergence is as far as possible from lying in the merit of the two

sorts of theory. Their merit, and the genius and observation required to

frame them, may well be equal, or an imaginative system may have the

advantage in these respects. It may even be more serviceable for a while

and have greater pragmatic value, so long as knowledge is at best

fragmentary, and no consecutive or total view of things is attempted by

either party. Thus in social life a psychology expressed in terms of

abstract faculties and personified passions may well carry a man farther

than a physiological psychology would. Or, again, we may say that there

was more experience and love of nature enshrined in ancient mythology

than in ancient physics; the observant poet might then have fared better

in the world than the pert and ignorant materialist. Nor does the

difference between science and myth lie in the fact that the one is

essentially less speculative than the other. They are differently

speculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notions

that might by chance represent actual existences; while science

terminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, but

verified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experience

as those from which the theory started.

[Sidenote: Platonic status of hypothesis.]

The laws formulated by science—the transitive figments describing the

relation between fact and fact—possess only a Platonic sort of reality.

They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they

are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time

they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible

with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true

of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf.

This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not

docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on

treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves

persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of

things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed,

each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone

is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those

propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody’s

_knowledge_ of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of

course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found

in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which

it may succeed in knowing.

[Sidenote: Meaning of verification.]

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when

we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity,

however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only

vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense.

To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult

existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover

that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also.

There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a

kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably

exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of

relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof.

Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could

not be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open

to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being

existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring

as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device,

gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is

established. It _is_ not, it merely _applies_; and every situation in

which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.

The case would not be different with fables, were their basis and

meaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they,

too, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverable

reality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidence

it can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysical

pretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the less

relevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to support

fabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they are

merely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods of

expression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed to

lie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observation

they descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and were

actually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the society

of Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself,

since only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave could

know for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary,

a speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one that

might be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy,

but would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it had

led us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparent

again and relevant to experience, which could continually serve to

support or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, it

would be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate in

itself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it to

eventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would have

prepared him to meet and to use.

[Sidenote: Possible validity of myths.]

If I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patiently

follows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. It

reveals nothing, but, what is far better, it means something. I have

expressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course which

events may be expected to take under given circumstances. The

expression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because it

tends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its own

plane—other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would be

truly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, by

way of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actually

follows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into that

reverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to the

undiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in the

world. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression,

would have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the given

fact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real—for such a

goddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourth

dimension—are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any

possibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are

thought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but as

hypotheses they are not gods.

[Sidenote: Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.]

The same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science deals

only with objects of possible experience. But this expression is

unfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical and

supernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an object

of _possible_ experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe one

another and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said to

occupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomena

there; they would be experienced things. Were fables really as

metaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all the

while and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would be

nothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A real

Triton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open to

properly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But a

Triton after all has something to do with the Ægean and other earthly

waters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of his

habitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards of

moral action. This relevance to given experience and its objects is what

cuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous rôle of

reporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhere

else in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what they

describe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that,

absolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience.

What we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the sea

waves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves,

we should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back the

history of man and nature we should find them always passing by natural

generation out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearing

suddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos;

and finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals,

we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and

its functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy.

Those myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the given

world, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, not

extensions, for the experience we know.

[Sidenote: But science follows the movement of its subject-matter.]

A chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing given

facts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the same

sphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in its

own plane through its continuous transformations. Science expands

speculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objects

given in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supporting

world, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What a

scientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts—the atomic

structure of things, for instance—might come in time under the direct

fire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with better

instruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis that

assumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis that

the interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if on

inspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does not

merely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves the

inference by reaching the fact inferred.

The contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myth

the facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is felt to

terminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level than

any immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossible

to verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed the

stars’ shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps at

sunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous for

travellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, I

might possibly find that the stars’ appearance and disappearance could

continue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggest

itself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would never

descend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences.

It would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my

metaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would

remain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the

more earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be

deceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own

emotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their

hands—if they had hands—that would have lighted the stars I saw; and

this, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable and

its sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation,

did what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in the

universe; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true at

all, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion.

Any representative and provable validity which it might possess would

assimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrument

for human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies it

made were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on its

own account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of its

essential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only for

its significance.

[Sidenote: Moral value of science.]

A symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in the

contrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpret

experience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves by

turning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, the

emotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm.

Since in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, in

itself perhaps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual facts

and to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from a

different point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when we

succeed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has a

rational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipation

what we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully to

satisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific

thinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does.

It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal

direction upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed

absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow,

have to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might have

been would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully how

things are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then

inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from

the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and

basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems

comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens

through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps,

we recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to

know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mere

amusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: it

marks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle to

significant play and a flimsy to a solid idea.

[Sidenote: Its continuity with common knowledge.]

The fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movement

involves a further consequence: science differs from common knowledge in

scope only, not in nature. When intelligence arises, when the flux of

things begins to be mitigated by representation of it and objects are at

last fixed and recognisable, there is science. For even here, in the

presence of a datum something virtual and potential is called up,

namely, what the given thing was a moment ago, what it is growing into,

or what it is contrasted with in character. As I walk round a tree, I

learn that the parts still visible, those that have just disappeared

and those now coming into view, are continuous and belong to the same

tree.

This declaration, though dialectic might find many a mare’s nest in its

language, is a safe and obvious enough expression of knowledge. It

involves terms, however, which are in the act of becoming potential.

What is just past, what is just coming, though sensibly continuous with

what is present, are partially infected with nonentity. After a while

human apprehension can reach them only by inference, and to count upon

them is frankly to rely on theory. The other side of the tree, which

common sense affirms to exist unconditionally, will have to be

represented in memory or fancy; and it may never actually be observed by

any mortal. Yet, if I continued my round, I should actually observe it

and know it by experience; and I should find that it had the same status

as the parts now seen, and was continuous with them. My assertion that

it exists, while certainly theoretical and perhaps false, is accordingly

scientific in type. Science, when it has no more scope than this, is

indistinguishable from common sense. The two become distinct only when

the facts inferred cannot be easily verified or have not yet been merged

with the notion representing the given object in most men’s minds.

