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THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
SALES AGENTS
NEW YORK:
LEMCKE & BUECHNER
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LONDON:
HUMPHREY MILFORD
AMEN CORNER, E. C.
THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
BY
FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1916
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1916,
BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Printed from type, July, 1916.
NOTE
This book contains three lectures delivered at the University of North
Carolina on the McNair Foundation in March of the current year. It
expresses certain conclusions about history to which I have been led by
the study of the history of philosophy and by reflection on the work of
contemporary philosophers, especially Bergson, Dewey, and Santayana.
I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Faculty and Students of
the University of North Carolina for a most delightful visit at Chapel
Hill.
F. J. E. W.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
JUNE, 1916
CONTENTS
I. FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 1
II. THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 27
III. THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 58
THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
I
FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY
The serious study of history is characteristic of a certain maturity of
mind. For the intellectually young, the world is too new and attractive
to arouse in them a very absorbing interest in its past. Life is for
them an adventure, and the world is a place for excursions and
experiences. They care little about what men have done, but much about
what they might do. History, to interest them, must be written as a
romance which will fire their imagination, rather than as a philosophy
which might make them wise. But maturity, somewhat disciplined and
disillusioned, confirms the suspicion, which even youth entertains at
times, that the world, while offering an opportunity, hedges the offer
about with restrictions which must be understood and submitted to, if
effort is to be crowned with success. The mature may thus become eager
to understand life without ceasing to enjoy it. They may become
philosophical and show their wisdom by a desire to sympathize with what
men have done and to live rationally in the light of what is possible.
They may study history, convinced that it enlarges their sympathies and
promotes rational living.
We might, therefore, conclude that the prevailing interest in historical
studies is a sign that the age is growing in maturity and is seeking an
outlook upon life which is both sane and encouraging. This may well be
true. But even if the study of history indicate a certain maturity of
mind, it is not a guarantee that history will not be studied in the
spirit of youth. History may do little more than afford a new world for
wild adventure and undisciplined experience. Moreover, maturity is not
necessarily wise. Disgust, revolt, and loss of sympathy are not always
strangers to it. Historical studies may be pursued with little
comprehension of their aim or meaning; and history may be taught with
little reflection on its philosophical significance. It would appear,
therefore, that the study of history itself affords an opportunity for
philosophical inquiry, and may profitably stimulate questions about the
character of those facts with which history is concerned.
In these lectures I intend to deal with the purpose of history. I would
not, however, be misunderstood. My aim is not, by making another attempt
to find the increasing purpose running through the ages, to win
permanently the laurel which, hitherto, ambitious philosophers have worn
only for a season. There is, no doubt, a kind of rapture in seeing
history as St. Augustine saw it,--the progress of the City of God from
earth to heaven; and there is a kind of pride not wholly ignoble, in
seeing it as Hegel did,--the vibrating evolution from the brooding
absolution of the East to the self-conscious freedom of one's own
philosophy embraced and made universal by the civilizing energy of one's
own state. My aim is more modest. It is not romantic, but technical.
Metaphysics rather than poetry is to be my domain, although I cherish
the hope that poetry may not, therefore, be misprized. If it may
ultimately appear, not only as an ornament to living, but also as an
exemplary method of living well, I may even now invoke the Muses to my
aid, but Clio first, and, afterwards, Calliope. It is my aim, through an
examination of what the historian himself proposes, to discover in what
sense the idea of purpose in history is appropriate, and to what ideas
we are led when we think of history as the record of human progress.
