Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge.
1. Evolution, and the principles associated with the Darwinian theory,
could not fail to exert a considerable influence on the studies
connected with the history of civilised man. The speculations which
are known as "philosophy of history," as well as the sciences of
anthropology, ethnography, and sociology (sciences which though they
stand on their own feet are for the historian auxiliary), have been
deeply affected by these principles. Historiographers, indeed, have
with few exceptions made little attempt to apply them; but the growth
of historical study in the nineteenth century has been determined and
characterised by the same general principle which has underlain the
simultaneous developments of the study of nature, namely the GENETIC
idea. The "historical" conception of nature, which has produced the
history of the solar system, the story of the earth, the genealogies of
telluric organisms, and has revolutionised natural science, belongs
to the same order of thought as the conception of human history as
a continuous, genetic, causal process--a conception which has
revolutionised historical research and made it scientific. Before
proceeding to consider the application of evolutional principles, it
will be pertinent to notice the rise of this new view.
2. With the Greeks and Romans history had been either a descriptive
record or had been written in practical interests. The most eminent of
the ancient historians were pragmatical; that is, they regarded history
as an instructress in statesmanship, or in the art of war, or in morals.
Their records reached back such a short way, their experience was so
brief, that they never attained to the conception of continuous process,
or realised the significance of time; and they never viewed the history
of human societies as a phenomenon to be investigated for its own sake.
In the middle ages there was still less chance of the emergence of the
ideas of progress and development. Such notions were excluded by the
fundamental doctrines of the dominant religion which bounded and bound
men's minds. As the course of history was held to be determined from
hour to hour by the arbitrary will of an extra-cosmic person, there
could be no self-contained causal development, only a dispensation
imposed from without. And as it was believed that the world was within
no great distance from the end of this dispensation, there was no motive
to take much interest in understanding the temporal, which was to be
only temporary.
The intellectual movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge
immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted to
the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for Thucydides
and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction in the art of
politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of a new culture,
different from anything that had gone before; but at the time men were
not conscious of this; they saw clearly that the traditions of classical
antiquity had been lost for a long period, and they were seeking to
revive them, but otherwise they did not perceive that the world had
moved, and that their own spirit, culture, and conditions were
entirely unlike those of the thirteenth century. It was hardly till the
seventeenth century that the presence of a new age, as different from
the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and Rome, was fully realised.
It was then that the triple division of ancient, medieval, and modern
was first applied to the history of western civilisation. Whatever
objections may be urged against this division, which has now become
almost a category of thought, it marks a most significant advance in
man's view of his own past. He has become conscious of the immense
changes in civilisation which have come about slowly in the course of
time, and history confronts him with a new aspect. He has to explain how
those changes have been produced, how the transformations were effected.
The appearance of this problem was almost simultaneous with the rise
of rationalism, and the great historians and thinkers of the eighteenth
century, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, attempted to explain
the movement of civilisation by purely natural causes. These brilliant
writers prepared the way for the genetic history of the following
century. But in the spirit of the Aufklarung, that eighteenth-century
Enlightenment to which they belonged, they were concerned to judge all
phenomena before the tribunal of reason; and the apotheosis of "reason"
tended to foster a certain superior a priori attitude, which was
not favourable to objective treatment and was incompatible with
a "historical sense." Moreover the traditions of pragmatical
historiography had by no means disappeared.
3. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the meaning of genetic
history was fully realised. "Genetic" perhaps is as good a word as can
be found for the conception which in this century was applied to so many
branches of knowledge in the spheres both of nature and of mind. It
does not commit us to the doctrine proper of evolution, nor yet to any
teleological hypothesis such as is implied in "progress." For history
it meant that the present condition of the human race is simply and
strictly the result of a causal series (or set of causal series)--a
continuous succession of changes, where each state arises causally out
of the preceding; and that the business of historians is to trace this
genetic process, to explain each change, and ultimately to grasp the
complete development of the life of humanity. Three influential writers,
who appeared at this stage and helped to initiate a new period
of research, may specially be mentioned. Ranke in 1824 definitely
repudiated the pragmatical view which ascribes to history the duties
of an instructress, and with no less decision renounced the function,
assumed by the historians of the Aufklarung, to judge the past; it
was his business, he said, merely to show how things really happened.