Where science remains consciously theoretical (being as yet contrasted

with ordinary apperception and current thought), it is, ideally

considered, a _pis aller_, an expedient to which a mind must have

recourse when it lacks power and scope to hold all experience in hand

and to view the wide world in its genuine immediacy. As oblivescence is

a gradual death, proper to a being not ideally master of the universal

flux, but swamped within it, so science is an artificial life, in which

what cannot be perceived directly (because personal limitations forbid)

may be regarded abstractly, yet efficaciously, in what we think and do.

With better faculties the field of possible experience could be better

dominated, and fewer of its parts, being hidden from sight, would need

to be mapped out symbolically on that sort of projection which we call

scientific inference. The real relations between the parts of nature

would then be given in intuition, from which hypothesis, after all, has

borrowed its schemata.

[Sidenote: Its intellectual essence.]

Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal

vision. We should not forget to add, however, that the universal vision

in question, if it were to be something better than private sensation or

passive feeling in greater bulk, would have to be intellectual, just as

science is; that is, it would have to be practical and to survey the

flux from a given standpoint, in a perspective determined by special and

local interests. Otherwise the whole world, when known, would merely be

re-enacted in its blind immediacy without being understood or subjected

to any purpose. The critics of science, when endowed with any

speculative power, have always seen that what is hypothetical and

abstract in scientific method is somehow servile and provisional;

science being a sort of telegraphic wire through which a meagre report

reaches us of things we would fain observe and live through in their

full reality. This report may suffice for approximately fit action; it

does not suffice for ideal knowledge of the truth nor for adequate

sympathy with the reality. What commonly escapes speculative critics of

science, however, is that in transcending hypothesis and reaching

immediacy again we should run a great risk of abandoning knowledge and

sympathy altogether; for if we _became_ what we now represent so

imperfectly, we should evidently no longer represent it at all. We

should not, at the end of our labours, have at all enriched our own

minds by adequate knowledge of what surrounds us, nor made our wills

just in view of alien but well-considered interests. We should have lost

our own essence and substituted for it, not something higher than

indiscriminate being, but only indiscriminate being in its flat, blind,

and selfish infinity. The ideality, the representative faculty, would

have gone out in our souls, and our perfected humanity would have

brought us back to protoplasm.

In transcending science, therefore, we must not hope to transcend

knowledge, nor in transcending selfishness to abolish finitude. Finitude

is the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as of

selfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypothetical

knowledge. The defect of science is that it is inadequate or abstract,

that the account it gives of things is not full and sensuous enough; but

its merit is that, like sense, it makes external being present to a

creature that is concerned in adjusting itself to its environment, and

informs that creature about things other than itself. Science, if

brought to perfection, would not lose its representative or ideal

essence. It would still survey and inform, but it would survey

everything at once and inform the being it enlightened about all that

could affect its interests. It would thus remain practical in effect and

speculative in character. In losing its accidental limitations it would

not lose its initial bias, its vital function. It would continue to be a

rational activity, guiding and perfecting a natural being.

Perfect knowledge of things would be as far as possible from identifying

the knower with them, seeing that for the most part—even when we call

them human—they have no knowledge of themselves. Science, accordingly,

even when imperfect, is a tremendous advance on absorption in sense and

a dull immediacy. It begins to enrich the mind and gives it some

inkling, at least, of that ideal dominion which each centre of

experience might have if it had learned to regard all others, and the

relation connecting it with them, both in thought and in action. Ideal

knowledge would be an inward state corresponding to a perfect

adjustment of the body to all forces affecting it. If the adjustment was

perfect the inward state would regard every detail in the objects

envisaged, but it would see those details in a perspective of its own,

adding to sympathetic reproduction of them a consciousness of their

relation to its own existence and perfection.

[Sidenote: Unity of science.]

The fact that science expresses the character and relation of objects in

their own terms has a further important consequence, which serves again

to distinguish science from metaphorical thinking. If a man tries to

illustrate the nature of a thing by assimilating it to something else

which he happens to have in mind at the same time, it is obvious that a

second man, whose mind is differently furnished, may assimilate the same

object to a quite different idea: so myths are centrifugal, and the more

elaborate and delicate they are the more they diverge, like

well-developed languages. The rude beginnings of myth in every age and

country bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted are

similar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their special

grammar of representation. But two highly developed mythical

systems—two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and the

Indian—will grow every day farther and farther apart. Science, on the

contrary, whatever it may start with, runs back into the same circle of

facts, because it follows the lead of the subject-matter, and is

attentive to its inherent transformations.

If men’s fund of initial perceptions, then, is alike, their science is

sure to be so; while the embroideries they make upon perception out of

their own resources will differ as much as do the men themselves. Men

asleep, said Heraclitus, live each in his own world, but awake they live

in the same world together. To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming

under control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the

comparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth.

Thus if our objects are the same, our science and our waking lives will

coincide; or if there is a natural diversity in our discoveries, because

we occupy different points in space and time and have a varying range of

experience, these diversities will nevertheless supplement one another;

the discovery that each has made will be a possible discovery for the

others also. So a geographer in China and one in Babylonia may at first

make wholly unlike maps; but in time both will take note of the

Himalayas, and the side each approaches will slope up to the very crest

approached by the other. So science is self-confirming, and its most

disparate branches are mutually illuminating; while in the realm of

myth, until it is surveyed scientifically, there can be nothing but

mutual repulsion and incapacity to understand. Languages and religions

are necessarily rivals, but sciences are necessarily allies.

[Sidenote: In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of

waste.]

The unity of science can reach no farther than does coherent experience;

and though coherence be a condition of experience in the more pregnant

sense of the word—in the sense in which the child or the fool has no

experience—existence is absolutely free to bloom as it likes, and no

logic can set limits or prescribe times for its irresponsible presence.

