The reaction manifested itself with the sentimental return to the past,

and with the defence undertaken by the politicians of old institutions

worthy of being preserved or accorded new life. Hence arose two forms

of historical representation, which certainly belong in a measure to

all periods, but which were very vigorous at the romantic period:

_nostalgic_ historiography and historiography which _restored._ And

since the past of their desires, which supplied the material for

practical recommendations, was just that which the enlightenment

and the Revolution had combated and overthrown--the Middle Ages and

everything that resembled or seemed to resemble the Middle Ages--both

kinds of history were, so to say, medievalized. Just as a watercourse

which has been forcibly diverted from its natural bed noisily returns

to it as soon as obstructions are removed, so a great sigh of joy and

satisfaction, a warm emotion of tenderness, welled up in and reanimated

all breasts as, after so long a rationalistic ascesis, they again took

to themselves the old religion, the old national customs, regional and

local, again entered the old houses and castles and cathedrals, sang

again the old songs, dreamed again the old legends. In this tumult of

sentiment we do not at first observe the profound and irremediable

change that has taken place in the souls of all, borne witness to

by the anxiety, the emotion, the pathos of that apparent return. It

would be to belittle the nostalgic historiography of the romantic

movement to make it consist of certain special literary works, for in

reality it penetrated all or almost all the writings of that time, like

an irresistible current, to be found not only in lesser and poorer

spirits, such as De Barante, nor only in the more poetically disposed,

such as Chateaubriand, but in historians who present some of the most

important or purely scientific thoughts, for example Niebuhr. The life

of chivalry, the life of the cloister, the Crusades, the Hohenstaufen,

the Lombard and Flemish communes, the Christian kings of Spain at

strife with the Arabs, the Arabs themselves, England divided between

Saxons and Normans, the Switzerland of William Tell, the _chansons

de geste,_ the songs of the troubadours, _Gothic_ architecture

(characteristic vicissitude of a name, applied in contempt and then

turned into a symbol of affection), became at this time the object of

universal and national sympathy, as did the rough, ingenuous popular

literature, poetry, and art: translations or abbreviations of the

medieval chronicles were even reprinted for the enjoyment of a large

and eager circle of readers; the first medieval museums were formed;

an attempt was made to restore and complete ancient churches, castles,

and city palaces. Historiography entered into close relations and

exchange of ideas with the new literary form of historical romance,

which expressed the same nostalgia, first with Walter Scott and then

with his innumerable followers in all countries. (This literary form

was therefore quite different from the historical fiction of Manzoni,

which is free from such sentiment and whose historical element has a

moral foundation.) I have already remarked that this nostalgia was

far more modern of content than at first supposed; so much so that

every one was attracted to it by the motive that most appealed to

himself, whether religious or political, Old Catholic, mystical,

monarchical, constitutional, communal-republican, national-independent,

liberal-democratic, or aristocratic. Nevertheless, when the past was

taken as a poetic theme, there was a risk that the idealizing tendency

of the images would be at strife with critical reflection: hence the

cult of the Middle Ages, which had become a superstition, came to a

ridiculous end. Fueter quotes an acute remark of Ranke, relating to one

of the last worthy representatives of the romantic school, Giesebrecht,

author of the History of the German Empire, admirer and extoller of

the 'Christian-Germanic virtues,' of the power and excellence of the

medieval heroes. Ranke described all this as "at once too virile and

too puerile." But the puerility discernible at the sources of this

ideal current, before it falls into the comic, is rather the sublime

puerility of the poet's dream.

