it is not entirely free from spatial reminiscences. But it serves to
point out that past, present, and future are not like parts of a whole
into which an absolute or complete time is divided. They are more like
derivatives of the time process itself in the concrete instances of its
activity. They are what every growing or changing thing involves,
whether it be the knowledge of man or the crust of the earth, for
everything that grows or changes manufactures a past by realizing a
future. It leaves behind it the record of what it has done conserved by
memory or by nature, and in leaving that record behind constantly
enlarges or transforms it. The growth moves in a manner and an order
which when once performed are unalterable, but there is growth none the
less. Since time is like this, it seems evidently unintelligible to
restrict it and history to human experience and make the world in itself
absolute. It would be better to say that it is history in the large
sense applicable to the world itself that makes human experience
possible. Yet it would be more advisable not to make such a distinction
at all, but to recognize that human experience is one kind of history,
namely, history conscious of itself, the time process deliberately at
work.
Now it is evident that history in this latter sense is purposive and
selective. That which has happened is not remembered as a whole or
understood as a whole. Not only are details forgotten or neglected, but
things and events otherwise important are omitted for the sake of
securing emphasis and distinction among the things remembered. Herodotus
spoke of "wonderful deeds" and others following this example have
regarded history as concerned only with great men and great events. It
is true that the little men and the little events tend to disappear, but
we should remember that it is the selective character of history which
makes them little. Speaking absolutely, we may say that no item, however
apparently insignificant, is really insignificant in the historical
development of any people or any institution, for in some measure every
item is material to that development. But all are not equally material.
The absence of any one of them might undoubtedly have changed the whole
history, but given the presence of them all, some are of greater
significance than others.
The history of the English people may be regarded as a development of
personal liberty. It is doubtless more than that, but it is that. As
such a development, it is evident that there are many things which an
historian of personal liberty will disregard in order that the
particular movement he is studying may be emphasized and distinguished.
It will be that particular movement which will determine for him what is
great and what little. So it comes about that histories are diversified
even when they are histories of the same thing. There are many histories
of England which differ from one another not only in accuracy,
philosophical grasp, and brilliancy, but also in the purpose they
discover England to be fulfilling. By purpose here is not meant a
predestined end which England is bound to reach, but the fact that her
history can be construed as a development of a specific kind. In other
words her past can be understood only when it is seen to be relevant to
some particular career which has its termination in her existing
institutions. Her past has contributed through time to definite results
which are now apparent. The things that have happened have not all
contributed to these results in the same measure. Some have contributed
more, some less. What is true in this illustration appears to be true
generally. Every history is a particular career in the development of
which some facts, persons, and events have been more significant than
others, so that the termination of the career at any time is like an end
that has been reached or a consequence to which its antecedents are
peculiarly appropriate. That is the sense in which history is purposeful
and selective.
The selection is twofold. First, there is selection of the type of
career, and secondly, there is selection of the items especially
relevant to its progress. We may have the military, the political, the
social, the industrial, the economic, or the religious history of
England, for instance, and although these histories will overlap and
involve one another, each of them will exhibit a career which is
peculiar and distinct from its fellows. When reading the industrial
history we shall not be reading the religious history. In the one we
shall find circumstances and events recorded which we do not find in the
other, because all circumstances and events do not have significance
equally for the development of industry and religion. Historical
selection is, therefore, twofold,--the selection of a career to be
depicted and of events and circumstances peculiarly relevant to that
career.
Is this selection, we may ask, only a device on the historian's part to
facilitate our comprehension, or is it a genuine characteristic of the
time process itself? Does the historian read purpose into history or
does he find it there? It may assist in answering such questions to
observe that if selection is a device of the historian, it is one to
which he is compelled. Without it history is unintelligible. Unless we
understand events and circumstances as contributing to a definite result
and contributing in different measures, we do not understand them at
all. The Magna Charta, the British Constitution, the Tower of London,
the River Thames, the mines of Wales, the plays of Shakespeare--all
these things and things like them are for us quite unintelligible if
they illuminate no career or illustrate no specific movements to which
they have particularly contributed. Selection is, consequently, not a
device which the historian has invented; it is imposed upon him by his
own purpose to preserve the memory and promote the understanding of what
has happened. The procedure of the historian is not arbitrary, but
necessary. It is imposed upon him by the character of the facts with
which he deals. These facts are movements from the possible to the
actual and are helped and hindered by other such movements. An
historical fact is not only spread out in space and exists equally with
all its contemporaries at an assignable place in reference to them, it
also persists in time, comes before and after other persisting facts,
and persists along with others in a continuance equal to, or more or
less than, theirs. In a figure we may say, facts march on in time, but
not all at the same speed or with the same endurance; they help or
impede one another's movement; they do not all reach the goal; some of
them turn out to be leaders, others followers; their careers overlap and
interfere; so that the result is a failure for some and a success for
others. The march is their history.