Niebuhr was already working in the same spirit and did more than any
other writer to establish the principle that historical transactions
must be related to the ideas and conditions of their age. Savigny about
the same time founded the "historical school" of law. He sought to show
that law was not the creation of an enlightened will, but grew out of
custom and was developed by a series of adaptations and rejections, thus
applying the conception of evolution. He helped to diffuse the notion
that all the institutions of a society or a notion are as closely
interconnected as the parts of a living organism.
4. The conception of the history of man as a causal development meant
the elevation of historical inquiry to the dignity of a science. Just
as the study of bees cannot become scientific so long as the student's
interest in them is only to procure honey or to derive moral lessons
from the labours of "the little busy bee," so the history of human
societies cannot become the object of pure scientific investigation so
long as man estimates its value in pragmatical scales. Nor can it become
a science until it is conceived as lying entirely within a sphere
in which the law of cause and effect has unreserved and unrestricted
dominion. On the other hand, once history is envisaged as a causal
process, which contains within itself the explanation of the development
of man from his primitive state to the point which he has reached, such
a process necessarily becomes the object of scientific investigation and
the interest in it is scientific curiosity.
At the same time, the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here Wolf,
a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His "Prolegomena"
to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. Historical investigation
was soon transformed by the elaboration of new methods.
5. "Progress" involves a judgment of value, which is not involved in the
conception of history as a genetic process. It is also an idea distinct
from that of evolution. Nevertheless it is closely related to the ideas
which revolutionised history at the beginning of the last century;
it swam into men's ken simultaneously; and it helped effectively to
establish the notion of history as a continuous process and to emphasise
the significance of time. Passing over earlier anticipations, I may
point to a "Discours" of Turgot (1750), where history is presented as a
process in which "the total mass of the human race" "marches continually
though sometimes slowly to an ever increasing perfection." That is
a clear statement of the conception which Turgot's friend Condorcet
elaborated in the famous work, published in 1795, "Esquisse d'un tableau
historique des progres de l'esprit humain". This work first treated with
explicit fulness the idea to which a leading role was to fall in the
ideology of the nineteenth century. Condorcet's book reflects the
triumphs of the Tiers etat, whose growing importance had also inspired
Turgot; it was the political changes in the eighteenth century which led
to the doctrine, emphatically formulated by Condorcet, that the masses
are the most important element in the historical process. I dwell
on this because, though Condorcet had no idea of evolution, the
pre-dominant importance of the masses was the assumption which made
it possible to apply evolutional principles to history. And it enabled
Condorcet himself to maintain that the history of civilisation, a
progress still far from being complete, was a development conditioned by
general laws.
6. The assimilation of society to an organism, which was a governing
notion in the school of Savigny, and the conception of progress,
combined to produce the idea of an organic development, in which the
historian has to determine the central principle or leading character.
This is illustrated by the apotheosis of democracy in Tocqueville's
"Democratie en Amerique", where the theory is maintained that "the
gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past and
the future of the history of men." The same two principles are combined
in the doctrine of Spencer (who held that society is an organism,
though he also contemplated its being what he calls a "super-organic
aggregate") (A society presents suggestive analogies with an organism,
but it certainly is not an organism, and sociologists who draw
inferences from the assumption of its organic nature must fall into
error. A vital organism and a society are radically distinguished by the
fact that the individual components of the former, namely the cells,
are morphologically as well as functionally differentiated, whereas the
individuals which compose a society are morphologically homogeneous and
only functionally differentiated. The resemblances and the differences
are worked out in E. de Majewski's striking book "La Science de la
Civilisation", Paris, 1908.), that social evolution is a progressive
change from militarism to industrialism.