The conclusions I hope to clarify, I may here anticipate. There is
discoverable in history no purpose, if we mean by purpose some future
event towards which the whole creation moves and which past and present
events portend; but there is purpose in history, if we mean that the
past is utilized as material for the progressive realization, at least
by man, of what we call spiritual ends. More generally, history is
itself essentially the utilization of the past for ends, ends not
necessarily foreseen, but ends to come, so that every historical thing,
when we view it retrospectively, has the appearance of a result which
has been selected, and to which its antecedents are exclusively
appropriate. In that sense purpose is discoverable in history. But this
purpose is not single. History is pluralistic and implies a pluralistic
philosophy. There are many histories, but no one of them exists to the
prejudice of any other. And, finally, progress is not aptly conceived as
an evolution from the past into the future. Evolution is, rather, only a
name for historical continuity, and this continuity itself is a fact to
be investigated and not a theory which explains anything, or affords a
standard of value. The past is not the cause or beginning of the
present, but the effect and result of history; so that every historical
thing leaves, as it were, its past behind it as the record of its life
in time. Progress may mean material progress when we have in mind the
improvement in efficiency of the instruments man uses to promote his
well-being; it may mean rational progress when we have in mind the
idealization of his natural impulses. Then he frames in his imagination
ideal ends which he can intelligently pursue and which, through the
attempt to realize them, justify his labors. Such are the conclusions I
hope to clarify, and I shall begin by considering the purpose men
entertain when they write histories.
It is natural to quote Herodotus. The Father of History seems to have
been conscious of his purpose and to have expressed it. We are told that
he gave his history to the world "in order that the things men have done
might not in time be forgotten, and that the great and wonderful deeds
of both Greeks and barbarians might not become unheard of,--this, and
why they fought with one another." This statement seems to be, in
principle, an adequate expression of the purpose of writing histories,
even if Herodotus did not execute that purpose with fidelity. The
limitations of its specific terms are obvious. One might expect that the
great deeds were mainly exploits at arms, that the history would be
military, and that the causes exposed would be causes of war. But the
history itself deals with geography and climate, with manners, customs,
traditions, and institutions, fully as much as with heroes and battles.
Professor Gilbert Murray says of it: "His work is not only an account of
a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually
tremendous; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the
expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen
through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The
world was at that time very interesting; and the one mind, while
strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human
records. Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too
sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the
earnest superstitions of people about him: he shares from the outset
their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving
events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature,
interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them
if they are only facts and figures; he catches quickly the atmosphere of
the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great
human influences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the
dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens; yet all the time shrewd,
cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and unconsciously convinced of the
weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness
of its apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the stamp of
this character and this profession."[1]
The history of Herodotus would, then, preserve a record of the world of
human affairs as he discovered it and an exposition of the causes and
conditions which have influenced human action. He would record what men
have done in order that their deeds might be remembered and in order
that they might be understood. Like all other historians he had his
individual limitations, but for all of them he seems to have expressed
the purpose of their inquiries. That purpose may be worked out in many
different fields. We may have military history, political history,
industrial history, economic history, religious history, the history of
civilization, of education, and of philosophy, the history, indeed, of
any human enterprise whatever. But always the purpose is the same, to
preserve a faithful record and to promote the understanding of what has
happened in the affairs of men. I need hardly add that, for the present,
I am restricting history to human history. Its wider signification will
not be neglected, but I make the present limitation in order that
through a consideration of the writing of human history, we may be led
on to the conception of history in its more comprehensive form.
To conceive the purpose of writing history adequately is not the same
thing as to execute that purpose faithfully. If Herodotus may be cited
in illustration of the adequate conception, he will hardly be cited by
historians in illustration of its faithful execution. They have
complained of him from time to time ever since Thucydides first accused
him of caring more about pleasing his readers than about telling the
truth. He is blamed principally for his credulity and for his lack of
criticism. Credulous he was and less critical than one could wish, but
it is well to remember, in any just estimate of him, that he was much
less credulous and much more critical than we should naturally expect a
man of his time to be. He wrote in an age when men generally believed
spontaneously things which we, since we reflect, can not believe, and
when it was more congenial to listen to a story than to indulge in the
criticism of it. He frequently expresses disbelief of what he has been
told and is often at great pains to verify what he has heard. With all
his faults he remains among the extraordinary men.