A great deal may accordingly exist which cannot be known by science, or

be reached from the outside at all. This fact perhaps explains why

science has as yet taken so little root in human life: for even within

the limits of human existence, which are tolerably narrow, there is

probably no little incoherence, no little lapsing into what, from any

other point of view, is inconceivable and undiscoverable. Science, for

instance, can hardly reach the catastrophes and delights, often so

vivid, which occur in dreams; for even if a physiological psychology

should some day be able to find the causes of these phenomena, and so to

predict them, it would never enter the dream-world persuasively, in a

way that the dreamer could appreciate and understand, while he continued

to dream. This is because that dream-world and the waking world present

two disjointed landscapes, and the figures they contain belong to quite

different genealogies—like the families of Zeus and of Abraham. Science

is a great disciplinarian, and misses much of the sport which the

absolute is free to indulge in. If there is no inner congruity and

communion between two fields, science cannot survey them both; at best

in tracing the structure of things presented in one of them, it may come

upon some detail which may offer a basis or lodgment for the entire

fabric of the other, which will thus be explained _ab extra_; as the

children of Abraham might give an explanation for Zeus and his progeny,

treating them as a phenomenon in the benighted minds of some of Japhet’s

children.

This brings the Olympian world within the purview of science, but does

so with a very bad grace. For suppose the Olympian gods really

existed—and there is nothing impossible in that supposition—they would

not be allowed to have any science of their own; or if they did, it

would threaten the children of Abraham with the same imputed unreality

with which the latter boast to have extinguished Olympus. In order,

then, that two regions of existence should be amenable to a science

common to both and establishing a mutual rational representation between

them, it is requisite that the two regions should be congruous in

texture and continuous inwardly: the objects present in each must be

transformations of the objects present in the other. As this condition

is not always fulfilled, even within a man’s personal fortunes, it is

impossible that all he goes through should be mastered by science or

should accrue to him ideally and become part of his funded experience.

Much must be lost, left to itself, and resigned to the unprofitable

flux that produced it.

[Sidenote: Sciences converge from different points of origin.]

A consequence of this incoherence in experience is that science is not

absolutely single but springs up in various places at once, as a certain

consistency or method becomes visible in this or that direction. These

independent sciences might, conceivably, never meet at all; each might

work out an entirely different aspect of things and cross the other, as

it were, at a different level. This actually happens, for instance, in

mathematics as compared with history or psychology, and in morals as

compared with physics. Nevertheless, the fact that these various

sciences are all human, and that here, for instance, we are able to

mention them in one breath and to compare their natures, is proof that

their spheres touch somehow, even if only peripherally. Since common

knowledge, which knows of them all, is itself an incipient science, we

may be sure that some continuity and some congruity obtains between

their provinces. Some aspect of each must coincide with some aspect of

some other, else nobody who pursued any one science would so much as

suspect the existence of the rest. Great as may be the aversion of

learned men to one another, and comprehensive as may be their ignorance,

they are not positively compelled to live in solitary confinement, and

the key of their prison cells is at least in their own pocket.

[Sidenote: Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic.]

Some sciences, like chemistry and biology, or biology and anthropology,

are parted only, we presume, by accidental gaps in human knowledge; a

more minute and better directed study of these fields would doubtless

disclose their continuity with the fields adjoining. But there is one

general division in science which cuts almost to the roots of human

experience. Human understanding has used from the beginning a double

method of surveying and arresting ideally the irreparable flux of being.

One expedient has been to notice and identify similarities of character,

recurrent types, in the phenomena that pass before it or in its own

operations; the other expedient has been to note and combine in one

complex object characters which occur and reappear together. The latter

feat which is made easy by the fact that when various senses are

stimulated at once the inward instinctive reaction—which is felt by a

primitive mind more powerfully than any external image—is one and not

consciously divisible.

The first expedient imposes on the flux what we call ideas, which are

concretions in discourse, terms employed in thought and language. The

second expedient separates the same flux into what we call things, which

are concretions in existence, complexes of qualities subsisting in space

and time, having definable dynamic relations there and a traceable

history. Carrying out this primitive diversity in reflection science

has moved in two different directions. By refining concretions in

discourse it has attained to mathematics, logic, and the dialectical

developments of ethics; by tracing concretions in existence it has

reached the various natural and historical sciences. Following ancient

usage, I shall take the liberty of calling the whole group of sciences

which elaborates ideas _dialectic_, and the whole group that describes

existences _physics_.

The contrast between ideal science or dialectic and natural science or

physics is as great as the understanding of a single experience could

well afford; yet the two kinds of science are far from independent. They

touch at their basis and they co-operate in their results. Were

dialectic made clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, these

points of contact would doubtless be multiplied; but even as they stand

they furnish a sufficient illustration of the principle that all science

develops objects in their own category and gives the mind dominion over

the flux of matter by discovering its form.

[Sidenote: Their mutual implication.]

That physics and dialectic touch at their basis may be shown by a double

analysis. In the first place, it is clear that the science of existence,

like all science, is itself discourse, and that before concretions in

existence can be discovered, and groups of coexistent qualities can be

recognised, these qualities themselves must be arrested by the mind,

noted, and identified in their recurrences. But these terms, bandied

about in scientific discourse, are so many essences and pure ideas: so

that the inmost texture of natural science is logical, and the whole

force of any observation made upon the outer world lies in the constancy

and mutual relations of the terms it is made in. If down did not mean

down and motion motion, Newton could never have taken note of the fall

of his apple. Now the constancy and relation of meanings is something

_meant_, it is something created by insight and intent and is altogether

dialectical; so that the science of existence is a portion of the art of

discourse.

On the other hand discourse, in its operation, is a part of existence.

That truth or logical cogency is not itself an existence can be proved

dialectically,[A] and is obvious to any one who sees for a moment what

truth means, especially if he remembers at the same time that all

existence is mutable, which it is the essence of truth not to be. But

the knowledge or discovery of truth is an event in time, an incident in

the flux of existence, and therefore a matter for natural science to

study.

Furthermore, every term which dialectic uses is originally given

embodied; in other words, it is given as an element in the actual flux,

it conies by illustration. Though meaning is the object of an ideal

function, and signification is inwardly appreciable only in terms of

signification, yet the ideal leap is made from a material datum: that in

which signification is seen is a fact. Or to state the matter somewhat

differently, truth is not self-generating; if it were it would be a

falsehood.