7. the idea of development assumed another form in the speculations of
German idealism. Hegel conceived the successive periods of history as
corresponding to the ascending phases or ideas in the self-evolution
of his Absolute Being. His "Lectures on the Philosophy of History" were
published in 1837 after his death. His philosophy had a considerable
effect, direct and indirect, on the treatment of history by historians,
and although he was superficial and unscientific himself in dealing with
historical phenomena, he contributed much towards making the idea of
historical development familiar. Ranke was influenced, if not by Hegel
himself, at least by the Idealistic philosophies of which Hegel's was
the greatest. He was inclined to conceive the stages in the process of
history as marked by incarnations, as it were, of ideas, and sometimes
speaks as if the ideas were independent forces, with hands and feet. But
while Hegel determined his ideas by a priori logic, Ranke obtained his
by induction--by a strict investigation of the phenomena; so that he
was scientific in his method and work, and was influenced by Hegelian
prepossessions only in the kind of significance which he was disposed
to ascribe to his results. It is to be noted that the theory of Hegel
implied a judgment of value; the movement was a progress towards
perfection.
8. In France, Comte approached the subject from a different side, and
exercised, outside Germany, a far wider influence than Hegel. The 4th
volume of his "Cours de philosophie positive", which appeared in 1839,
created sociology and treated history as a part of this new science,
namely as "social dynamics." Comte sought the key for unfolding
historical development, in what he called the social-psychological point
of view, and he worked out the two ideas which had been enunciated by
Condorcet: that the historian's attention should be directed not, as
hitherto, principally to eminent individuals, but to the collective
behaviour of the masses, as being the most important element in the
process; and that, as in nature, so in history, there are general laws,
necessary and constant, which condition the development. The two points
are intimately connected, for it is only when the masses are moved into
the foreground that regularity, uniformity, and law can be conceived
as applicable. To determine the social-psychological laws which
have controlled the development is, according to Comte, the task of
sociologists and historians.
9. The hypothesis of general laws operative in history was carried
further in a book which appeared in England twenty years later and
exercised an influence in Europe far beyond its intrinsic merit,
Buckle's "History of Civilisation in England" (1857-61). Buckle owed
much to Comte, and followed him, or rather outdid him, in regarding
intellect as the most important factor conditioning the upward
development of man, so that progress, according to him, consisted in the
victory of the intellectual over the moral laws.
10. The tendency of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to the
sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived stimulus
and plausibility from the vista offered by the study of statistics, in
which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book "Sur l'homme" appeared in 1835,
discerned endless possibilities. The astonishing uniformities which
statistical inquiry disclosed led to the belief that it was only a
question of collecting a sufficient amount of statistical material, to
enable us to predict how a given social group will act in a particular
case. Bourdeau, a disciple of this school, looks forward to the time
when historical science will become entirely quantitative. The actions
of prominent individuals, which are generally considered to have altered
or determined the course of things, are obviously not amenable to
statistical computation or explicable by general laws. Thinkers like
Buckle sought to minimise their importance or explain them away.
11. These indications may suffice to show that the new efforts to
interpret history which marked the first half of the nineteenth century
were governed by conceptions closely related to those which were current
in the field of natural science and which resulted in the doctrine of
evolution. The genetic principle, progressive development, general
laws, the significance of time, the conception of society as an organic
aggregate, the metaphysical theory of history as the self-evolution of
spirit,--all these ideas show that historical inquiry had been advancing
independently on somewhat parallel lines to the sciences of nature. It
was necessary to bring this out in order to appreciate the influence of
Darwinism.
12. In the course of the dozen years which elapsed between the
appearances of "The Origin of Species" (observe that the first volume of
Buckle's work was published just two years before) and of "The Descent
of Man" (1871), the hypothesis of Lamarck that man is the co-descendant
with other species of some lower extinct form was admitted to have been
raised to the rank of an established fact by most thinkers whose brains
were not working under the constraint of theological authority.
One important effect of the discovery of this fact (I am not speaking
now of the Darwinian explanation) was to assign to history a definite
place in the coordinated whole of knowledge, and relate it more closely
to other sciences. It had indeed a defined logical place in systems
such as Hegel's and Comte's; but Darwinism certified its standing
convincingly and without more ado. The prevailing doctrine that man
was created ex abrupto had placed history in an isolated position,
disconnected with the sciences of nature. Anthropology, which deals with
the animal anthropos, now comes into line with zoology, and brings it
into relation with history. (It is to be observed that history is not
only different in scope but) not coextensive with anthropology IN TIME.