These faults, when they are sympathetically examined, indicate far less
blemishes in the character of Herodotus than they do the practical and
moral difficulties which beset the faithful writing of all history. That
is why he is so illustrative for our purpose. A faithful and true record
is the first thing the historian desires, but it is a very difficult
thing to obtain. Human testimony even in the presence of searching
cross-examination is notoriously fallible, and the dumb records of the
past, with all their variations and contradictions, present a stolid
indifference to our curiosity. The questions we ask of the dead, only we
ourselves can answer. Herodotus wrote with these practical and moral
difficulties at a maximum. We have learned systematically to combat
them. There has grown up for our benefit an abundant literature which
would instruct the historian how best to proceed. The methods of
historians, their failures and successes, have been carefully studied
with the result that we have an elaborate science of writing history
which we call historiography. Therein one may learn how to estimate
sources, deal with documents, weigh evidence, detect causes, and be
warned against the errors to which one is liable. Moreover,
anthropology, archæology, and psychology have come to the historian's
aid to help him in keeping his path as clear and unobstructed as
possible. In other words, history has become more easy and more
difficult to write than it was in the days of Herodotus. The better
understanding of its difficulties and of the ways to meet them has made
it more easy; but the widening of its scope has made it more difficult.
We still face the contrast between the adequate conception of the
purpose of writing history and the faithful execution of that purpose.
But it would seem that only practical and moral difficulties stand in
the way of successful performance. Ideally, at least, a perfect history
seems to be conceivable.
It is, indeed, conceivable that with adequate data, with a wise and
unbiased mind, and with a moderate supply of genius, an historian might
faithfully record the events with which he deals, and make us understand
how they happened. It is conceivable because it has in many cases been
so closely approximated. Our standards of judgment and appraisement here
are doubtless open to question by a skeptical mind. We may lack the
evidence which would make our estimate conclusive. But what I mean is
this: histories have been written which satisfy to a remarkable degree
the spirit of inquiry. They present that finality and inevitability
which mark the master mind. There are, in other words, authorities which
few of us ever question. They have so succeeded, within their
limitations, in producing the sense of adequacy, that their reputation
seems to be secure. Their limitations have been physical, rather than
moral or intellectual, so that the defects which mar their work are less
their own than those of circumstance. They thus appear to be substantial
witnesses that the only difficulties in the way of faithfully executing
the purpose of writing history are practical and moral--to get the
adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of
genius. There are no other difficulties.
Yet when we say that there are no other difficulties we may profitably
bear in mind that Herodotus has been charged not only with being
credulous and uncritical, but also with not telling the truth. At first
this might not appear to indicate a new difficulty. For if Herodotus
lied, his difficulty was moral. But it is not meant that Herodotus lied.
It is meant rather that within his own limitations he did not, and
possibly could not, give us the true picture of the times which he
recorded. He saw things too near at hand to paint them in that
perspective which truthfully reveals their proportions. His emphases,
his lights and shadows, are such as an enlightened man of his time might
display, but they are not the emphases, the lights and shadows which, as
subsequent historians have proved, give us ancient Greece with its true
shading. We understand his own age much better than he did because Grote
and other moderns have revealed to us what Greece really was. But what,
we may ask, was the real Greece? Who has written and who can write its
true history? Grote's reputation as an historian is secure, but his
history has already been superseded in many important respects. We are
told that, since its publication, "a great change has come over our
knowledge of Greek civilization." What then shall we say if neither
Herodotus, who saw that civilization largely face to face, nor Grote,
who portrays it after an exceptionally patient and thorough study of its
records, supplemented by what he calls scientific criticism and a
positive philosophy, has given us the real Greece? Clearly it looks as
if the perfect history is yet to be written, and as if every attempt to
write it pushes it forward into the future. And clearly we face, if not
a new difficulty, a fact at least which is of fundamental importance in
the attempt to understand what history itself is.
