of historical continuity visibly before us, these from Professor Tylor's
"Primitive Culture" are particularly suggestive because they deal with
familiar things: "Progress, degradation, survival, modification, are all
modes of the connection that binds together the complex network of
civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own
daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and
how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past
ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he
who knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even
that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of
Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style
of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass
between them. Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art
still carry their history plainly stamped upon them; and if the history
yet farther behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because
we can not clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is
thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous
little tails of the German postilion's coat show of themselves how they
came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman's
bands no longer so convey their history to the eye, and look
unaccountable enough till one has seen the intermediate stages through
which they came down from the more serviceable wide collars, such as
Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave their name to the
'band-box' they used to be kept in. In fact, the books of costume,
showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual stages and passed into
another, illustrate with much force and clearness the nature of the
change and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year to year in
more important matters of life. In books, again, we see each writer not
for and by himself, but occupying his proper place in history; we look
through each philosopher, mathematician, chemist, poet, into the
background of his education,--through Leibnitz into Descartes, through
Dalton into Priestly, through Milton into Homer.
"'Man,' said Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'ever connects on from what lies at
hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).' The notion of the
continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren
philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the
consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to
know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what
they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study
of development, when he declared at the beginning of his 'Positive
Philosophy' that 'no conception can be understood except through its
history,' and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To
expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere
inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested.
Imagine any one explaining the trivial saying, 'a little bird told me,'
without knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts,
to which Dr. Dasent in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so
reasonably traces its origin. To ingenious attempts at explaining by the
light of reason things which want the light of history to show their
meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been
due."[5]
The illustrations are drawn from the domain of human interests. They
could be paralleled by others drawn from natural history. The
honeysuckle may carry us elsewhere than to Assyria, revealing
unsuspected kinships in the world of plants. Biology has made the
conception of the continuity of living forms a familiar commonplace, and
geology can find in the earth's crust the story of countless years. So
familiar has the idea of continuity become that terms like "evolution"
and "development" have ceased to be technical and have become terms of
common speech. We speak readily of the evolution of man, of government,
of the steam-engine, of the automobile, and of the atom. The idea has so
possessed all departments of inquiry that a large part of the
literature of every subject is occupied with setting forth connections
which have gone before. Not only do we go through Milton into Homer, but
through yesterday into an ever receding past which grows more alluring
the more it recedes. The quest for origins has been of absorbing
interest. It would seem that we can never understand anything at all
until we have discovered its origin in something which preceded it.
In the first lecture I pointed out how impossible it appears ever to end
any history finally. We now seem to face a corresponding impossibility,
namely, the impossibility of ever really beginning it successfully. It
would appear that we stop only because we do not care to go farther, or
lack the means to do so, and not because we can say that we have found a
first beginning with no antecedents before it. We may begin the history
of philosophy with the Greeks, with Thales of Miletus, but the question
has been repeatedly asked, Was not Thales a Semite? Did he not derive
his ideas from Egypt and Babylonia? And whence came philosophy itself?
Was it not the offspring of religion which preceded it, so that, before
we begin its history, we must pass, as Professor Cornford suggests,[6]
from religion to philosophy? Then what of religion itself? What were its
antecedents and whence was its descent? So the questions multiply
interminably until we must admit that "in the beginning" is a time
arbitrarily fixed or only relatively determined. History, being
continuous, has neither beginning nor end.