For it deals only with the development of man in societies, whereas
anthropology includes in its definition the proto-anthropic period
when anthropos was still non-social, whether he lived in herds like
the chimpanzee, or alone like the male ourang-outang. (It has been well
shown by Majewski that congregations--herds, flocks, packs, etc.--of
animals are not SOCIETIES; the characteristic of a society is
differentiation of function. Bee hives, ant hills, may be called
quasi-societies; but in their case the classes which perform distinct
functions are morphologically different.) Man's condition at the present
day is the result of a series of transformations, going back to the most
primitive phase of society, which is the ideal (unattainable) beginning
of history. But that beginning had emerged without any breach of
continuity from a development which carries us back to a quadrimane
ancestor, still further back (according to Darwin's conjecture) to a
marine animal of the ascidian type, and then through remoter periods to
the lowest form of organism. It is essential in this theory that though
links have been lost there was no break in the gradual development;
and this conception of a continuous progress in the evolution of
life, resulting in the appearance of uncivilised Anthropos, helped to
reinforce, and increase a belief in, the conception of the history of
civilised Anthropos as itself also a continuous progressive development.
13. Thus the diffusion of the Darwinian theory of the origin of man,
by emphasising the idea of continuity and breaking down the barriers
between the human and animal kingdoms, has had an important effect in
establishing the position of history among the sciences which deal with
telluric development. The perspective of history is merged in a larger
perspective of development. As one of the objects of biology is to find
the exact steps in the genealogy of man from the lowest organic form,
so the scope of history is to determine the stages in the unique
causal series from the most rudimentary to the present state of human
civilisation.
It is to be observed that the interest in historical research implied
by this conception need not be that of Comte. In the Positive Philosophy
history is part of sociology; the interest in it is to discover the
sociological laws. In the view of which I have just spoken, history
is permitted to be an end in itself; the reconstruction of the
genetic process is an independent interest. For the purpose of the
reconstruction, sociology, as well as physical geography, biology,
psychology, is necessary; the sociologist and the historian play
into each other's hands; but the object of the former is to establish
generalisations; the aim of the latter is to trace in detail a singular
causal sequence.
14. The success of the evolutional theory helped to discredit
the assumption or at least the invocation of transcendent causes.
Philosophically of course it is compatible with theism, but historians
have for the most part desisted from invoking the naive conception of a
"god in history" to explain historical movements. A historian may be a
theist; but, so far as his work is concerned, this particular belief is
otiose. Otherwise indeed (as was remarked above) history could not be a
science; for with a deus ex machina who can be brought on the stage to
solve difficulties scientific treatment is a farce. The transcendent
element had appeared in a more subtle form through the influence of
German philosophy. I noticed how Ranke is prone to refer to ideas as
if they were transcendent existences manifesting themselves in the
successive movements of history. It is intelligible to speak of certain
ideas as controlling, in a given period,--for instance, the idea of
nationality; but from the scientific point of view, such ideas have
no existence outside the minds of individuals and are purely psychical
forces; and a historical "idea," if it does not exist in this form, is
merely a way of expressing a synthesis of the historian himself.
15. From the more general influence of Darwinism on the place of history
in the system of human knowledge, we may turn to the influence of the
principles and methods by which Darwin explained development. It had
been recognised even by ancient writers (such as Aristotle and
Polybius) that physical circumstances (geography, climate) were factors
conditioning the character and history of a race or society. In the
sixteenth century Bodin emphasised these factors, and many subsequent
writers took them into account. The investigations of Darwin, which
brought them into the foreground, naturally promoted attempts to
discover in them the chief key to the growth of civilisation. Comte had
expressly denounced the notion that the biological methods of Lamarck
could be applied to social man. Buckle had taken account of natural
influences, but had relegated them to a secondary plane, compared with
psychological factors. But the Darwinian theory made it tempting to
explain the development of civilisation in terms of "adaptation to
environment," "struggle for existence," "natural selection," "survival
of the fittest," etc. (Recently O. Seeck has applied these principles to
the decline of Graeco-Roman civilisation in his "Untergang der antiken
Welt", 2 volumes, Berlin, 1895, 1901.)
The operation of these principles cannot be denied. Man is still an
animal, subject to zoological as well as mechanical laws. The dark
influence of heredity continues to be effective; and psychical
development had begun in lower organic forms,--perhaps with life itself.