The actual modern motives, which present themselves as sentiments in

nostalgic historiography, acquired a reflex form with the same or

other writers, as tendencies to the service of which their narratives

were bent. Here, too, it would be superfluous to give an account of

all the various forms and specifications of these tendencies (which

Fueter has already done admirably), from the persistent Rousseauism

of Giovanni Müller to Sismondi, or from the ideal of a free peasantry

of Niebuhr, the ultramontane ideal of Leo, the imperialistic-medieval

ideal of the already mentioned Giesebrecht and Ficker, the old liberal

of Raumer, the neo-liberal of Rotteck and Gervinus, the anglicizing

of Guizot and Dahlmann, or the democratic ideal of Michelet, to

the neo-Guelfish ideal of Troya and Balbo and Father Tosti, to the

Prussian hegemony of Droysen and of Treitschke, and so on. But all of

these, and other historians with a particular bias, lean, with rare

exceptions, on the past, and find the justification of their bias in

the dialectic of tradition or in tradition itself. Nobody any longer

cared to compose by the light of abstract reason alone. The extreme

typical instance is afforded by the socialistic school, which took the

romantic form in the person of its chief representative, Marx, who

endowed it with historiographical and scientific value. His work was

in complete opposition to the socialistic ideals that had appeared in

the eighteenth century, and he therefore boasted that they had passed

from the state of being a Utopia to that of a science. His science

was nothing less than historical necessity attributed to the new era

that he prophesied, and materialism itself no longer wished to be the

naturalistic materialism of a d'Holbach or a Helvétius, but presented

itself as 'historical materialism.'

If nostalgic historiography is poetry and that with a purpose is

practical and political, the historiography, the true historiography,

of romanticism is not to be placed in either of the two, in so far as

it is considered an epoch in the history of thought. Certainly, poetry

and practice arose from a thought and led to a thought as its material

or problem: the French Revolution was certainly not the cause or the

effect of a philosophy, but both the cause and the effect, a philosophy

in the act, born from and generating the life that was then developed.

But thought in the form of thought, and not in the form of sentimental

love of the past or effort to revive a false past, is what determines

the scientific character of that historiography, which we desire to set

in a clear light. And it reacted in the form of thought against the

thought of the enlightenment, so crudely dualistic, by opposing to it

the conception of development.

Not indeed that this concept was something entirely new, which had then

burst forth in bud for the first time: no speculative conception that

is really such can be absent at one time and appear at another. The

difference lies in this, that at a given period scientific problems

seem to apply to one rather than to another aspect of thought, which

is always present in its totality. So that when we say that the

conception of development was absent from antiquity and from the

eighteenth century, we utter a hyperbole. There are good reasons for

this hyperbole, but it remains a hyperbole and should not be taken

literally and understood materially. Nor are we to believe that there

was no suspicion or anticipation of the important scientific conception

of development prior to the romantic period. Traces of it may be found

in the pantheism of the great philosophers of the Renaissance, and

especially in Bruno, and in mysticism itself, in so far as it included

pantheism, and yet more distinctly in the reconstruction of the bare

bones of the theological conception with the conception of the course

of historical events as a gradual education of the human race, in

which the successive revelations should be the communication of books

of a gradually less and less elementary nature, from the first Hebrew

scriptures to the Gospels and to the revisions of the Gospels. Lessing

offers an example of this. Nor were the theorists of the enlightenment

always so terribly dualistic as those that I have mentioned, but here

and there one of them, such as Turgot, although he did not altogether

abandon the presupposition as to epochs of decadence, yet recognized

the progress of Christianity over antiquity and of modern times over

Christianity, and attempted even to trace the line of development

passing through the three ages, the mythological, the metaphysical,

and the scientific. Other thinkers, like Montesquieu, noticed the

relativity of institutions to customs and to periods; others, like

Rousseau, attached great importance to the strength of sentiment.

Enlightenment had also its adversaries during its own period, not

only as represented by political abstraction and fatuous optimism

(such as that of Galiani, for instance), but also in more important

respects, destined later to form the special subject of criticism,

such as contempt for tradition, for religion, and for poetry and arid

naturalism. Hence the smile of Hamann at the blind faith of Voltaire

and of Hume in the Newtonian astronomical doctrines and at their lack

of sense for moral doctrines. He held that a revival of poetry and

a linking of it with history were necessary, and considered history

to be (here he was just the opposite of Bodin) not the easiest but

the most difficult of all mental labours. But in the _Scienza nuova_

of Vico (1725) was to be found a very rich and organic anticipation

of romantic thought (as should now be universally recognized and

known). Vico criticized the enlightenment only in its beginnings (when

it was still only natural jurisprudence and Cartesianism), yet he

nevertheless penetrated more deeply than others who came after him

into its hidden motives and measured more accurately its logical and

practical consequences. Thus he opposed to the superficial contempt

for the past in the name of abstract reason the unfolding of the human

mind in history, as sense, imagination, and intellect, as the divine

or animal age, the heroic age, and the human age. He held further

that no human age was in the wrong, for each had its own strength and

beauty, and each was the effect of its predecessor and the necessary

preparation for the one to follow, aristocracy for democracy, democracy

for monarchy, each one appearing at the right moment, or as the justice

of that moment.