Its eternity, and the infinitude of propositions it contains, remain

potential and unapproachable until their incidence is found in

existence. Form cannot of itself decide which of all possible forms

shall be real; in their ideality, and without reference to their

illustration in things, all consistent propositions would be equally

valid and equally trivial. Important truth is truth about something, not

truth about truth; and although a single datum might suffice to give

foothold and pertinence to an infinity of truths, as one atom would

posit all geometry, geometry, if there were no space, would be, if I may

say so, all of the fourth dimension, and arithmetic, if there were no

pulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends upon

facts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which

truths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms

of actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if

the existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comes

to clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things

by reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects of

discourse.

[Sidenote: Their co-operation.]

Dialectic and physics, thus united at their basis, meet again in their

results. In mechanical science, which is the best part of physics,

mathematics, which is the best part of dialectic, plays a predominant

rôle; it furnishes the whole method of understanding wherever there is

any real understanding at all. In psychology and history, too, although

dialectic is soon choked by the cross-currents of nature, it furnishes

the little perspicuousness which there is. We understand actions and

mental developments when the purposes or ideas contained in any stage

are carried out logically in the sequel; it is when conduct and growth

are rational, that is, when they are dialectical, that we think we have

found the true secret and significance of them. It is the evident ideal

of physics, in every department, to attain such an insight into causes

that the effects actually given may be thence _deduced_; and deduction

is another name for dialectic. To be sure, the dialectic applicable to

material processes and to human life is one in which the terms and the

categories needed are still exceedingly numerous and vague: a little

logic is all that can be read into the cataract of events. But the hope

of science, a hope which is supported by every success it scores, is

that a simpler law than has yet been discovered will be found to connect

units subtler than those yet known; and that in these finer terms the

universal mechanism may be exhaustively rendered. Mechanism is the ideal

of physics, because it is the infusion of a maximum of mathematical

necessity into the flux of real things. It is the aspiration of natural

science to be as dialectical as possible, and thus, in their ideal, both

branches of science are brought together.

That the ideal of dialectic is to apply to existence and thereby to

coincide with physics is in a sense no less true, although dialecticians

may be little inclined to confess it. The direct purpose of deduction is

to elucidate an idea, to develop an import, and nothing can be more

irrelevant in this science than whether the conclusion is verified in

nature or not. But the direct purpose of dialectic is not its ultimate

justification. Dialectic is a human pursuit and has, at bottom, a moral

function; otherwise, at bottom, it would have no value. And the moral

function and ultimate justification of dialectic is to further the Life

of Reason, in which human thought has the maximum practical validity,

and may enjoy in consequence the richest ideal development. If dialectic

takes a turn which makes it inapplicable in physics, which makes it

worthless for mastering experience, it loses all its dignity: for

abstract cogency has no dignity if the subject-matter into which it is

introduced is trivial. In fact, were dialectic a game in which the

counters were not actual data and the conclusions were not possible

principles for understanding existence, it would not be a science at

all. It would resemble a counterfeit paper currency, without intrinsic

value and without commercial convenience. Just as a fact without

implications is not a part of science, so a method without application

would not be.

The free excursions of dialectic into non-natural regions may be wisely

encouraged when they satisfy an interest which is at bottom healthy and

may, at least indirectly, bring with it excellent fruits. As musicians

are an honour to society, so are dialecticians that have a single heart

and an exquisite patience. But somehow the benefit must redound to

society and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits will

seem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has a

subtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic of

common sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: it

runs most neatly after nothing at all.

[Sidenote: No science _a priori_.]

Both physics and dialectic are contained in common knowledge, and when

carried further than men carry them daily life these sciences remain

essentially inevitable and essentially fallible. If science deserves

respect, it is not for being oracular but for being useful and

delightful, as seeing is. Understanding is nothing but seeing under and

seeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but this

mystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The sciences

have nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as it

were, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they accept

its pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes. A pretence on

the philosopher’s part that he could get behind or below human thinking,

that he could underpin, so to speak, his own childhood and the inherent

conventions of daily thought, would be pure imposture. A philosopher

can of course investigate the history of knowledge, he can analyse its

method and point out its assumptions; but he cannot know by other

authority than that which the vulgar know by, nor can his knowledge

begin with other unheard-of objects or deploy itself in advance over an

esoteric field. Every deeper investigation presupposes ordinary

perception and uses some at least of its data. Every possible discovery

_extends_ human knowledge. None can base human knowledge anew on a

deeper foundation or prefix an ante-experimental episode to experience.

We may construct a theory as disintegrating as we please about the

dialectical or empirical conditions of the experience given; we may

disclose its logical stratification or physical antecedents; but every

idea and principle used in such a theory must be borrowed from current

knowledge as it happens to lie in the philosopher’s mind.

[Sidenote: Role of criticism.]

If these speculative adventures do not turn out well, the scientific man

is free to turn about and become the critic and satirist of his foiled

ambitions. He may exhaust scepticism and withdraw into the citadel of

immediate feeling, yielding bastion after bastion to the assaults of

doubt. When he is at last perfectly safe from error and reduced to

speechless sensibility, he will perceive, however, that he is also

washed clean of every practical belief: he would declare himself

universally ignorant but for a doubt whether there be really anything to

know. This metaphysical exercise is simply one of those “fallings from

us, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds

not realised” which may visit any child. So long as the suspension of

judgment lasts, knowledge is surely not increased; but when we remember

that the enemy to whom we have surrendered is but a ghost of our own

evoking, we easily reoccupy the lost ground and fall back into an

ordinary posture of belief and expectation. This recovered faith has no

new evidences to rest on. We simply stand where we stood before we began

to philosophise, only with a better knowledge of the lines we are

holding and perhaps with less inclination to give them up again for no

better reason than the undoubted fact that, in a speculative sense, it

is always possible to renounce them.

Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it

is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same

order as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its

test is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes

consists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is

merely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more

accurate of meaning from meaning and purpose from purpose. It generates

in the mind, for each vulgar observation, a whole brood of suggestions,

hypotheses, and inferences. The sciences bestow, as is right and

fitting, infinite pains upon that experience which in their absence

would drift by unchallenged or misunderstood. They take note, infer, and

prophesy. They compare prophecy with event; and altogether they

supply—so intent are they on reality—every imaginable background and

extension for the present dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: For instance, in Plato’s “Parmenides,” where it is shown

that the ideas are not in the mind. We may gather from what is there

said that the ideas cannot be identified with any embodiment of them,

however perfect, since an idea means a nature common to all its possible

embodiments and remains always outside of them. This is what Plato meant

by saying that the ideas lay apart from phenomena and were what they

were in and for themselves. They were mere forms and not, as a

materialised Platonism afterward fancied, images in the mind of some

psychological deity. The gods doubtless know the ideas, as Plato tells

us in the same place: these are the common object of their thought and

of ours; hence they are not anybody’s thinking process, which of course

would be in flux and phenomenal. Only by being ideal (_i.e._, by being a

goal of intellectual energy and no part of sensuous existence) can a

term be common to various minds and serve to make their deliverances

pertinent to one another.

That truth is no existence might also be proved as follows: Suppose that

nothing existed or (if critics carp at that phrase), that a universe did

not exist. It would then be true that all existences were wanting, yet

this truth itself would endure; therefore truth is not an existence. An

attempt might be made to reverse this argument by saying that since it

would still “be” true that nothing existed, the supposition is

self-contradictory, for the truth would “be” or exist in any case. Truth

would thus be turned into an opinion, supposed to subsist eternally in

the ether. The argument, however, is a bad sophism, because it falsifies

the intent of the terms used. Somebody’s opinion is not what is meant by

the truth, since every opinion, however long-lived, may be false.

Furthermore, the notion that it might have been true that nothing

existed is a perfectly clear notion. The nature of dialectic is entirely

corrupted when sincerity is lost. No intent can be self-contradictory,

since it fixes its own object, but a man may easily contradict himself

by wavering between one intent and another.]

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]

The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal

recollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely

commented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not

the least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in

his career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments

the changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He

would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and

controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains

to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic

investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the

basis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frail

body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an

individual’s attention.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be

said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not

what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must

rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to

expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has

to be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the

mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but

a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of

the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the

original experience which it purports to describe.

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the

curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We

may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but,

though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some

spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other

telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone

perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiæ

and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anything

that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.

The sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption for

experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can

claim no respect from the outsider.

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be

compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when

memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself

corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and

approach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide,

make a double assurance. While memory, then, is the basis of all

historical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field

where it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that

natural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational,

envisage together. Assertions relating to events in that world can

corroborate or contradict one another—something that would be

impossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere

of its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects

which are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct

each other and help to fix the order of events as they really

happened—that is, as they happened independently of what either memory

may chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct

recovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically

credited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in

nature, in that common world in space and time to which other memories

and perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory

becomes a portion of natural science. Its assertions are such that any

natural science may conceivably support or contradict them.

[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]

Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried and

complicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their

spontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first

vaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and

fable being originally localised within the confines of the material

world and made to pass for a part of early history. The method by which

knowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative

influence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the

imagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm

becomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is

reproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew.

The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap—a gap which the

momentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image.

Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant

round of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.

This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for

the most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are

conscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the

excitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover

the hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of

experience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain

awe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory

for its arts. A bard’s mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all

judgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanctity attributed to the

tale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering

with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which

early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice

prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling,

between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the

tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it

is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if

some record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical

memorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the

modified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons.

It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent

poet believes his own lies.

Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic

force. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal

pertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative

principles for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is

a ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it

is in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only

such stability as the circumstances require. Dramatic effect is not

everywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is

wanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of

irrelevant survivals, contradictions, and scraps of nonsense. These

literary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the

mechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated.

The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its

inconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale

incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body,

reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or

beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious

minstrel carries it with him to the end.

[Sidenote: No history without documents.]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are

archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged

position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his

own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives

and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from

paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same

concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of

documents, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that

elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of

remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically

foreshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about a

chosen interest. The historian’s politics, philosophy, or romantic

imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls

within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the

rest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible

to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which

guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the

events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and

put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought

forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of

events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are

endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their

actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual

achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain

buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an

honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish,

as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of

his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very

great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and

such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of

all reality.

[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they

avowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or

literary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those

philosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation with

malice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point,

much as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the

characteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of

time and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that

which he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic

humanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might

assume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The

characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral

variation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless

shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that

supports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within

his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly

devoted to expressing the passions of the dead. His ideal, emanating

from his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his

heroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.

Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even

scandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous

myth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes

unblushing theory. Now theory—when we use the word for a schema of

things’ relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and

fulness—is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The

function of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to

render theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological

changes since the creation we should need no geological theory to

suggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the

rule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown

and needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal

historian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses,

and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual

juxtapositions he would need no classifications. The intentions, acts,

and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places,

with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been

in fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest

position in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the

idea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were

perceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow

through being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be

in saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation

of cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is

guided by presumption. We say, “If this thing had happened, that other

thing would have followed”—a hypothesis which would lapse and become

unmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary

to fact would then have entered discourse.

[Sidenote: Indirect methods of attaining it.]

This ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; not

merely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in the

way. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because its

very nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phases

bodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memory

itself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totality

may at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; and

experience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into the

moving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past.

History is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recovering

what has lapsed. The historian’s object may be to bring the past again

before the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that object

he is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramatic

fancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforce

written by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historical

investigation, historical theory, and historical romance.

[Sidenote: Historical research a part of physics.]