The organic and the social struggles for existence are manifestations of
the same principle. Environment and climatic influence must be called in
to explain not only the differentiation of the great racial sections of
humanity, but also the varieties within these sub-species and, it may
be, the assimilation of distinct varieties. Ritter's "Anthropogeography"
has opened a useful line of research. But on the other hand, it is urged
that, in explaining the course of history, these principles do not take
us very far, and that it is chiefly for the primitive ultra-prehistoric
period that they can account for human development. It may be said
that, so far as concerns the actions and movements of men which are
the subject of recorded history, physical environment has ceased to act
mechanically, and in order to affect their actions must affect their
wills first; and that this psychical character of the causal relations
substantially alters the problem. The development of human societies, it
may be argued, derives a completely new character from the dominance
of the conscious psychical element, creating as it does new conditions
(inventions, social institutions, etc.) which limit and counteract the
operation of natural selection, and control and modify the influence of
physical environment. Most thinkers agree now that the chief clews to
the growth of civilisation must be sought in the psychological
sphere. Imitation, for instance, is a principle which is probably
more significant for the explanation of human development than natural
selection. Darwin himself was conscious that his principles had only
a very restricted application in this sphere, as is evident from his
cautious and tentative remarks in the 5th chapter of his "Descent of
Man". He applied natural selection to the growth of the intellectual
faculties and of the fundamental social instincts, and also to the
differentiation of the great races or "sub-species" (Caucasian, African,
etc.) which differ in anthropological character. (Darwinian formulae may
be suggestive by way of analogy. For instance, it is characteristic of
social advance that a multitude of inventions, schemes and plans are
framed which are never carried out, similar to, or designed for the same
end as, an invention or plan which is actually adopted because it has
chanced to suit better the particular conditions of the hour (just as
the works accomplished by an individual statesman, artist or savant are
usually only a residue of the numerous projects conceived by his brain).
This process in which so much abortive production occurs is analogous to
elimination by natural selection.)
16. But if it is admitted that the governing factors which concern
the student of social development are of the psychical order, the
preliminary success of natural science in explaining organic evolution
by general principles encouraged sociologists to hope that social
evolution could be explained on general principles also. The idea of
Condorcet, Buckle, and others, that history could be assimilated to
the natural sciences was powerfully reinforced, and the notion that the
actual historical process, and every social movement involved in it, can
be accounted for by sociological generalisations, so-called "laws," is
still entertained by many, in one form or another. Dissentients from
this view do not deny that the generalisations at which the sociologist
arrives by the comparative method, by the analysis of social factors,
and by psychological deduction may be an aid to the historian; but they
deny that such uniformities are laws or contain an explanation of the
phenomena. They can point to the element of chance coincidence. This
element must have played a part in the events of organic evolution, but
it has probably in a larger measure helped to determine events in social
evolution. The collision of two unconnected sequences may be fraught
with great results. The sudden death of a leader or a marriage without
issue, to take simple cases, has again and again led to permanent
political consequences. More emphasis is laid on the decisive actions
of individuals, which cannot be reduced under generalisations and which
deflect the course of events. If the significance of the individual will
had been exaggerated to the neglect of the collective activity of the
social aggregate before Condorcet, his doctrine tended to eliminate as
unimportant the roles of prominent men, and by means of this elimination
it was possible to found sociology. But it may be urged that it is
patent on the face of history that its course has constantly been
shaped and modified by the wills of individuals (We can ignore here the
metaphysical question of freewill and determinism. For the character of
the individual's brain depends in any case on ante-natal accidents
and coincidences, and so it may be said that the role of individuals
ultimately depends on chance,--the accidental coincidence of independent
sequences.), which are by no means always the expression of the
collective will; and that the appearance of such personalities at the
given moments is not a necessary outcome of the conditions and cannot be
deduced. Nor is there any proof that, if such and such an individual
had not been born, some one else would have arisen to do what he did. In
some cases there is no reason to think that what happened need ever have
come to pass. In other cases, it seems evident that the actual change
was inevitable, but in default of the man who initiated and guided it,
it might have been postponed, and, postponed or not, might have borne
a different cachet. I may illustrate by an instance which has just come
under my notice. Modern painting was founded by Giotto, and the Italian
expedition of Charles VIII, near the close of the sixteenth century,
introduced into France the fashion of imitating Italian painters.