The conception of development did not, however, in the romantic

period, remain the thought of a solitary thinker without an audience,

but broadened until it became a general conviction; it did not

appear timidly shadowed forth, or contradictorily affirmed, but took

on body, coherence, and vigour, and dominated spirits. It is the

formative principle of the idealist philosophy, which culminated in

the system of Hegel. Few there were who resisted its strength, and

these, like Herbart, were still shut up in pre-Kantian dogmatism,

or tried to resist it and are more or less tinged with it, as is

the case with Schopenhauer and yet more with Comte and later with

positivistic evolutionism. It gives its intellectual backbone to the

whole of historiography (with the exception here too of lingerers and

reactionaries), and that historiography corrects for it, in greater or

less measure, the same one-sided tendencies which came to it from the

sentimental and political causes already described, from tenderness for

the near past or for "the good old times," and for the Middle Ages.

The whole of history is now understood as necessary development, and

is therefore implicitly, and more or less explicitly, all redeemed; it

is all learned with the feeling that it is sacred, a feeling reserved

in the Middle Ages for those parts of it only which represented the

opposition of God to the power of the devil. Thus the conception of

development was extended to classical antiquity, and then, with the

increase of knowledge and of attention, to Oriental civilizations.

Thus the Romans, the Ionians, the Dorians, the Egyptians, and the

Indians got back their life and were justified and loved in their

turn almost as much as the world of chivalry and the Christian world

had been loved. But the logical extension of the conception did not

find any obstacle among the philosophers and historians, even in the

repugnance that was felt for the times to which modern times were

opposed, such as the eighteenth century. The spectacle was witnessed

of the consecration of Jacobinism and of the French Revolution in

the very books of their adversaries, Hegel, for instance, finding in

those events both the triumph and the death, the one not less than the

other, the 'triumphant death' of the modern abstract subjectivity,

inaugurated by Descartes. Not only did the adversaries, but also the

executioners and their victims, make peace, and Socrates, the martyr of

free thought and the victim of intolerance, such as he was understood

to be by the intellectualists of the eighteenth century and those who

superstitiously repeat them in our own day, was condemned to the death

that he had well deserved, in the name of History, which does not admit

of spiritual revolutions without tragedies. The drafter, too, of the

_Manifesto of the Communists,_ as he was hastening on the business of

putting an end to the burgess class, both with his prayers and with

his works, gave vent to a warm and grandiose eulogium of the work

achieved by the burgess class, and in so doing showed himself to be the

faithful child of romantic thought; because, for anyone who held to the

ideology of the eighteenth century, capitalism and the burgess class

should have appeared to be nothing but distortions due to ignorance,

stupidity, and egoism, unworthy of any praise beyond a funeral

oration. The passions of the greater part of those historians were

most inflammable, not less than those of the enlightened, yet satire,

sarcasm, invective, at least among the superior intellects, vividly

encircled the historical understanding of the time, but did not oppress

or negate it. The general impression experienced from those narratives

is that of a serious effort to render justice to all, and we owe it to

the discipline thus imparted to the minds and souls of the thinkers

and historians of romanticism that it is only the least cultivated or

most fanatical among the priests and Catholics in general who continue

to curse Voltaire and the eighteenth century as the work of the devil.

In the same way, it is only vulgar democrats and anti-clericals,

akin to the former in their anachronism and the rest, who treat the

reaction, the restoration, and the Middle Ages with equal grossness.

Enlightenment and the Jacobinism connected with it was a religion,

as we have shown, and when it died it left behind it survivals or

superstitions.