This fact, however, ought not to bewilder any one who contemplates it
steadily. It is an obvious consequence of the nature of time, for every
present has a past and a future, and a first or last present is,
consequently, quite unintelligible. The historian, least of all, should
be bewildered. If he has recognized that history is pluralistic, he will
recognize also that beginnings and ends are, in any intelligible sense,
the termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute first or last in
history taken as a whole, for, as we have seen, the attempt to take
history as a whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the attempt to
define history. It gives us the metaphysics of time, but not an
absolute, complete, and finished whole, whose boundaries, although never
empirically reached, are ideally conceivable. Our thinking moves in a
direction quite different. It leads us to observe that distinctions
begin and end, and begin and end as absolutely as one chooses, but do
not, thereby, cut themselves off from all connections. These lectures
began to be delivered last Friday, but not the day before; the first
word of them was written at a perfectly definite time and place which
can never be changed; they will end with a definiteness equally precise;
but these beginnings and endings destroy no continuity. Every history is
equally continuous, undisturbed by its beginnings and endings. Each
action of time is preceded and followed by everything which precedes and
follows it, and yet each action of time begins and ends with its own
peculiar and individual precision. In affirming this we are affirming,
by means of a particular instance, the metaphysical nature of continuity
itself. For by continuity we mean the possibility of precise and
definite distinctions. The continuity of a line may be divided at its
middle point. It is then precisely divided, but is not, thereby, broken
into two separate lines.[7] After this manner the continuity of history
is to be conceived. And in the light of this conception we should
understand what the continuity of history can explain.
It is tempting to say that it can explain nothing at all, but it is
evident that there is an uncertainty of meaning in such a claim. For
things may be explained or made clear in a variety of ways with little
resemblance to one another. What we mean by a circle may be made clear
by defining a circle, or by an algebraical formula, or by drawing a
circle. All these ways will be fruitful, but they will be fruitful
relatively to the problem which provokes them. To explain anything at
all, it is necessary to keep in mind the questions to which the proposed
explanation is relevant. If I am asked to draw a circle it will not do
simply to define it; and if I am asked to tell what it is algebraically,
it will not do simply to draw it. So it is apparent that, when we wish
to know what the continuity of history can explain, or when we affirm
that it explains nothing, we should have in mind, first of all, the
questions to which the continuity of history would be an appropriate
answer. There appears to be only one such question, and that is, What
have been the antecedents of any given fact? These antecedents the
continuity of history explains in that it makes them clear. It may also
make clear what the consequences of a given fact have been or may be.
But this explanatory value is a derivative of the preceding or an
enlargement of it, through our habit of looking at consequences as
derived from their antecedents, and of basing our expectations of what
may happen upon our observations of what has happened. Further
explanatory value in the continuity of history it seems difficult to
find, even if we make the statement of it less general and more precise.
But in saying this, it is not implied that this value is mean or
inconsiderable. The continuity of history is both entertaining and
instructive. It is entertaining because it reveals unsuspected kinships
and alluring connections. It is instructive because it furnishes a
foundation for inference and practice. To man it gives the long
experience of his race to enjoy and profit by. It guides his
expectations and enhances the control of his own affairs. It is the same
with the continuities of nature generally. They beget the vision of an
ordered world and help to frame rules which are applicable in the
control of nature. Accordingly it is not disparagement which is here
intended, but a limitation which should be appreciated.
When we say to our children, "A little bird told me," both we and our
children may be quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent's introduction to the Norse
Tales. We may be quite unconscious that we are using an expression
traceable to a time when people believed in such language of birds and
beasts as gifted persons could understand. It may be that we repeat the
words simply because we remember that our parents once successfully
deceived us in our childhood by using them, and that our parents did but
follow the example of theirs. But evidently we should not explain the
trivial saying simply by following it back endlessly into antiquity
unless we concluded that it had always been characteristic of parents to
deceive children in this manner. In that case we should have discovered
a metaphysical truth about the nature of parents, and no further
explanation would be required.