But for Giotto and Charles VIII, French painting might have been very
different. It may be said that "if Giotto had not appeared, some other
great initiator would have played a role analogous to his, and that
without Charles VIII there would have been the commerce with Italy,
which in the long run would have sufficed to place France in relation
with Italian artists. But the equivalent of Giotto might have been
deferred for a century and probably would have been different; and
commercial relations would have required ages to produce the rayonnement
imitatif of Italian art in France, which the expedition of the royal
adventurer provoked in a few years." (I have taken this example from G.
Tarde's "La logique sociale" 2 (page 403), Paris, 1904, where it is used
for quite a different purpose.) Instances furnished by political history
are simply endless. Can we conjecture how events would have moved if the
son of Philip of Macedon had been an incompetent? The aggressive action
of Prussia which astonished Europe in 1740 determined the subsequent
history of Germany; but that action was anything but inevitable; it
depended entirely on the personality of Frederick the Great.
Hence it may be argued that the action of individual wills is a
determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to
allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae. The types and
general forms of development which the sociologist attempts to disengage
can only assist the historian in understanding the actual course
of events. It is in the special domains of economic history and
Culturgeschichte which have come to the front in modern times that
generalisation is most fruitful, but even in these it may be contended
that it furnishes only partial explanations.
17. The truth is that Darwinism itself offers the best illustration of
the insufficiency of general laws to account for historical
development. The part played by coincidence, and the part played
by individuals--limited by, and related to, general social
conditions--render it impossible to deduce the course of the past
history of man or to predict the future. But it is just the same with
organic development. Darwin (or any other zoologist) could not deduce
the actual course of evolution from general principles. Given an
organism and its environment, he could not show that it must evolve into
a more complex organism of a definite pre-determined type; knowing
what it has evolved into, he could attempt to discover and assign the
determining causes. General principles do not account for a particular
sequence; they embody necessary conditions; but there is a chapter of
accidents too. It is the same in the case of history.
18. Among the evolutional attempts to subsume the course of history
under general syntheses, perhaps the most important is that of
Lamprecht, whose "kulturhistorische Methode," which he has deduced from
and applied to German history, exhibits the (indirect) influence of the
Comtist school. It is based upon psychology, which, in his view, holds
among the sciences of mind (Geisteswissenschaften) the same place (that
of a Grundwissenschaft) which mechanics holds among the sciences of
nature. History, by the same comparison, corresponds to biology, and,
according to him, it can only become scientific if it is reduced to
general concepts (Begriffe). Historical movements and events are of
a psychical character, and Lamprecht conceives a given phase of
civilisation as "a collective psychical condition (seelischer
Gesamtzustand)" controlling the period, "a diapason which penetrates
all psychical phenomena and thereby all historical events of the time."
("Die kulturhistorische Methode", Berlin, 1900, page 26.) He has worked
out a series of such phases, "ages of changing psychical diapason," in
his "Deutsche Geschichte" with the aim of showing that all the feelings
and actions of each age can be explained by the diapason; and has
attempted to prove that these diapasons are exhibited in other social
developments, and are consequently not singular but typical. He
maintains further that these ages succeed each other in a definite
order; the principle being that the collective psychical development
begins with the homogeneity of all the individual members of a society
and, through heightened psychical activity, advances in the form of a
continually increasing differentiation of the individuals (this is akin
to the Spencerian formula). This process, evolving psychical freedom
from psychical constraint, exhibits a series of psychical phenomena
which define successive periods of civilisation. The process depends on
two simple principles, that no idea can disappear without leaving behind
it an effect or influence, and that all psychical life, whether in
a person or a society, means change, the acquisition of new mental
contents. It follows that the new have to come to terms with the old,
and this leads to a synthesis which determines the character of a new
age. Hence the ages of civilisation are defined as the "highest
concepts for subsuming without exception all psychical phenomena of
the development of human societies, that is, of all historical events."