This is figure, but it looks like the fact. Simple illustrations may
enforce it. The seeds which we buy and sow in the spring are not simply
so many ounces of chemical substances. They are also so many possible
histories or careers in time, so many days of growth, so much promise of
fruit or flower. Each seed has its own peculiar history with its own
peculiar career. The seeds are planted. Then in the course of time, soil
and moisture and atmosphere and food operate in unequal ways in the
development of each career. Each is furthered or hindered as events
fall out. Some careers are cut short, others prosper. Everywhere there
is selection. Everywhere there is adaptation of means to ends. The
history of the garden can be written because there is a history there to
write.
Such an illustration can be generalized. Our world is indubitably a
world in time. That means much more than the fact that its events can be
placed in accordance with a map or dated in accordance with a calendar.
It means that they are events in genuine careers, each with its own
particular character and its own possibility of a future, like the seeds
in the garden. Things with histories have not only structures in space
and are, accordingly, related geometrically to one another; they have
not only chemical structures and are thus analyzable into component
parts; they have also structures in time. They are not now what they
will be, but what they will be is always continuous with what they are,
so that we must think of them stretched out, so to speak, in time as
well as in space, or as being so many moments as well as so much volume.
What they become, however, depends not only on their own time
structures, but also on their interplay with one another. They are
helped and hindered in their development. The results reached at any
time are such as complete those which have gone before, for each career
is the producer, but not the product of its past.
It seems clear, therefore, that there is purpose in history. But
"purpose" is a troublesome word. It connotes design, intention,
foresight, as well as the converging of means upon a specific end. Only
in the latter sense is it here used, but with this addition: the end is
to be conceived not in terms of any goal ultimately reached, but in
terms of the career of which it is the termination; and in this career,
the present is continually adding to and completing the past. The
growing seeds end each in its own specific flower or fruit. They are
each of its own kind and named accordingly. It is only because each of
them has its specific structure in time that their growth presents that
convergence of means toward an end by which we distinguish them and for
which we value them. In purpose construed in this way there is evidently
no need of design or intention or foresight. In making a garden there is
such need. The purposes of nature may be deliberately employed to attain
the purposes of men. But apart from beings who foresee and plan there
appears to be no evidence of intention in the world. When we speak of
nature's designs, we speak figuratively, and impute to her rational and
deliberate powers. But we can not clearly affirm that the rain falls in
order that the garden may be watered, or that the eye was framed in
order that we might see. The evidence for design of that character has
been proved inadequate again and again with every careful examination of
it. To say, therefore, that nature is full of purpose does not mean that
nature has been framed in accordance with some preconceived plan, but
rather that nature is discovered to be an historical process, the
conversion of the possible into the actual in such a way that there is
conserved a progressive record of that conversion.
From the selective character of history it follows that a single
complete history of anything is impossible--certainly a single complete
history of the world at large. History is pluralistic. This conclusion
might be reached as others have already been reached by pointing out how
it follows from the purpose of writing history, and how this purpose
indicates the character of movements in time. Indeed this has already
been done in pointing out that the history of England is its many
histories and the history of a garden the history of its many seeds.
Always there is a particular career and particular incidents appropriate
to it. Any career may be as comprehensive as desired, but the more
inclusive it is the more restricted it becomes. The history of Milton
contains details which the history of English literature will omit; and
the history of the cosmos shrinks to nothing when we try to write it.
The only universal history is the exposition of what history itself is,
the time process stripped of all its variety and specific interests.
Consequently, a single purpose is not discoverable; there are many
purposes. When we try to reduce them all to some show of singleness we
again do no more than try to tell what a temporal order is like. It is
metaphysics and not history we are writing.
