prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge
immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted
to the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for
Thucydides and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction
in the art of politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of a
new culture, different from anything that had gone before; but at the
time men were not conscious of this; they saw clearly that the
traditions of classical antiquity had been lost for a long period, and
they were seeking to revive them, but otherwise they did not perceive
that the world had moved, and that their own spirit, culture, and
conditions were entirely unlike those of the thirteenth century. It
was hardly till the seventeenth century that the presence of a new
age, as different from the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and
Rome, was fully realised. It was then that the triple division of
ancient, medieval, and modern was first applied to the history of
western civilisation. Whatever objections may be urged against this
division, which has now become almost a category of thought, it marks
a most significant advance in man's view of his own past. He has
become conscious of the immense changes in civilisation which have
come about slowly in the course of time, and history confronts him
with a new aspect. He has to explain how those changes have been
produced, how the transformations were effected. The appearance of
this problem was almost simultaneous with the rise of rationalism, and
the great historians and thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, attempted to explain the movement of
civilisation by purely natural causes. These brilliant writers
prepared the way for the genetic history of the following century. But
in the spirit of the _Aufklaerung_, that eighteenth-century
Enlightenment to which they belonged, they were concerned to judge all
phenomena before the tribunal of reason; and the apotheosis of
"reason" tended to foster a certain superior _a priori_ attitude,
which was not favourable to objective treatment and was incompatible
with a "historical sense." Moreover the traditions of pragmatical
historiography had by no means disappeared.
3. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the meaning of
genetic history was fully realised. "Genetic" perhaps is as good a
word as can be found for the conception which in this century was
applied to so many branches of knowledge in the spheres both of nature
and of mind. It does not commit us to the doctrine proper of
evolution, nor yet to any teleological hypothesis such as is implied
in "progress." For history it meant that the present condition of the
human race is simply and strictly the result of a causal series (or
set of causal series)--a continuous succession of changes, where each
state arises causally out of the preceding; and that the business of
historians is to trace this genetic process, to explain each change,
and ultimately to grasp' the complete development of the life of
humanity. Three influential writers, who appeared at this stage and
helped to initiate a new period of research, may specially be
mentioned. Ranke in 1824 definitely repudiated the pragmatical view
which ascribes to history the duties of an instructress, and with no
less decision renounced the function, assumed by the historians of the
_Aufklaerung_, to judge the past; it was his business, he said, merely
to show how things really happened. Niebuhr was already working in the
same spirit and did more than any other writer to establish the
principle that historical transactions must be related to the ideas
and conditions of their age. Savigny about the same time founded the
"historical school" of law. He sought to show that law was not the
creation of an enlightened will, but grew out of custom and was
developed by a series of adaptations and rejections, thus applying the
conception of evolution. He helped to diffuse the notion that all the
institutions of a society or a nation are as closely interconnected as
the parts of a living organism.
4. The conception of the history of man as a causal development meant
the elevation of historical inquiry to the dignity of a science. Just
as the study of bees cannot become scientific so long as the student's
interest in them is only to procure honey or to derive moral lessons
from the labours of "the little busy bee," so the history of human
societies cannot become the object of pure scientific investigation so
long as man estimates its value in pragmatical scales. Nor can it
become a science until it is conceived as lying entirely within a
sphere in which the law of cause and effect has unreserved and
unrestricted dominion. On the other hand, once history is envisaged as
a causal process, which contains within itself the explanation of the
development of man from his primitive state to the point which he has
reached, such a process necessarily becomes the object of scientific
investigation and the interest in it is scientific curiosity.
At the same time, the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here
Wolf, a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His
_Prolegomena_ to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack.
Historical investigation was soon transformed by the elaboration of
new methods.
5. "Progress" involves a judgment of value, which is not involved in
the conception of history as a genetic process. It is also an idea
distinct from that of evolution. Nevertheless it is closely related to
the ideas which revolutionised history at the beginning of the last
century; it swam into men's ken simultaneously; and it helped
effectively to establish the notion of history as a continuous process
and to emphasise the significance of time. Passing over earlier
anticipations, I may point to a _Discours_ of Turgot (1750), where
history is presented as a process in which "the total mass of the
human race" "marches continually though sometimes slowly to an ever
increasing perfection." That is a clear statement of the conception
which Turgot's friend Condorcet elaborated in the famous work,
published in 1795, _Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de
l'esprit humain_. This work first treated with explicit fulness the
idea to which a leading role was to fall in the ideology of the
nineteenth century. Condorcet's book reflects the triumphs of the
_Tiers etat_, whose growing importance had also inspired Turgot; it
was the political changes in the eighteenth century which led to the
doctrine, emphatically formulated by Condorcet, that the masses are
the most important element in the historical process. I dwell on this
because, though Condorcet had no idea of evolution, the predominant
importance of the masses was the assumption which made it possible to
apply evolutional principles to history. And it enabled Condorcet
himself to maintain that the history of civilisation, a progress still
far from being complete, was a development conditioned by general
laws.