Historical investigation is the natural science of the past. The

circumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhat

disguise the physical character and the physical principles of this

science; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at a

given moment, even if the event were somebody’s thought; he has to read

his sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In other

words, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves,

after the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony has

to be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs to

be reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or archæology it needs to

be reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man’s memory or the

report in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about its

probable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in the

present when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is often

very difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end is

merely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as a

perplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the state

of the earth’s crust was once very different from what it is now.

[Sidenote: Verification here indirect.]

A natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantage

of not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates upon

cannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesis

that had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by current

events; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of facts

which themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to the

loose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a most

dangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which in

turn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts are

more deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error in

the inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering that

error; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet,

can never be found out.

Most facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and their

reality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which they

are inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete and

constant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and tradition

give the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations which

these first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to be

concatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the first

hypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming a

background and congruous extension to those originally assumed. This

expansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed the

principles of inference employed in it involve some present existence,

such as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails to

verify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of

hypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.

[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts.]

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character

of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly

superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal

detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated

by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum _ad

infinitum_ would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called

infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete

historical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for

intelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are

many things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to

know—namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind’s

fortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of

immediate experience in other minds or in one’s own past; and just as it

is better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone

sensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous

pulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant

in character.

An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived

would be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above

the world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would

flatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence,

with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not

come to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey

of events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in

matter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palæontology,

and archæology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning

would dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of

boredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may

enter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but

which ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.

[Sidenote: Historical theory.]

The profit of studying history lies in something else than in a dead

knowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternative

might be to say that the profit of it lies in _understanding_ what has

happened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern social

evolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upon

a region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius for

quick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause why

Borne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or to

expound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate in

limpid sentences the essence of Greek culture—what could be more

tempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of this

book to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion of

dismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. We

must have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be taken

imaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at his

own risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he was

designing the _School of Athens_, had said to himself that Aristotle

should point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designing

the _Disputa_ had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary of

argument and learning, should throw down his books and turn to

revelation for guidance, there would have been much historical

pertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have been

allegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had been

dispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up here

and there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particular

natural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might be

spoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, and

something might be added about the troubles of their home life; but

would it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these units

were verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at work

had been multitudinous and infinitesimal?

[Sidenote: It is arbitrary.]

In fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have no

dynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not at

bottom physical, like the laws of habit—those expressions of Newton’s

first law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperception

as long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering the

ideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts.

The truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations between things

will remain material. Physical causes traverse the moral units at which

history stops, determining their force and duration, and the order, so

irrelevant to intent, in which they succeed one another. Even the single

man’s life and character have subterranean sources; how should the outer

expression and influence of that character have sources more

superficial than its own? Yet we cannot trace mechanical necessity down

to the more stable units composing a personal mechanism, and much less,

therefore, to those composing a complex social evolution. We accordingly

translate the necessity, obviously lurking under life’s commonplace yet

unaccountable shocks, into verbal principles, names for general

impressive results, that play some rôle in our ideal philosophy. Each of

these idols of the theatre is visible only on a single stage and to duly

predisposed spectators. The next passion affected will throw a

differently coloured calcium light on the same pageant, and there will

be no end of rival evolutions and incompatible ideal principles crossing

one another at every interesting event.

Such a manipulation of history, when made by persons who underestimate

their imaginative powers, ends in asserting that events have directed

themselves prophetically upon the interests which they arouse. Apart

from the magic involved and the mockery of all science, there is a

difficulty here which even a dramatic idealist ought to feel. The

interests affected are themselves many and contrary. If history is to be

understood teleologically, which of all the possible ends it might be

pursuing shall we think really endowed with regressive influence and

responsible for the movement that is going to realise it? Did Columbus,

for instance, discover America so that George Washington might exist and

that some day football and the Church of England may prevail throughout

the world? Or was it (as has been seriously maintained) in order that

the converted Indians of South America might console Saint Peter for the

defection of the British and Germans? Or was America, as Hegel believed,

ideally superfluous, the absolute having become self-conscious enough

already in Prussia? Or shall we say that the real goal is at an infinite

distance and unimaginable by us, and useless, therefore, for

understanding anything?

In truth, whatever plausibility the providential view of a given

occurrence may have is dependent on the curious limitation and

selfishness of the observer’s estimations. Sheep are providentially

designed for men; but why not also for wolves, and men for worms and

microbes? If the historian is willing to accept such a suggestion, and

to become a blind worshipper of success, applauding every issue, however

lamentable for humanity, and calling it admirable tragedy, he may seem

for a while to save his theory by making it mystical; yet presently this

last illusion will be dissipated when he loses his way in the maze and

finds that all victors perish in their turn and everything, if you look

far enough, falls back into the inexorable vortex. This is the sort of

observation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renders

their philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragable

record of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of the

flux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies of

history, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years,

seem puerile vistas indeed. Shall all eternity and all existence be for

the sake of what is happening here to-day, and to me? Shall we strive

manfully to the top of this particular wave, on the ground that its foam

is the culmination of all things for ever?

There is a sense, of course, in which definite political plans and moral

aspirations may well be fulfilled by events. Our ancestors, sharing and

anticipating our natures, may have had in many respects our actual

interests in view, as we may have those of posterity. Such ideal

co-operation extends far, where primary interests are concerned; it is

rarer and more qualified where a fine and fragile organisation is

required to support the common spiritual life. Even in these cases, the

aim pursued and attained is not the force that operates, since the

result achieved had many other conditions besides the worker’s intent,

and that intent itself had causes which it knew nothing of. Every

“historical force” pompously appealed to breaks up on inspection into a

cataract of miscellaneous natural processes and minute particular

causes. It breaks into its mechanical constituents and proves to have

been nothing but an _effet d’ensemble_ produced on a mind whose habits

and categories are essentially rhetorical.

[Sidenote: A moral critique of the past is possible.]

This sort of false history or philosophy of history might be purified,

like so many other things, by self-knowledge. If the philosopher in

reviewing events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order to

abstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as he

might look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would become

a perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left for

scientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testify

to them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theory

of natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledge

attained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presence

of the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicate

their rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of

events in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed,

might supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution might

well be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higher

operation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needful

basis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay in

that direction.