If, however, we are not willing to admit that parents are such by nature
that they will cite birds as sources of information when it is expedient
to keep the real source hidden, but insist that this habit be otherwise
explained, we ask for an explanation which the continuity of history
alone can not afford. An explanation in contemporaneous terms is
required. We do not use the phrase because our ancestors used it,
although we may have derived it from them; we use it because of its
known efficacy. We may, however, discover that our ancestors--or Norse
parents--used it for a different reason, namely, because they believed
in a language of beasts and birds. But if we ask why they so believed,
it will not profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so doing we
come upon the contemporaneous, experimental origin of that belief. For
it is evident that if the belief had an origin, there was a time
anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can not, therefore, be
explained solely in terms of that anterior time. Its origin points, not
to continuity, but to action. It indicates not that the originators of
the belief had ancestors, but that, in view of their contemporaneous
circumstances, they acted in a certain way. To explain the origin of
anything, therefore, we can not trust to the continuity of history
alone. That continuity may carry us back to the beginnings of beliefs
and institutions which have persisted and been transmitted from age to
age; it may reveal to us experimental factors which have shaped beliefs
and institutions, but which have long since been forgotten; but it can
never, of itself, reveal the experimental origin of any belief or
institution whatever. That is, in principle, the limitation by which the
explanatory value of historical continuity is restricted. To understand
origins we must appeal to the contemporaneous experience of their own
age, or to experimental science.[8]
Simple as this consideration is, it has been too much neglected by
historians and philosophers in recent times on account of the profound
influence of the doctrine of evolution. The great service, which that
doctrine has rendered, has been to fix our attention on the evident fact
of continuity from which our minds had been distracted by a too
exclusive preoccupation with theories of the atomic kind. Through
several centuries, philosophy had acquired the habit of thinking
generally in terms of elements and their compounds, whenever it
addressed itself to a consideration of nature, or of the mind, or of the
relation between the two. Its principal problem was to discover means
of connection and unification which might make clear how that which is
essentially discrete and discontinuous might, none the less, be combined
into a unity of some sort. As it failed, it usually took refuge in the
opposite idea, and attempted to conceive an original unity out of which
diversity was generated by some impulsion in this initial and primal
being. Philosophy thus vibrated between the contrasted poles of the same
fundamental endeavor, between the attempt to combine elements into a
unity, and the attempt to resolve unity into elements. The latter
attempt, especially in men like Hegel and Spencer, had the advantage of
involving the idea of continuity, and became the controlling
philosophical enterprise of the latter part of the last century. But it
was principally the doctrine of evolution or development as set forth by
biologists, anthropologists, and historians that made the fact of
continuity convincingly apparent and freed philosophy from the necessity
of attempting to explain it. Continuity became a fact to be appreciated
and understood, and ceased to be a riddle to be solved. The doctrine of
evolution thus wrought a real emancipation of the mind.
But this freedom has been often abused. Relieved of the necessity of
explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even
students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently
content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs
to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of
ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the
exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental
science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in
our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. If we
would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to
consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate
marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote
ancestors. And this practical advice has sometimes taken the form of
metaphysics. If we wish to know the nature of things or to appraise
their worth, we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic stuff from
which everything has been derived. Thus man and all the varied panorama
of the world vanish backward into nebulæ, and life disappears into the
impulse to live. Not trailing clouds of glory do we come, but trailing
the primitive and the obsolete.
Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our
temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and
sophistication. That is the usual result of inquisitions into one's
ancestry. But disillusionment and sophistication may produce either
regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home
of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our
disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better for us to have lived
then when illusions were cherished and vital, than to live now when they
are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has been sapped, and we
may cry with Matthew Arnold's Obermann
"Oh, had I lived in that great day!"
Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break
with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and
superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of
centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at
last, we have begun to make progress.
But progress is not to be construed in terms of a conservatism which is
artificial and reactionary, or of a radicalism which is undisciplined
and irresponsible. Conservatism and radicalism are, as already
indicated, temperamental affections which a too exclusive and irrational
contemplation of our ancestry may produce in us. They are born of fear
or impatience, and are not the legitimate offspring of history. For
historical continuity, just because it does not of itself reveal the
experimental origin of any belief or institution, does not of itself
disclose progress or any standard by which progress may be estimated. It
teaches no lesson in morals and provides no guide to the perplexed. And
the reason for this is simple. History is continuous, and, therefore,
there is no point, no date, no occurrence, no incident, no origin, no
belief, and no institution, which can claim preëminence simply on
account of its position. If men were once superstitious because of their
place in history and are now scientific for precisely the same reason,
we can not therefore conclude, with any intelligent or rational
certainty, that evolution has progressed from superstition to science,
or that science is better than superstition. Values are otherwise
determined. The continuity of history levels them all.