6. The assimilation of society to an organism, which was a governing
notion in the school of Savigny, and the conception of progress,
combined to produce the idea of an organic development, in which the
historian has to determine the central principle or leading character.
This is illustrated by the apotheosis of democracy in Tocqueville's
_Democratie en Amerique_, where the theory is maintained that "the
gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past
and the future of the history of men." The same two principles are
combined in the doctrine of Spencer (who held that society is an
organism, though he also contemplated its being what he calls a
"super-organic aggregate"),[238] that social evolution is a
progressive change from militarism to industrialism.
7. The idea of development assumed another form in the speculations of
German idealism. Hegel conceived the successive periods of history as
corresponding to the ascending phases or ideas in the self-evolution
of his Absolute Being. His _Lectures on the Philosophy of History_
were published in 1837 after his death. His philosophy had a
considerable effect, direct and indirect, on the treatment of history
by historians, and although he was superficial and unscientific
himself in dealing with historical phenomena, he contributed much
towards making the idea of historical development familiar. Ranke was
influenced, if not by Hegel himself, at least by the Idealistic
philosophies of which Hegel's was the greatest. He was inclined to
conceive the stages in the process of history as marked by
incarnations, as it were, of ideas, and sometimes speaks as if the
ideas were independent forces, with hands and feet. But while Hegel
determined his ideas by _a priori_ logic, Ranke obtained his by
induction--by a strict investigation of the phenomena; so that he was
scientific in his method and work, and was influenced by Hegelian
prepossessions only in the kind of significance which he was disposed
to ascribe to his results. It is to be noted that the theory of Hegel
implied a judgment of value; the movement was a progress towards
perfection.
8. In France, Comte approached the subject from a different side, and
exercised, outside Germany, a far wider influence than Hegel. The 4th
volume of his _Cours de philosophie positive_, which appeared in 1839,
created sociology and treated history as a part of this new science,
namely as "social dynamics." Comte sought the key for unfolding
historical development, in what he called the social-psychological
point of view, and he worked out the two ideas which had been
enunciated by Condorcet: that the historian's attention should be
directed not, as hitherto, principally to eminent individuals, but to
the collective behaviour of the masses, as being the most important
element in the process; and that, as in nature, so in history, there
are general laws, necessary and constant, which condition the
development. The two points are intimately connected, for it is only
when the masses are moved into the foreground that regularity,
uniformity, and law can be conceived as applicable. To determine the
social-psychological laws which have controlled the development is,
according to Comte, the task of sociologists and historians.
9. The hypothesis of general laws operative in history was carried
further in a book which appeared in England twenty years later and
exercised an influence in Europe far beyond its intrinsic merit,
Buckle's _History of Civilisation in England_ (1857-61). Buckle owed
much to Comte, and followed him, or rather outdid him, in regarding
intellect as the most important factor conditioning the upward
development of man, so that progress, according to him, consisted in
the victory of the intellectual over the moral laws.
10. The tendency of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to the
sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived stimulus
and plausibility from the vista offered by the study of statistics,
in which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book _Sur l'homme_ appeared in
1835, discerned endless possibilities. The astonishing uniformities
which statistical inquiry disclosed led to the belief that it was only
a question of collecting a sufficient amount of statistical material,
to enable us to predict how a given social group will act in a
particular case. Bourdeau, a disciple of this school, looks forward to
the time when historical science will become entirely quantitative.
The actions of prominent individuals, which are generally considered
to have altered or determined the course of things, are obviously not
amenable to statistical computation or explicable by general laws.
Thinkers like Buckle sought to minimise their importance or explain
them away.
11. These indications may suffice to show that the new efforts to
interpret history which marked the first half of the nineteenth
century were governed by conceptions closely related to those which
were current in the field of natural science and which resulted in the
doctrine of evolution. The genetic principle, progressive development,
general laws, the significance of time, the conception of society as
an organic aggregate, the metaphysical theory of history as the
self-evolution of spirit,--all these ideas show that historical
inquiry had been advancing independently on somewhat parallel lines to
the sciences of nature. It was necessary to bring this out in order to
appreciate the influence of Darwinism.