(Ibid. pages 28, 29.) Lamprecht deduces the idea of a special historical
science, which might be called "historical ethnology," dealing with the
ages of civilisation, and bearing the same relation to (descriptive or
narrative) history as ethnology to ethnography. Such a science obviously
corresponds to Comte's social dynamics, and the comparative method,
on which Comte laid so much emphasis, is the principal instrument of
Lamprecht.
19. I have dwelt on the fundamental ideas of Lamprecht, because they are
not yet widely known in England, and because his system is the ablest
product of the sociological school of historians. It carries the
more weight as its author himself is a historical specialist, and his
historical syntheses deserve the most careful consideration. But there
is much in the process of development which on such assumptions is
not explained, especially the initiative of individuals. Historical
development does not proceed in a right line, without the choice of
diverging. Again and again, several roads are open to it, of which it
chooses one--why? On Lamprecht's method, we may be able to assign the
conditions which limit the psychical activity of men at a particular
stage of evolution, but within those limits the individual has so many
options, such a wide room for moving, that the definition of those
conditions, the "psychical diapasons," is only part of the explanation
of the particular development. The heel of Achilles in all historical
speculations of this class has been the role of the individual.
The increasing prominence of economic history has tended to encourage
the view that history can be explained in terms of general concepts or
types. Marx and his school based their theory of human development on
the conditions of production, by which, according to them, all social
movements and historical changes are entirely controlled. The leading
part which economic factors play in Lamprecht's system is significant,
illustrating the fact that economic changes admit most readily this
kind of treatment, because they have been less subject to direction or
interference by individual pioneers.
Perhaps it may be thought that the conception of SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
(essentially psychical), on which Lamprecht's "psychical diapasons"
depend, is the most valuable and fertile conception that the historian
owes to the suggestion of the science of biology--the conception of
all particular historical actions and movements as (1) related to and
conditioned by the social environment, and (2) gradually bringing about
a transformation of that environment. But no given transformation can be
proved to be necessary (pre-determined). And types of development do not
represent laws; their meaning and value lie in the help they may give
to the historian, in investigating a certain period of civilisation,
to enable him to discover the interrelations among the diverse features
which it presents. They are, as some one has said, an instrument of
heuretic method.
20. The men engaged in special historical researches--which have been
pursued unremittingly for a century past, according to scientific
methods of investigating evidence (initiated by Wolf, Niebuhr,
Ranke)--have for the most part worked on the assumptions of genetic
history or at least followed in the footsteps of those who fully grasped
the genetic point of view. But their aim has been to collect and sift
evidence, and determine particular facts; comparatively few have given
serious thought to the lines of research and the speculations which
have been considered in this paper. They have been reasonably shy
of compromising their work by applying theories which are still much
debated and immature. But historiography cannot permanently evade the
questions raised by these theories. One may venture to say that no
historical change or transformation will be fully understood until it is
explained how social environment acted on the individual components of
the society (both immediately and by heredity), and how the individuals
reacted upon their environment. The problem is psychical, but it is
analogous to the main problem of the biologist.
XXVIII. THE GENESIS OF DOUBLE STARS. By Sir George Darwin, K.C.B.,
F.R.S.
Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in the
University of Cambridge.
In ordinary speech a system of any sort is said to be stable when it
cannot be upset easily, but the meaning attached to the word is usually
somewhat vague. It is hardly surprising that this should be the case,
when it is only within the last thirty years, and principally through
the investigations of M. Poincare, that the conception of stability has,
even for physicists, assumed a definiteness and clearness in which it
was previously lacking. The laws which govern stability hold good in
regions of the greatest diversity; they apply to the motion of planets
round the sun, to the internal arrangement of those minute corpuscles of
which each chemical atom is constructed, and to the forms of celestial
bodies. In the present essay I shall attempt to consider the laws of
stability as relating to the last case, and shall discuss the succession
of shapes which may be assumed by celestial bodies in the course of
their evolution. I believe further that homologous conceptions are
applicable in the consideration of the transmutations of the various
forms of animal and of vegetable life and in other regions of thought.
Even if some of my readers should think that what I shall say on this
head is fanciful, yet at least the exposition will serve to illustrate
the meaning to be attached to the laws of stability in the physical
universe.
I propose, therefore, to begin this essay by a sketch of the principles
of stability as they are now formulated by physicists.