[Sidenote: How it might be just.]

The ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone for

estimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its own

natural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under other

conditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and may

have been made the standard for a different judgment on the world.

Historical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal to

us what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, and

whenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have known

how to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals could

not have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, the

irremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. In

estimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian,

who does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate it

from _all_ these points of view, considering all real interests

affected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant by

putting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma but

in a variegated omnipresent happiness.

It is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life of

Reason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, much

less to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his time, or his

nation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetual

concomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be well

in the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellence

of things would be heightened if other men’s purposes also had been

fulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As each

will, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values are

introduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what has

been hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all past

aspirations.

If the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our

advantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason

was thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic

experiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their

day, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that

in the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what

is good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need be

no impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason but

passion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents of

its own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only the

judgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these are

indelible and have their proportionate weight though others of many

different types may surround or succeed them.

[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance.]

To inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into what

strange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformed

existence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. These

facts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by side

with all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universe

must somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would all

find their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vain

knowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroic

episodes and commanding characters in the world’s annals. It is not even

in the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how many

directions experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance of

failure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would not

be a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be for

the world at large, success and benefit here, from the living point of

view, would be equally valid and delightful; and however good or however

bad the universe may be it is always worth while to make it better.

What engages the historian in the reconstruction of moral life, such as

the past contained, is that he finds in that life many an illustration

of his own ideals, or even a necessary stimulus in defining what his

ideals are. Where his admiration and his sympathy are awakened, he sees

noble aims and great achievements, worthy of being minutely studied and

brought vividly before later generations. Very probably he will be led

by moral affinities with certain phases of the past to attribute to

those phases, in their abstraction and by virtue of their moral dignity,

a material efficacy which they did not really have; and his interest in

history’s moral will make him turn history itself into a fable. This

abuse may be abated, however, by having recourse to impartial historical

investigation, that will restore to the hero all his circumstantial

impotence, and to the glorious event all its insignificant causes.

Certain men and certain episodes will retain, notwithstanding, their

intrinsic nobility; and the historian, who is often a politician and a

poet rather than a man of science, will dwell on those noble things so

as to quicken his own sense for greatness and to burnish in his soul

ideals that may have remained obscure for want of scrutiny or may have

been tarnished by too much contact with a sordid world.

[Sidenote: Possibility of genuine epics.]

History so conceived has the function of epic or dramatic poetry. The

moral life represented may actually have been lived through; but that

circumstance is incidental merely and what makes the story worth telling

is its pertinence to the political or emotional life of the present. To

revive past moral experience is indeed wellnigh impossible unless the

living will can still covet or dread the same issues; historical romance

cannot be truthful or interesting when profound changes have taken place

in human nature. The reported acts and sentiments of early peoples lose

their tragic dignity in our eyes when they lose their pertinence to our

own aims. So that a recital of history with an eye to its dramatic

values is possible only when that history is, so to speak, our own, or

when we assimilate it to ours by poetic license.

The various functions of history have been generally carried on

simultaneously and with little consciousness of their profound

diversity. Since historical criticism made its appearance, the romantic

interest in the past, far from abating, has fed eagerly on all the

material incidents and private gossip of remote times. This sort of

petty historical drama has reflected contemporary interests, which have

centred so largely in material possessions and personal careers; while

at the same time it has kept pace with the knowledge of minutiæ attained

by archæology. When historical investigation has reached its limits a

period of ideal reconstruction may very likely set in. Indeed were it

possible to collect in archives exhaustive accounts of everything that

has ever happened, so that the curious man might always be informed on

any point of fact that interested him, historical imagination might grow

free again in its movements. Not being suspected of wishing to distort

facts which could so easily be pointed to, it might become more

conscious of its own moral function, and it might turn unblushingly to

what was important and inspiring in order to put it with dramatic force

before the mind. Such a treatment of history would reinstate that epic

and tragic poetry which has become obsolete; it might well be written in

verse, and would at any rate be frankly imaginative; it might furnish a

sort of ritual, with scientific and political sanctions, for public

feasts. Tragedies and epics are such only in name if they do not deal

with the highest interests and destinies of a people; and they could

hardly deal with such ideals in an authoritative and definite way,

unless they found them illustrated in that people’s traditions.

[Sidenote: Literal truth abandoned.]

Historic romance is a work of art, not of science, and its fidelity to

past fact is only an expedient, often an excellent and easy one, for

striking the key-note of present ideals. The insight attained, even when

it is true insight into what some one else felt in some other age, draws

its force and sublimity from current passions, passions potential in the

auditor’s soul. Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, doubtless repeated,

in many a fancied dialogue with Queen Elizabeth, the very words that

Schiller puts into her mouth in the central scene of his play, “_Denn

ich bin Euer König!_” Yet the dramatic force of that expression, its

audacious substitution of ideals for facts, depends entirely on the

scope which we lend it. Different actors and different readers would

interpret it differently. Some might see in it nothing but a sally in a

woman’s quarrel, reading it with the accent of mere spite and

irritation. Then the tragedy, not perhaps without historic truth, would

be reduced to a loud comedy. Other interpreters might find in the

phrase the whole feudal system, all the chivalry, legality, and

foolishness of the Middle Ages. Then the drama would become more

interesting, and the poor queen’s cry, while that of a mind

sophisticated and fanatical, would have great pathos and keenness. To

reach sublimity, however, that moment would have to epitomise ideals

which we deeply respected. We should have to believe in the sanctity of

canon law and in the divine right of primogeniture. That a woman may

have been very unhappy or that a state may have been held together by

personal allegiance does not raise the fate of either to the tragic

plane, unless “laws that are not of to-day nor yesterday,” aspirations

native to the heart, shine through those legendary misfortunes.

It would matter nothing to the excellence of Schiller’s drama which of

these interpretations might have been made by Mary Stuart herself at any

given moment; doubtless her attitude toward her rival was coloured on

different occasions by varying degrees of political insight and moral

fervour. The successful historical poet would be he who caught the most

significant attitude which a person in that position could possibly have

assumed, and his Mary Stuart, whether accidentally resembling the real

woman or not, would be essentially a mythical person. So Electra and

Antigone and Helen of Troy are tragic figures absolved from historical

accuracy, although possibly if the personages of heroic times were known

to us we might find that our highest imagination had been anticipated

in their consciousness.