12. In the course of the dozen years which elapsed between the
appearances of _The Origin of Species_ (observe that the first volume
of Buckle's work was published just two years before) and of _The
Descent of Man_ (1871), the hypothesis of Lamarck that man is the
co-descendant with other species of some lower extinct form was
admitted to have been raised to the rank of an established fact by
most thinkers whose brains were not working under the constraint of
theological authority.
One important effect of the discovery of this fact (I am not speaking
now of the Darwinian explanation) was to assign to history a definite
place in the coordinated whole of knowledge, and relate it more
closely to other sciences. It had indeed a defined logical place in
systems such as Hegel's and Comte's; but Darwinism certified its
standing convincingly and without more ado. The prevailing doctrine
that man was created _ex abrupto_ had placed history in an isolated
position, disconnected with the sciences of nature. Anthropology,
which deals with the animal _anthropos_, now comes into line with
zoology, and brings it into relation with history.[239] Man's
condition at the present day is the result of a series of
transformations, going back to the most primitive phase of society,
which is the ideal (unattainable) beginning of history. But that
beginning had emerged without any breach of continuity from a
development which carries us back to a quadrimane ancestor, still
further back (according to Darwin's conjecture) to a marine animal of
the ascidian type, and then through remoter periods to the lowest form
of organism. It is essential in this theory that though links have
been lost there was no break in the gradual development; and this
conception of a continuous progress in the evolution of life,
resulting in the appearance of uncivilised Anthropos, helped to
reinforce, and increase a belief in, the conception of the history of
civilised Anthropos as itself also a continuous progressive
development.
13. Thus the diffusion of the Darwinian theory of the origin of man,
by emphasising the idea of continuity and breaking down the barriers
between the human and animal kingdoms, has had an important effect in
establishing the position of history among the sciences which deal
with telluric development. The perspective of history is merged in a
larger perspective of development. As one of the objects of biology is
to find the exact steps in the genealogy of man from the lowest
organic form, so the scope of history is to determine the stages in
the unique causal series from the most rudimentary to the present
state of human civilisation.
It is to be observed that the interest in historical research implied
by this conception need not be that of Comte. In the Positive
Philosophy history is part of sociology; the interest in it is to
discover the sociological laws. In the view of which I have just
spoken, history is permitted to be an end in itself; the
reconstruction of the genetic process is an independent interest. For
the purpose of the reconstruction, sociology, as well as physical
geography, biology, psychology, is necessary; the sociologist and the
historian play into each other's hands; but the object of the former
is to establish generalisations; the aim of the latter is to trace in
detail a singular causal sequence.
14. The success of the evolutional theory helped to discredit the
assumption or at least the invocation of transcendent causes.
Philosophically of course it is compatible with theism, but historians
have for the most part desisted from invoking the naive conception of
a "god in history" to explain historical movements. A historian may be
a theist; but, so far as his work is concerned, this particular belief
is otiose. Otherwise indeed (as was remarked above) history could not
be a science; for with a _deus ex machina_ who can be brought on the
stage to solve difficulties scientific treatment is a farce. The
transcendent element had appeared in a more subtle form through the
influence of German philosophy. I noticed how Ranke is prone to refer
to ideas as if they were transcendent existences manifesting
themselves in the successive movements of history. It is intelligible
to speak of certain ideas as controlling, in a given period,--for
instance, the idea of nationality; but from the scientific point of
view, such ideas have no existence outside the minds of individuals
and are purely psychical forces; and a historical "idea," if it does
not exist in this form, is merely a way of expressing a synthesis of
the historian himself.
15. From the more general influence of Darwinism on the place of
history in the system of human knowledge, we may turn to the influence
of the principles and methods by which Darwin explained development.
It had been recognised even by ancient writers (such as Aristotle and
Polybius) that physical circumstances (geography, climate) were
factors conditioning the character and history of a race or society.
In the sixteenth century Bodin emphasised these factors, and many
subsequent writers took them into account. The investigations of
Darwin, which brought them into the foreground, naturally promoted
attempts to discover in them the chief key to the growth of
civilisation. Comte had expressly denounced the notion that the
biological methods of Lamarck could be applied to social man. Buckle
had taken account of natural influences, but had relegated them to a
secondary plane, compared with psychological factors. But the
Darwinian theory made it tempting to explain the development of
civilisation in terms of "adaptation to environment," "struggle for
existence," "natural selection," "survival of the fittest," etc.[240]
The operation of these principles cannot be denied. Man is still an
animal, subject to zoological as well as mechanical laws. The dark
influence of heredity continues to be effective; and psychical
development had begun in lower organic forms,--perhaps with life
itself. The organic and the social struggles for existence are
manifestations of the same principle. Environment and climatic
influence must be called in to explain not only the differentiation of
the great racial sections of humanity, but also the varieties within
these sub-species and, it may be, the assimilation of distinct
varieties. Ritter's _Anthropogeography_ has opened a useful line of
research. But on the other hand, it is urged that, in explaining the
course of history, these principles do not take us very far, and that
it is chiefly for the primitive ultra-prehistoric period that they can
account for human development. It may be said that, so far as concerns
the actions and movements of men which are the subject of recorded
history, physical environment has ceased to act mechanically, and in
order to affect their actions must affect their wills first; and that
this psychical character of the causal relations substantially alters
the problem. The development of human societies, it may be argued,
derives a completely new character from the dominance of the conscious
psychical element, creating as it does new conditions (inventions,
social institutions, etc.) which limit and counteract the operation of
natural selection, and control and modify the influence of physical
environment. Most thinkers agree now that the chief clews to the
growth of civilisation must be sought in the psychological sphere.