To conceive history as development is to conceive it as history of

ideal values, the only ones that have value, and it was for this

reason that in the romantic period there was an ever increasing

multiplication of those histories which had already increased to so

considerable an extent in the preceding period. But their novelty did

not consist in their external multiplication, but in their internal

maturation, which corrected those previously composed, consisting

either of learned collections of disconnected items of information, or

judgments indeed, but judgments based upon an external model, which

claimed to be constructed by pure reason and was in reality constructed

by arbitrary and capricious abstraction and imagination. And now the

history of poetry and of literature is no longer measured according

to the standard of the Roman-humanistic ideal, or according to the

classical ideal of the age of Louis XIV, or of the ratiocinative and

prosaic ideal of the eighteenth century, but discovers by degrees

its own measure in itself, and beginning with the first attempts of

Herder, of the Schlegels, and then of Villemain, of Sainte-Beuve, and

of Gervinus, and for antiquity of Wolf and Müller, finally reaches

the high standard represented by the _History of Italian Literature_

of de Sanctis. Suddenly the history of art feels itself embarrassed

by the too narrow ideal of Lessing and of Winckelmann, and there is

a movement toward colour, toward landscape, toward pre-Hellenic and

post-Hellenic art, toward the romantic, the Gothic, the Renaissance,

and the baroque, a movement that extends from Meyer and Hirth to

Rumohr, Kluger, Schnaase, till it reaches Burckhardt and Ruskin. It

also tries here and there to break down the barriers of the schools and

to attain the really artistic personality of the artists. The history

of philosophy has its great crisis with Hegel, who leads it from the

abstract subjectivism of the followers of Kant to objectivity, and

recognizes the only true existence of philosophy to consist of the

history of thought, considered in its entirety, without neglecting any

one of its forms. Zeller, Fischer, and Erdmann in Germany, Cousin and

his school in France, Spaventa in Italy, follow Hegel in such objective

research. The like takes place in the history of religion, which tries

to adopt intrinsic criteria of judgment, after Spittler and Planck, the

last representatives of the rationalistic school, with Marheinecke,

Neander, Hase, and finds a peculiarly scientific form with Strauss,

Baur, and the Tübingen school; and from Eichhorn to Savigny, Gans, and

Lassalle in the history of rights. The conception of the State always

yields the leadership more and more to that of the nation in the

history called political, and 'nationality' substitutes the names of

'humanity,' 'liberty,' and 'equality,' and all the other ideas of the

preceding age that once were full of radiance, but are now dimmed. This

nationalism has wrongly been looked upon as a regression, in respect

of that universalism and cosmopolitanism, because (notwithstanding

its well-known sentimental exaggerations) it notably assists the

concrete conception of the universal living only in its historical

creations, such as nations, which are both products and factors of its

development. And the value of Europeanism is revived as the result

of this acquisition of consciousness of the value of nations. It had

been too much trampled upon during the period of the enlightenment,

owing to the naturalistic spirit which dominated at that time, and to

the reaction taking place against the historical schemes of antiquity

and Christianity, although it was surely evident that history written

by Europeans could not but be 'Europocentric,' and that it is only in

relation to the course of Græco-Roman civilization, which was Christian

and Occidental, that the civilizations developed along other lines

become actual and comprehensible to us, provided always that we do

not wish to change history into an exhibition of the different types

of civilization, with a prize for the best of them The difference is

also made clear for the same reason between history and pre-history,

between the history of man and the history of nature, which had been

illegitimately linked by the materialists and the naturalists. This is

to be found even in the works of Herder, who retains a good many of

the elements of the century of his birth mingled with those of the new

period. But it is above all in romantic historiography that we observe

the search for and very often the happy realization of an organic

linking together of all particular histories of spiritual values, by

relating religious, philosophical, poetical, artistic, juridical, and

moral facts as a function of a single motive of development. It then

becomes a commonplace that a literature cannot be understood without

understanding ideas and customs, or politics without philosophy, or

(as was realized rather later) rights and customs and ideas without

economy. And it is worth while recording as we pass by that there is

hardly one of these histories of values which has not been previously

presented or sketched by Vico, together with the indication of their

intrinsic unity. Histories of poetry, histories of myth, of rights, of

languages, of constitutions, of explicative or philosophical reason,

all are in Vico, although sometimes wrapped up in the historical

or sociological epoch with which each one of them was particularly

connected. Even modern biography (which illustrates what the individual

does and suffers in relation to the mission which he fulfils and to the

aspect of the Idea which becomes actual in him) has its first or one of

its first notable monuments in the autobiography of Vico--that is to

say, in the history of the works which Providence commanded and guided

him to accomplish "in diverse ways that seemed to be obstacles, but

were opportunities."