[Sidenote: History exists to be transcended.]

Of the three parts into which the pursuit of history may be

divided—investigation, theory, and story-telling—not one attains ideal

finality. Investigation is merely useful, because its intrinsic

ideal—to know every detail of everything—is not rational, and its

acceptable function can only be to offer accurate information upon such

points as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory,

in turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other than

mechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and it

dissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clear

ideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into

epics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from

all allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be an

imperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisional

discipline; its values, with the mind’s progress, would empty into

higher activities. The function of history is to lend materials to

politics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, the

better to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good book

of history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry out

his plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is most

glorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance are

now mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods by

which history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary,

since the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will be

necessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinence

to public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; and

romance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities of

the mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and a

dramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when all

the elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind.

[Sidenote: Its great rôle.]

Fragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions must

remain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousness

the indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is the

foundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false and

useless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnant

acceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardly

distinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, and

the present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derived

from memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memory

artificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has and

is riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out.

Inference has gone a step farther, thought is more largely

representative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others or

found in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that must

have filled the remotest ages. This information is not passive or idle

knowledge; it truly _informs_ or shapes the mind, giving it new

aptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling it

with a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what human

experience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specific

circumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any large

drama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imagination

busy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift which

history makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the past

than is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyal

to it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawls

among superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and among

persons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raising

to a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignity

of human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and as

conscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to become

rational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally if

the failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests.

CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature.]

A retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardly

fail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make their

round and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat their

career. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. A

study of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a description

of habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine a

mechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, which

alone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that the

flux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composed

of a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal of

mechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are what

reflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; they

constitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic is

conversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of these

forms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, the

historian merely _define_ what they see. But these incidental

illustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a method in

their comings and goings, and this method may in turn be definable. It

will be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we call

a law. If events could be reduced to a number of constant forms moving

in a constant medium according to a constant law, a maximum of constancy

would be introduced into the flux, which would thereby be proved to be

mechanical.

The form of events, abstracted from their material presence, becomes a

general mould to which we tend to assimilate new observations. Whatever

in particular instances may contravene the accredited rule, we attribute

without a qualm to unknown variations in the circumstances, thus saving

our faith in order at all hazards and appealing to investigation to

justify the same. Only when another rule suggests itself which leaves a

smaller margin unaccounted for in the phenomena do we give up our first

generalisation. Not even the rudest superstition can be criticised or

dislodged scientifically save by another general rule, more exact and

trustworthy than the superstition. The scepticism which comes from

distrust of abstraction and disgust with reckoning of any sort is not a

scientific force; it is an intellectual weakness.

Generalities are indeed essential to understanding, which is apt to

impose them hastily upon particulars. Confirmation is not needed to

create prejudice. It suffices that a vivid impression should once have

cut its way into the mind and settled there in a fertile soil; it will

entwine itself at once with its chance neighbours and these adventitious

relations will pass henceforth for a part of the fact. Repetition,

however, is a good means of making or keeping impressions vivid and

almost the only means of keeping them unchanged. Prejudices, however

refractory to new evidence, evolve inwardly of themselves. The mental

soil in which they lie is in a continual ferment and their very vitality

will extend their scope and change their application. Generalisations,

therefore, when based on a single instance, will soon forget it and

shift their ground, as unchecked words shift their meaning. But when a

phenomenon actually recurs the generalisations founded on it are

reinforced and kept identical, and prejudices so sustained by events

make man’s knowledge of nature.

[Sidenote: Their discovery makes the flux calculable.]

Natural science consists of general ideas which look for verification in

events, and which find it. The particular instance, once noted, is

thrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishing

some law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into the

general, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which its

parts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk in

the moments of existence and never abstracted their character from their

presence, we should never know that they had any relation to one

another. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguish

their dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find and

abstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover a

sustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we may

find in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals its

skeleton.

Skeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it be

for the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and to

frighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhaust

their rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science are

artificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich and

absolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describing

the office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body is

none the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not all

visible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, who

nevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning in

their sockets; and a surgeon’s studies in dead anatomy help him

excellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science are

extractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existence

with its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, its

hopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true of

existence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts cohere

materially and become ideally inferable from one another.

[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first.]

Science becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. It

becomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematics

witnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seized

the profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features are

often hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in the

internal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem to

move on the world’s stage in an unaccountable fashion, and to betray

magic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. The

types of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Any

chance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesis

about the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a whole

system of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard

images are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is

that offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine,

having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that

the world’s true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for

everybody’s benefit—and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at

ease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and

conceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat more

observant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number of

definite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and in

such language we still commonly read political events and our friend’s

actions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and the

conditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain,

something quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them with

verdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stone

and melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything is

water in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulated

observation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law we

hardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealed

the secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us only

in such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in the

ideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena.

[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden.]

These exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human life

appears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To a

speculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature’s

inexhaustible resources and of man’s essential continuity with other

natural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similar

principles (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to preside

over all man’s action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn from

introspection and from history, would be found to confirm this

speculative presumption. It is not only earthquakes and floods, summer

and winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambition

are unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intense

and poetical a man’s sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudly

will he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of the

moving principle in him and in her.

Mankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to the

law of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems to

a superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a person

may imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wags

his tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open to

human inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to the

elements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectly

steady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce it

unequivocally from given properties in the body and in the external

bodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living and

to which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, is

not so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account for

that minute motion and pullulation in the earth’s crust of which human

affairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed under

categories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. These

looser categories are of every sort—grammatical, moral, magical—and

there is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure.

Between the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experience

there remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannot

see the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied with

an empirical description of appearances as they first fall together in

our apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is what

popular philosophy calls intelligence in the world.

[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive.]