So Herodotus becomes again illustrative. His history once written and
given to the world becomes itself an item in the history of Greece,
making it necessary that the story be retold. In the face of a fact, at
once so simple and so profound, how idle is the boast of the publisher
who could say of the author of a recent life of Christ[2] that she "has
reproduced the time of Christ, not as we would understand it, but as He
himself saw it. She has told what He believed and did, rather than what
He is reported to have said. She has stripped Him of tradition and
shown Him as He was; she has given to literature an imperishable figure,
not of the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, but of the towering figure
of all history." How idle, I repeat, is such a boast of finality when we
know that this new history of Christ, instead of ending the matter, may
cause another history to be written by some student who comes to the old
record with a new insight and a new inspiration. It is possible, we may
say, to portray the Christ of His own day, or the wan Galilean of the
Middle Ages, or the figure which commands the attention of the twentieth
century, but the real Christ, the towering figure of all history,--who
will portray that? It is yet to be done and done again. No historical
fact can ever have its history fully written: and this, not because the
adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of
genius are lacking, but because it is itself the producer of new history
the more it is historically understood. It grows, it changes, it expands
the more adequately we apparently grasp it. We seem never to be at the
end of its career and we must stop abruptly with its history still
unfinished. Others may take up our task, but they will end as we have
ended. The history of nothing is complete.
It is well-nigh impossible to avoid the suspicion of paradox in such
statements as these. Yet I feel confident that every historical student
keenly alive to his task is abundantly sensible of this truth. Where
will he end the history of Greece or of Rome? What will be the final
chapter of the French Revolution? No: there is no paradox here, but
there is an ambiguity. For history is not only a record written to
preserve memory and promote understanding, it is also a process in time.
"With us," Professor Flint writes, "the word 'history,' like its
equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary
composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such
composition--either a narrative of events, or events which may be
narrated. It is impossible to free the term of this doubleness and
ambiguity of meaning. Nor is it, on the whole, to be desired. The
advantages of having one term which may, with ordinary caution, be
innocuously applied to two things so related, more than counterbalance
the dangers involved in two things so distinct having the same name. The
history of England which actually happened can not easily be confounded
with the history of England written by Mr. Green; while by the latter
being termed history as well as the former, we are reminded that it is
an attempt to reproduce or represent the course of the former.
Occasionally, however, the ambiguity of the word gives rise to great
confusion of thought and gross inaccuracy of speech. And this occurs
most frequently, if not exclusively, just when men are trying and
professing to think and speak with especial clearness and exactness
regarding the signification of history--i.e., when they are labouring to
define it. Since the word history has two very different meanings, it
obviously can not have merely one definition. To define an order of
facts and a form of literature in the same terms--to suppose that when
either of them is defined the other is defined--is so absurd that one
would probably not believe it could be seriously done were it not so
often done. But to do so has been the rule rather than the exception.
The majority of so-called definitions of history are definitions only of
the records of history. They relate to history as narrated and written,
not to history as evolved and acted; in other words, although given as
the only definitions of history needed, they do not apply to history
itself, but merely to accounts of history. They may tell us what
constitutes a book of history, but they can not tell us what the
history is with which all books of history are occupied. It is, however,
with history in this latter sense that a student of the science or
philosophy of history is mainly concerned."[3]
It is because history is not only something "narrated and written," but
also something "evolved and acted" that we are led to say that the
history of nothing is complete. The narrative may begin and end where we
please; and might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. But the
beginning and the end of the action are so interwoven with the whole
time process that adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the
fundamental reason why Grote's history surpasses that of Herodotus in
what we call historical truth. For the truth of history is a progressive
truth to which the ages as they continue contribute. The truth for one
time is not the truth for another, so that historical truth is something
which lives and grows rather than something fixed to be ascertained once
for all. To remember what has happened, and to understand it, carries us
thus to the recognition that the writing of history is itself an
historical process. It, too, is something "evolved and acted." It is
perennially fresh even if the events with which it deals are long since
past and gone. The record may be final, but our understanding of what
has been recorded can make no such claim. The accuracy of the record is
not the truth of history. We are well assured, for instance, that the
Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. The
record on that point is not seriously questionable, although we have to
rely on documents which have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to
our own day, we can have little doubt that the record of this greater
Marathon of Europe will surpass all others in fulness and accuracy.