This transformation of biography does not imply failure to recognize

individuality, but is, on the contrary, its elevation, for it finds

its true meaning in its relation with the universal, as the universal

its concreteness in the individual. And indeed individualizing power,

perception of physiognomies, of states of the soul, of the various

forms of the ideas, sense of the differences of times and places,

may be said to show themselves for the first time in romantic

historiography. That is to say, they do not show themselves rarely or

as by accident, nor any longer in the negative and summary form of

opposition between new and old, civil and barbarous, patriotic and

extraneous. It does not mean anything that some of those historians

lost themselves (though this happened rarely) in an abstract dialectic

of ideas, and that others more frequently allowed ideas to be submerged

in the external picturesqueness of customs and anecdotes, because we

find exaggerations, one-sidedness, lack of balance, at all periods and

in all progress of thought. Nor is the accusation of great importance

that the colouring of times and places preferred by the romantics

was false, because the important thing was precisely this attempt to

colour, whether the result were happy or the reverse (if the latter,

the picture had to be coloured again, but always coloured). A further

reason for this is that, as has been already admitted, there were

fancies and tendencies at work in romanticism beyond true and proper

historiography, which bestowed upon the times and places illustrated

that imaginary and exaggerated colouring suggested by the various

sentiments and interests. History, which is thought, was sometimes

idealized at this period as an imaginary living again in the past, and

people asked of history to be carried back into the old castles and

market-places of the Middle Ages; for their enjoyment they asked to

see the personages of the time in their own proper clothes and as they

moved about, to hear them speak the language, with the accent of the

time, to be made contemporary with the facts and to acquire them with

the ingenuous spirit of a contemporary. But to do this is not only

impossible for thought, but also for art, because art too surpasses

life, and it would be something useless, because it is not desired,

for what man really desires is to reproduce in imagination and to

rethink the past _from the present,_ not to tear himself away from the

present and fall back into the dead past. Certainly this last was an

illusion, proper to several romantics (who for that matter have their

successors in our own day), and in so far as it was an illusion either

remained a sterile effort or diffused itself in a lyrical sigh; but

an illusion of that kind was one of many aspects and did not form an

essential part of romantic historiography.

We also owe it to romanticism that a relation was established for

the first time and a fusion effected between the learned and the

historians, between those who sought out material and thinkers. This,

as we have said, had not happened in the eighteenth century, nor,

to tell the truth, before it, in the great epochs of erudition of

Italian or Alexandrian humanism, for then antiquaries and politicians

each followed their own path, indifferent to one another, and the

only political ideal that sometimes gleamed from the bookshelves of

the antiquary (as Fueter acutely observes of Flavius Blondus) was

that of a government which by ensuring calm should permit the learned

to follow their peaceful avocations! But the watchword of romantic

historiography was anticipated in respect to this matter also by Vico,

in his formula of the _union_ of _philosophy_ with _philology,_ and of

the reciprocal _conversion_ of the _true_ with the _certain,_ of the

idea with the fact. This formula proves (we give it passing mention)

that the historical saying of Manzoni, to the effect that Vico should

be united with Muratori, was not altogether historically exact--that

is to say, philosophy with erudition, for Vico had already united

these two things, and their union constitutes the chief value of his

work. Nevertheless, notwithstanding its inaccuracy, the saying of

Manzoni also proves how romantic historiography had noted the intimate

connexion that prevails between erudition and thought in history,

which is the living and thinking again of the document that has been

preserved or restored by erudition, and indeed demands erudition that

it may be sought out and prepared. Neither did romanticism limit

itself to stating this claim in the abstract, but really created the

type of the philologist-thinker (who was sometimes also a poet), from

Niebuhr to Mommsen, from Thierry to Fustel de Coulanges, from Troya

to Balbo or Tosti. Then for the first time were the great collections

and repertories of the erudition of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries valued at their true worth; then were new collections

promoted, supplementary to or correcting them according to criteria

that were ever more rigorous in relation to the subject and to the

greater knowledge and means at disposal. Thus arose the work known

as the _Monumenta Germania historica_ and the German philological

school (which was once the last and became the first), the one a model

of undertakings of this sort, the other of the disciplines relating

to them, for the rest of Europe. The philological claim of the new

historiography, aided by the sentiment of nationality, also gave life

in our Italy to those historical societies, to those collections of

chronicles, of laws, of charters, of 'historical archives' or reviews,

institutions with which historiographical work is concerned in our day.