Imitation, for instance, is a principle which is probably more
significant for the explanation of human development than natural
selection. Darwin himself was conscious that his principles had only a
very restricted application in this sphere, as is evident from his
cautious and tentative remarks in the 5th chapter of his _Descent of
Man_. He applied natural selection to the growth of the intellectual
faculties and of the fundamental social instincts, and also to the
differentiation of the great races or "sub-species" (Caucasian,
African, etc.) which differ in anthropological character.[241]
16. But if it is admitted that the governing factors which concern the
student of social development are of the psychical order, the
preliminary success of natural science in explaining organic evolution
by general principles encouraged sociologists to hope that social
evolution could be explained on general principles also. The idea of
Condorcet, Buckle, and others, that history could be assimilated to
the natural sciences was powerfully reinforced, and the notion that
the actual historical process, and every social movement involved in
it, can be accounted for by sociological generalisations, so-called
"laws," is still entertained by many, in one form or another.
Dissentients from this view do not deny that the generalisations at
which the sociologist arrives by the comparative method, by the
analysis of social factors, and by psychological deduction may be an
aid to the historian; but they deny that such uniformities are laws or
contain an explanation of the phenomena. They can point to the element
of chance coincidence. This element must have played a part in the
events of organic evolution, but it has probably in a larger measure
helped to determine events in social evolution. The collision of two
unconnected sequences may be fraught with great results. The sudden
death of a leader or a marriage without issue, to take simple cases,
has again and again led to permanent political consequences. More
emphasis is laid on the decisive actions of individuals, which cannot
be reduced under generalisations and which deflect the course of
events. If the significance of the individual will had been
exaggerated to the neglect of the collective activity of the social
aggregate before Condorcet, his doctrine tended to eliminate as
unimportant the roles of prominent men, and by means of this
elimination it was possible to found sociology. But it may be urged
that it is patent on the face of history that its course has
constantly been shaped and modified by the wills of individuals,[242]
which are by no means always the expression of the collective will;
and that the appearance of such personalities at the given moments is
not a necessary outcome of the conditions and cannot be deduced. Nor
is there any proof that, if such and such an individual had not been
born, some one else would have arisen to do what he did. In some cases
there is no reason to think that what happened need ever have come to
pass. In other cases, it seems evident that the actual change was
inevitable, but in default of the man who initiated and guided it, it
might have been postponed, and, postponed or not, might have borne a
different cachet. I may illustrate by an instance which has just come
under my notice. Modern painting was founded by Giotto, and the
Italian expedition of Charles VIII, near the close of the sixteenth
century, introduced into France the fashion of imitating Italian
painters. But for Giotto and Charles VIII, French painting might have
been very different. It may be said that "if Giotto had not appeared,
some other great imitator would have played a role analogous to his,
and that without Charles VIII there would have been the commerce with
Italy, which in the long run would have sufficed to place France in
relation with Italian artists. But the equivalent of Giotto might have
been deferred for a century and probably would have been different;
and commercial relations would have required ages to produce the
_rayonnement imitatif_ of Italian art in France, which the expedition
of the royal adventurer provoked in a few years."[243] Instances
furnished by political history are simply endless. Can we conjecture
how events would have moved if the son of Philip of Macedon had been
an incompetent? The aggressive action of Prussia which astonished
Europe in 1740 determined the subsequent history of Germany; but that
action was anything but inevitable; it depended entirely on the
personality of Frederick the Great.
Hence it may be argued that the action of individual wills is a
determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to
allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae. The types and
general forms of development which the sociologist attempts to
disengage can only assist the historian in understanding the actual
course of events. It is in the special domains of economic history and
_Culturgeschichte_ which have come to the front in modern times that
generalisation is most fruitful, but even in these it may be contended
that it furnishes only partial explanations.