To affirm that history is pluralistic is, however, only to reaffirm the
selective character of history generally. A history of the world in
order to be single, definite, and coherent, must exhibit a single,
definite, and coherent purpose or time process. That means, of course,
that it is distinguished from other purposes equally single, definite,
and coherent. There are thus many histories of the world distinguished
from one another by the incidence of choice or emphasis. The flower in
the crannied wall with its history fully recorded and understood would,
consequently, illustrate the universe. All that has ever happened might
be interpreted in illumination of its career. Yet it would be absurd to
maintain that either nature or Tennyson intended that the little flower
should be exclusively illustrative. The wall would do as well, or its
crannies, or the poet. Nature exhibits no preference either in the
choice of a history or in the extent of its comprehensiveness. Man may
be thought to be, and man is, an incident in the universe, and the
universe may be thought to be, and the universe is, the theater of man's
career.
The same principle may be illustrated from human history exclusively. We
who are of European ancestry and largely Anglo-Saxon by inheritance are
pleased to write history as the development of our own civilization with
its institutions, customs, and laws; and we regard China and Japan, for
example, as incidental and contributory to our own continuation in time.
Because our heritage is Christian we date all events from the birth of
Christ. Yet we gain some wisdom by pausing to reflect how our procedure
might impress an enlightened historian from China or Japan. Would he
begin with the cradle of European civilization, pass through Greece and
Rome, and then from Europe to America, remarking that in 1852 A.D.
Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world? Surely he would begin
otherwise, and not unlike ourselves would construe the history of the
world in a manner relevant to the progress of his own civilization.
Europe and America and Christianity would contribute to that
development, but would not constitute its essential or distinctively
significant factors. The historian is himself an historical fact
indicating a selection, a distinction, and an emphasis in the course of
time. His history is naturally colored by that fact. Other histories he
can write only with an effort at detachment from his own career. He must
forget himself if he would understand others; but he must understand
himself first, if he is successfully to forget what he is. He must know
what history is, recognize its pluralistic character, and try to do it
justice.
To do justice to the pluralistic character of history is not, however,
simply to write other histories than one's own with commendable
impartiality. It is also to be keenly alive to the philosophical
implications of this pluralism. The most significant of them is
doubtless this: since philosophically considered history is a thing not
written, but evolved and acted, to no one history can absolute
superiority or preference be assigned. Absolutely considered the history
of man can not claim preëminence over the history of the stars. He is no
more the darling of the universe than is the remotest nebula. It is just
as intelligible and just as true to say that man exists as an
illustration of stellar evolution as to say that the sun exists to
divide light from darkness for the good of man. Absolutely considered
the cosmos is impartial to its many histories. But even that is not well
said, for it implies that the cosmos might be partial if it chose. We
should rather say that there is no considering of history absolutely at
all. For history is just the denial of absolute considerations. It is
the affirmation of relative considerations, of considerations which are
relative to a selected career. There is no other kind of history
possible.
The recognition of this fact does not, however, imply the futility of
all history. It does not imply that any history is good enough for men
since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. So to conclude is to
disregard completely the implications of pluralism. If no history can
claim absolute distinction, all histories are distinguished,
nevertheless, from one another. If no history can claim preëminence over
any other, it is true also that none can be robbed by any other of its
own distinction and character. The fact that the morning stars do not
sing together is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. The
fact that the rain falls equally upon the just and the unjust is
evidence neither of the impartial dispensations of deity nor of the
equal issue of vice and virtue. Each event in its own history and
illustrative of its own career is the law.
Yet men have been prone to write their own history as if it were
something else than a human enterprise, as if it were something else
than the history of humanity. Those who seek to read their destiny from
the constellations ascendant at their birth are generally called
superstitious; but those who seek to read it from the constitution of
matter, or from the mechanism of the physical world, or from the
composition of chemical substances, although no less superstitious, are
too frequently called scientists. But "dust thou art and unto dust thou
shalt return" is an essential truth only about the history of dust; it
is only an incidental truth about the history of man. One learns nothing
peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. It affords no measure of
the appreciation of poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the
passion for happiness. Human history is human history only. The hopes
and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be
understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in
terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way
in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully
remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used
for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more
satisfying to understand.