There are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, difficulties in
the way of exactness even when we are dealing with contemporaneous
events. "Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differently as their
memories or their sympathies vary." Such difficulties we have learned
how to check until our records closely approach truth of fact.
Consequently the records of what men have done, or may be doing, may be
relatively unimpeachable. But it is quite a different matter to
understand what they have done and are doing. Without that
understanding, history is no better than a chronicle, a table of events,
but not that "thing to possess and keep always" after which the
historian aspires.
To understand is not simply difficult, it is also endless. But this fact
does not make it hopeless. The understanding of history grows by what it
feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, constantly reveals
more to be understood. Our illustrations may serve us again. From the
accessible records of the battle of Marathon we can understand with
tolerable success the immediate antecedents and consequents of that
great event. But in calling the event great we do not simply eulogize
its participants. We indicate, rather, that its antecedents and
consequents have been far-reaching and momentous. Greece, we say, was
saved. But what are we to understand by that salvation? To answer we
must write and rewrite her own history, the history of what she has been
and is; and with every fresh writing the battle of Marathon becomes
better understood. It becomes a different battle with a different truth.
And more than this: with every rewriting we understand better what went
before and what followed after until the battle itself becomes but the
symptom of deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's present struggle.
Already its history has begun with many volumes. Following the example
of Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are writing it
contemporaneously by summers and winters. The consequences they can only
guess at, but they have done much with the antecedents, so much that the
last fifty years of Europe are better understood than they were a year
ago. The record of them has changed little; our understanding of them
has changed much. It has changed so much that they have already become a
different half-century from what they were. The truth about them last
year is not the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence what will the
truth about them be?
I venture another illustration, one from the history of philosophy. I
choose Plato. He is such a commanding figure that the desire to
understand him is exceptionally keen. The record of his life and of his
conscious aims and purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no assured
authorities on these points. That is greatly to be regretted, because a
correct record is naturally the best of aids towards a correct
understanding. But the unsatisfactory record is not very material to the
illustration in hand. The record might be correct, but Plato would, even
so, remain an historical figure to be understood. He would continue to
be the producer of what we call Platonism, and we should have to
understand him as that producer. In that case, evidently, the details of
his life, his span of years, his immediate aims and activities would
involve but the beginning of an inquiry which would last as long as
Plato is studied by those who would understand him. Who, then, would be
the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle wrote, or the man about
whom Professor Paul Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is the man
about whom they both write, but that can mean only that he is the man
about whom writers can write so diversely. He is not the same man to
Professor Shorey that he was to Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a
nice question which of the two disciples has given us the correct
estimate of their master. Who was the real Plato? And that question
could still be asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its record,
what it is not, a continuous and uniformly accepted tradition. For it is
quite evident that the Platonic tradition has grown from age to age as
students of Plato have tried to understand him and to understand also
what other students have understood about him. The true Plato is still
the quest of Platonists.
It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by
that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something
which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic
truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something
being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence
of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we
declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth,
and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only
that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might
well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then
have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us
what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light
of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have
been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors
to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been
faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has
happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals
in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common
enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what
that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known.
History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is
also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order
that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically
from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but
it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. It may
afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a
book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense
progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because
every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and
a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of
reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something
like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are
subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time.
That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full
truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date.
Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to
affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that
event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the
history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written.
It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen
of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to
live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of
history itself.
The writer of history may, consequently, attain his purpose within the
limits of the practical and moral difficulties which beset it in either
of two ways. He may give us the contemporaneous understanding of what
has happened in terms of the outlook and perspective of his own day,
giving us a vision of what has gone before as an enlightened mind of his
time might see it. His history might then be that of ancient peoples
beheld in the new perspective into which they have now been placed.
Could he, by miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they would
doubtless fail to recognize their own history, truthful as it might be.