Yet there may be laws of history. The comparative study of history,
whether the history be of civilizations or of living forms or of
geological formations, reveals uniformities and sequences which promote
our understanding and aid our practice. If we should find that wherever
men have lived, their institutions, laws, customs, religion, and
philosophy tend to show a uniformity of direction in their development,
we should feel justified in concluding that the tendency indicated a law
of history. Yet such laws would not be indications of progress. They
would indicate rather the conditions under which progress is or can be
made. For laws are expressions of the limitations under which things may
be done. They show the forms and structures to which actions conform.
But whether these actions are good or bad, upward or downward,
progressive or retrogressive, they do not show. For decline no less than
progress is in conformity with law, and the continuity of history is
indifferent to both. Were we, therefore, in possession of all the laws
and uniformities of history, we should not have discovered thereby what
either decline or progress is; but were we in possession of a knowledge
of what decline and progress are, the laws and uniformities of history
would teach us better to avoid the one and attain the other.
It would seem to follow from these considerations that progress
involves something more than the continuous accumulation of results in
some specified direction, the piling of them up on one another in such a
way that the total heap is more impressive than any of the portions
added to it, and more illustrative, consequently, of a particular
career. There might, indeed, be progress in this sense, if we divorced
the conception of it from any standard which might intelligently judge
it and set a value upon it. For the passage from seed to fruit, or any
movement in time which attains an end illustrative of the steps by which
it has been reached is in that sense progressive. But progress in this
sense means no more than the fact of history. The career of things in
time is precisely that sort of movement, and indicates the sense in
which history is naturally purposeful. To call it progress adds nothing
to the meaning of it unless a standard is introduced by which it can be
measured. If we will risk again the treacherous distinction between man
as intelligent and nature as simply forceful, we may say that progress
rightfully implies some improvement of nature. We should then see that
to improve nature involves the doing of something which nature, left to
herself, does not do, and, consequently, that nature herself affords no
indication of progress and no measure or standard of it. Nor does
history afford them, if we divorce history from every moral estimate of
it. For again, we may say that progress implies some improvement of
history, so that to judge that there has been progress is not to
discover that history by evolving has put a value upon itself. It is
rather to judge that history has measured up to a standard applied to
it. It seems idle, therefore, to suppose that history apart from such a
standard can tell us what progress is or whether it has been made.
Yet history might do so if we are ready to admit man makes moral
judgments as naturally as the sun shines. If his morality were some
miracle, supernaturally imposed upon his natural career, we should need
supernatural sanctions for it, for no natural achievement of his could
justify it. These sanctions might justify him and what he does, if he
conformed to them, but neither he nor his actions could give them
natural warrant. They would express nothing after which he naturally
aspires, and could, consequently, afford him no vision of a goal the
attainment of which would crown his history with its own natural
fruition. But if his morality is natural, his ideals and standards of
judgment express what he has discovered he might be, and point out to
him what his history might attain, had he knowledge and power enough to
turn it in the direction of his own conscious purposes. Accordingly his
history then might reveal both progress and the criterion of it. But it
would do so not simply because it is a history, but because it is a
history of a certain kind. Man makes progress because he can conceive
what progress is, and use that conception as a standard of selection and
as a goal to be reached. He participates in his own history consciously,
and that means that he participates in it morally, with a sense of
obligation to his career. For to be conscious implies the anticipation
in imagination of results which are not yet attained, but which might be
attained if appropriate means were found. Conceiving thus what he might
be, man always has some standard and measure of what he is. He sees
ahead of him, and moves, therefore, with care and discrimination. All
the forces and impulses of his nature do not simply impel him on from
behind; they also draw him on from before through his ability to
conceive to what enlargement and fruition they might be carried. He
condemns his life as miserable, only because he conceives a happiness
which condemns it; and he calls it good, only because joys, once
anticipated but now attained, have blessed it. Progress is thus
characteristic of human history, because it is characteristic of man
that progress should be conceived. His life is not only a life of
nutrition and reproduction, or of pleasures and pains, but a life also
of hopes and fears. And when hope and fear are not blind, but
enlightened, his life is also a life of reason, for reason is the
ability to conceive the ends which clarify the movements toward them.