Yet some there are who stop worshipping the stars when they discover
that the stars neither ask for worship nor respond to it, and who
dismiss reverence and piety when they discover that a god did not create
the world. Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God,
but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an
end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to
worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast
purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been
divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own
history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found
that the stars have a different history from his own.
The inevitable failure of astronomy and geology to afford man gods
suitable for his worship is not a recommendation that he should
vigorously embrace the superstitions of his ancestors. To counsel that
would be an infamy equal to that which has just been condemned. The
counsel is rather that what is not human should not be taken as the
standard and measure of what is human. Human history can not be wholly
resolved into physical processes nor the enterprises of men be construed
solely as the by-product of material forces. Such resolution of it
appears to be unwarranted in view of the conclusions to which a
consideration of what history is, leads. The obverse error has long
since been sufficiently condemned. We have been warned often enough that
water does not _seek_ its own level or nature _abhor_ a vacuum. Even
literary criticism warns us against the pathetic fallacy. But in
refusing to anthropomorphize matter, we ought not to be led to
materialize man. We should rather be led to recognize that the reasons
which condemn anthropomorphic science are precisely the reasons which
commend humanistic philosophy. It is just because history is pluralistic
that it is unpardonable to confound different histories with one
another. So we may conclude that the pluralism of history which makes
all histories, when absolutely considered, of equal rank and of
indifferent importance, does not rob them, therefore, of their specific
characters, nor make human history a presumptuous enterprise for them
that write it not in the language of nature, but in the language of man.
This conclusion needs greater refinement of statement if it is to be
freed from ambiguity. For the distinction between nature and man is an
artifice. It is not a distinction which philosophy can ultimately
justify. Undoubtedly man is a part or instance of nature, governed by
nature's laws and intimately involved in her processes. But he is so
governed and involved not as matter without imagination, but as a being
whose distinction is the historical exercise of his intelligence. Nature
is not what she would be without him and that is why his history can
never be remembered or understood if he is forgotten. He can not be
taken out of nature and nature be then called upon to explain him. As a
part or instance of nature man is to be remembered and understood, but
as the part or instance which he himself is, and not another. His
history, consequently, can never be adequately written solely in terms
of physics or chemistry, or even of biology; it must be written also in
terms of aspiration.
All time processes are histories, but man only is the writer of them, so
that historical comprehension becomes the significant trait of human
history. To live in the light of a past remembered and understood is to
live, not the life of instinct and emotion, but the life of
intelligence. It is to see how means converge upon ends, and so to
discover means for the attainment of ends desired. Human history becomes
thus the record of human progress. From it we may learn how that
progress is to be defined and so discover the purpose of man in history.
For him the study of his own history is his congenial task to which all
his knowledge of other histories is contributory; and for him the
conscious, reflective, and intelligent living of his own history is his
congenial purpose.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] See especially his "Données immédiates de la conscience," 1888.
(Eng. tr. "Time and Free Will," by F. L. Pogson. The Macmillan Company,
1912.) "L'évolution créatrice," 1908. (Eng. tr. "Creative Evolution," by
Arthur Mitchell. Henry Holt and Company, 1913.)
III
THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY
Although history is pluralistic, it is not, therefore, discontinuous. We
can not divide it in two in such a manner that its parts will be wholly
unconnected. Any division we may make, although we make it as plain as
the fence which divides a field, gives us a boundary which, like the
fence, belongs equally to the parts on either side of it. Novelty and
distinction may abound in the world, but nothing is so novel or distinct
that it is wholly cut off from antecedents and consequences of some
sort. It is this fact which we denote when we speak of the continuity of
history. We indicate that every action of time, every conversion of the
possible into the actual, is intimately woven into the order of events
and finds there a definite place and definite connections. Consequently
it becomes easy to represent the movement of history as a kind of
progress from earlier to later things, from ancestors to descendants, or
from the original or primitive to the derived. If, however, progress is
to mean anything more than just this representation of historical
continuity, if, for example, it is to mean, besides a progression from
the earlier to the later, some improvement also, clearly a criterion is
necessary, by which progress may be judged and estimated. An inquiry is
thus suggested into the continuity of history to see in what sense
progress may be affirmed of it and by what criteria that affirmation may
be warranted. As a preliminary to this inquiry it is advisable to
envisage the continuity itself and determine how far it assists in
understanding what has happened.