But comprehension might dawn upon them as they read, and they might
exclaim: "These were the things we were really doing, but we did not
know it at the time; we have discovered what we were; our history has
revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, by the restrained exercise
of his imagination, may give us what has happened in the perspective of
the time in which it happened, or in a perspective anterior to his own
day. He may seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past
contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination to days no longer ours
and to ways of feeling and acting no longer presently familiar. Such a
history would be less comprehensive and complete than the former. It
would also be more difficult to write, because historical imagination of
this kind is rare and also because it is not easy to divest the past of
its present estimate. Yet the imagination has that power and enables us
to live again in retrospect what others have lived before us. But in
both cases the history would be an active conservation of events in
time; it would reveal their truth, their meaning, and their purpose.
If now we ask what may be this truth and meaning, or in what sense may
we appropriately speak of a purpose in history, we pass from history to
philosophy. No longer shall we be concerned with the purpose of writing
history, but rather with the character of the facts which stimulate
that purpose and assist in its attainment. From history as the attempt
to preserve memory and promote understanding we pass to history as a
characteristic of natural processes. We shall try to analyze what the
career of things in time involves; but we shall keep this career in mind
in those aspects of it which bear most significantly upon the history of
man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Murray, Gilbert. "Ancient Greek Literature." D. Appleton & Co.,
1908. Page 133.
[2] Austin, Mary. "The Man Jesus." Harper, 1915.
[3] Flint, Robert. "History of the Philosophy of History." Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1894. Page 5.
II
THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY
History leads to philosophy when it raises in a fundamental way the
question of truth. As we have seen, the term "truth," when applied to
history, has a double meaning. It may mean that the record of what has
happened is correct, and it may mean that the understanding of what has
happened is correct. If the record is correct, its truth seems to be
something fixed once for all and unchanging. The perfect record may
never be possessed, but it seems to be ideally possible, because the
events which the record would keep in memory must have happened, and,
therefore, might have been recorded if fortune had been favorable. If,
however, the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth
can not be something fixed once for all. It is fixed only from time to
time. One correct understanding of what has happened does not displace
another as truth might displace error, but one supplements and enlarges
another. Histories which have gone before are not undone by those that
follow after. They are incorporated into them in a very real way.
Historical truth, therefore, when it does not mean simply the
correctness of the records of history, is progressive. If the record of
what has happened is correct, its truth is perpetual; if the
understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth is
contemporaneous. Now what does this distinction involve? Does it involve
merely the recognition that facts may remain unchanged while our
knowledge of them grows? A suspicion, at least, has been created that it
involves something more, namely, the recognition that the facts
themselves, being something "evolved and acted," are also progressive.
Historical facts are careers in time. It is their occurrence which is
recorded and it is their career which is understood. We may, therefore,
undertake an inquiry into the nature of facts like these.
We may start from the distinction between facts and our knowledge of
them, for it is clear that whatever the character of the facts may be,
our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. The past is dead and
gone. It is something over and done with, so that any change in it is
forever impossible. We should then, if we would be precise, say, not
that it is the past which grows and enlarges, but only our knowledge of
it. We recover and conserve it in memory and imagination only, and as we
recover it more and more completely and relate it more and more
successfully, we know and understand it better. Plato is dead, and not
one feature, circumstance, or action of his life can now be changed. He
lives only in the memory of man; and because he lives there and
stimulates the imagination, there is born a Plato of the imagination.
There are thus two Platos, the one real and the other historical. The
one lived and died long ago; the other still lives in human history. The
real Plato has produced the historical Plato and affords a check upon
historians in their representation of him. That representation may
approach progressively nearer to what the real Plato was like, but it
can never be the man who has passed away. History would be thus a branch
of human knowledge, and grow with the growth of knowledge, while its
objects remain unchanged. That is why history has constantly to be
rewritten. Furthermore, in the rewriting, new types of history appear
with new or altered emphases. The moral and religious type is
supplemented by the political, and the political by the economic and
social. For with the growth of knowledge the past looks different to us
and we discover that what appeared once adequate has to be revised.
We may admit, therefore, that history, whatever else it may be, is at
any rate a kind of human knowledge. Like all knowledge it leads us to
recognize that there is a distinction between knowledge itself and its
objects, and that the progressive character of knowledge indicates an
approximation to an adequate representation of the objects and not
changes in their own character. This distinction in its application to
history is evidently not a distinction between literature and its
subject-matter. For the past, if we now take the past to be the proper
subject-matter of written history, appears to have a twofold character.
It is all that has happened precisely as it happened, and it is all that
is remembered and known, precisely as it is remembered and known. There
are, we may say, a real past and an historical past. The latter never is
the former, but always a progressively more adequate representation of
the former.
Now this distinction between the real past and the historical past may
be fruitful. It may also be treacherous, for the terms in which it is
expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very easy to claim that the
real past is after all only the historical past, because the past itself
being dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved in history. Yet
properly understood, the distinction is essential to any philosophical
comprehension of what history is. It points out that history is not the
past, but is its recovery and conservation. Events begin and end; men
are born and die; events and men disappear into the past in a manner and
an order which are unalterable. But it is not their disappearance which
constitutes their existence in time a history. Their historical
existence is a kind of continuing life. It may be that it continues only
in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly illustrates the nature of
history as a process in time. In other words the life of knowledge, of
memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has
happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it
in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits
of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now
restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and
events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which
are unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never to return in the
precise and identical manner of their first existence, they are
conserved, and continue the process of dying as occurrences in order to
live as a history. Yesterday as yesterday is gone forever. Its
opportunities are over and its incidents dead. As an historical
yesterday it lives as material for to-day's employment. It becomes an
experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy.
History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must
speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by
ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying;
whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed.
But the conservation of what happens is obviously not a perpetuation.
History is not the staying of events, for time forbids that they stay.
The conservation is rather a utilization, a kind of employment or
working over of material. Through it discriminations and selections are
made and connections discovered; the moving panorama is converted into
an order of events which can be understood, because consequences are
seen in the light of their antecedents and antecedents are seen in the
light of the consequences to which they lead. There is thus a genuine
incorporation of what has happened into what does happen, of yesterday
into to-day, so that yesterday becomes a vital part of to-day and finds
its enlargement and fulfilment there. We can thus write our own
biographies. It is possible for us to discover what mistakes we have
made and what ends we have attained. Our history appears thus to be a
utilization of material, a realization of ends, a movement with purpose
in it. Selection is characteristic of it very profoundly. Other
histories, of other men, of times, of peoples, of institutions, we write
in the same way because in the same way we discover and understand what
has happened in their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utilizing,
selective, and purposeful movement in time, history appears to be when
we restrict it to the domain of human knowledge.
It seems, however, idle so to restrict it. For other things besides our
knowledge grow--animals and plants, and the stars even. They, too, have
a history, and it may be that their history, being also an affair in
time, is not unlike in character to our own growth in knowledge. Or
perhaps it were even better to say that both they and our knowledge
illustrate equally what history is, discovering time itself to be the
great historian. All time-processes, that is, appear to be, when we
attentively consider them, processes which supplement, complete, or
transform what has gone before. They are active conservations and
utilizations of the past as material. They save what has happened from
being utterly destroyed, and, in saving it, complete and develop it.
Time is, thus, constantly rounding out things, so to speak, or bringing
them to some end or fulfilment. That is why we call its movement
purposeful.
Yet there have been philosophies which have tried to make of time a
magical device by which man might represent to himself in succession
that which in itself is never in succession. They picture his journey
through life as a journey through space where all that he sees, one
thing after another, comes successively into view like the houses on a
street along which he may walk. But as the houses do not exist in
succession, neither do the facts he discovers. They, too, come into view
as he moves along. These philosophies, consequently, would have us think
of a world in itself, absolute and complete, to which nothing can be
added and from which nothing can be subtracted. It is somehow fixed and
finished now; but our human experience, being incomplete and
unfinished, gives to it the appearance of a process in time and
discloses to us what it would be like if all its factors and the laws
which hold them in perfect equilibrium were experienced in succession.
History would thus be a kind of temporal revelation of the absolute and
we should read it as we read a book, from cover to cover, discovering
page by page a story which is itself finished when we begin.
Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the world to be thus finished
and complete in itself and only appearing to us as a temporal
revelation, has often thought of movements in time as only the results
of preceding movements. Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the
effect of what has already happened, rather than the active conservation
and working over of what has already happened. The past is made the
cause and producer of the present, so that the state of the world at any
moment is only the result or outcome of what it was in the preceding
moment. To-day is thought to be the effect of yesterday and the cause of
to-morrow, and is thus but a transition from one day to another.
Time-processes are thus robbed of any genuine activity or productivity,
and time itself is made to be nothing but the sequential order in which
events occur. Purpose, conservation, utilization, and all that active
supplementing and working over of the past on which we have dwelt,
become illusions when applied to the world at large. They represent our
way of conceiving things, but not nature's way of doing things.
But these philosophies, as Professor Bergson especially among recent
philosophers has pointed out,[4] gain whatever force they have
principally from the fact that they think of time in terms of space.
They picture it as a line already drawn, when they should picture it as
a line in the process of being drawn. As already drawn, the line has a
beginning, an end, and consequently, a middle point. Let us call the
middle point the present. All the line to the left of that point we will
call the past and all to the right of it the future. We thus behold time
spatially with all its parts coexistent as the points on the line.
Events are then conceived to move from the past through the present into
the future, just as a pencil point may pass from the beginning of the
line through its middle point to the end. But, unlike the pencil point,
they can not go backward. This fact gives us a characteristic by which
we may distinguish time from space even if we have represented time
spatially. The spatial order is reversible, the temporal is not. Time is
like a line on which you can go forward, but on which you can not go
backward. But you can go forward. Everything goes from the past to the
future. The present is but the transition point of their going.
There are, undoubtedly, advantages in thinking of time in this spatial
way. Thereby we are able to make calendars and have a science of
mechanics. It affords a basis for many successful predictions. But,
quite evidently, time is neither such a line nor anything like it.
Nothing whatever goes from the past through the present into the future.
We can not make such a statement intelligible. For "to go" from the past
to the future is not like going from New York to Boston. Boston is
already there to go to, but the future is not anywhere to go to. And New
York is there to leave, but the past is not anywhere to leave. What then
is this mysterious "going" if its starting-point and its end are both
non-existent now? Clearly it is a "going" only in a metaphorical sense.
We call it a "going" because we can so represent it by dates and places.
We can say that here we have been going from Friday through Saturday to
Sunday. But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past nor future,
that it is neither yesterday nor to-morrow, and that if we go anywhere
we must start to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday will be yesterday. But
note now the strange situation into which we have fallen--only in the
future is this day ever in the past! And that is true of every day in
the world's history. It becomes a past day only in its own future.
Clearly then time is not like a line already drawn. It is more like a
line in the drawing. You take the pencil and the line is left behind it
as the pencil moves. New points are being constantly added to what has
gone before. The line is being manufactured. Let us call so much of it
as has now been drawn the past and that which has not yet been drawn the
future. It is clear then that the present is not the middle point of the
line nor any point whatever upon it, for all of the line that has been
drawn belongs to the past and all the rest of it to the future. Its past
has already been done; its future is not yet done, but only possible.
Furthermore, it is clear that no point moves from the past into the
future. Such a movement is unintelligible. If there is any movement of
points at all, it is a movement into the past. That is, the line,
instead of growing into the future, grows into the past--continually
more and more of it is drawn. For remember that the future of the line
is not the place on the paper or in the air which by and by the line may
occupy. Its future is a genuine future, a possibility as yet nowhere
realized. It is the part of the line which always will be, but never is;
or, better, it is that part of the line which will have a place and a
date if the line continues to be drawn. The movement of time is thus not
a movement from the past to the future, but from the possible to the
actual, from what may be to what has been. The present is not the
vanishing point between past and future; it is not, so to speak, in the
same line or dimension with them. It is something quite different. It is
all that we mean by activity or eventuality. It is the concrete,
definite, and effective transforming of the possible into the actual. It
is the _drawing_ of the line, but in no sense is it a part or point of
the line itself.