A notable example of the power to promote the most patient philology

inspired with purely historical needs is to be found, among others, in

the _Corpus inscriptionum latinarum,_ conceived and carried out by a

historian endowed with the passionate energy and the synthetic mind of

a Mommsen. In the eighteenth century (with one or two very rare and

partial exceptions) historians disdained parchment and in-folios, or

opened them impatiently, _bibentes et fugientes_ but in the nineteenth

century no serious spirit dared to affirm any longer that it was

possible to compose history without accurate, scrupulous, meticulous

study of the documents upon which it is to be founded.

The pragmatic histories of the last centuries, therefore, melted

away at the simple touch of these new historiographical convictions,

rather than owing to direct and open criticism or polemic. The

word 'pragmatic,' which used to be a title of honour, began to be

pronounced with a tinge of contempt, to designate an inadequate form

of historical thought, and the historians of the enlightenment fell

into discredit, not only Voltaire and the French, but the Humes, the

Robertsons, and other English historians. They appeared now to be quite

without colour, lacking in historical sense, their minds fixed only

on the political aspect of things, superficial, vainly attempting to

explain great events by the intentions of individuals and by means of

little things or single details. The theory, too, of history as the

orator and teacher of virtue and prudential maxims also disappeared.

This theory had enjoyed a long and vigorous life during Græco-Roman

antiquity and again from the Renaissance onward (when I say that all

these things disappeared, the exception of the fossils is always to

be understood, for these persisted at that time and persist in our

own day, with the air of being alive). The attitude of the Christian

spirit toward history was resumed. This spirit contemplates it as

a single process, which does not repeat itself, as the work of

God, which teaches directly by means of His presence, not as matter

that exemplifies abstract teaching, extraneous to itself. The word

'pragmatic' was indeed pronounced with a smile from that time onward,

as were the formulas of _historia magister vitæ_ or that directed _ad

bene beateque vivendum_: let him who will believe these formulas--that

is to say, he who echoes traditional thoughts without rethinking them

and is satisfied with traditional and vulgar conceptions. What is the

use of history? "History itself," was the answer, and truly that is not

a little thing.

The new century glorified itself with the title of 'the century of

history,' owing to its new departures, which were born or converged

in one. It had deified and at the same time humanized history, as had

never been done before, and had made of it a centre of reality and of

thought. That title of honour should be confirmed, if not to the whole

of the nineteenth century, then to its romantic or idealistic period.

But this confirmation should not prevent our observing, with equal

clearness, the _limit_ of that historicity, without which it would not

be possible to understand its later and further advance. History was

then at once deified and humanized; but did the divinity and humanity

truly flow together in one, or was there not at bottom some separation

between the two of them? Was the disagreement between ancient worldly

thought and ultramundane Christian thought really healed, or did it not

present itself again in a new form, though this form was attenuated and

more critical intellectually? And which of the two elements prevailed

in this disagreement in its abstractness, the human or rather the

divine?

These questions suggest the answer, which is further suggested by

a memory familiar to all, namely, that the romantic period was not

only the splendid age of the great evolutionary histories, but also

the fatal age of the _philosophies of history,_ the transcendental

histories. And indeed, although the thought of immanence had grown

gradually more and more rich and profound during the Renaissance and

the enlightenment, and that of transcendency ever more evanescent,

the first had not for that reason absorbed the second in itself,

but had merely purified and rationalized it, as Hellenic philosophy

and Christian theology had tried to do in their own ways in their

own times. In the romantic period, purification and rationalization

continue, and here was the mistake as well as the merit of romanticism,

for it was no longer a question of setting right that ancient opinion,

but of radically inverting and remaking it. The transcendental

conception of history was no longer at that time called revelation

and apocalypse, but _philosophy of history,_ a title taken from the

enlightenment (principally from Voltaire), although it no longer had

the meaning formerly attributed to it of history examined with an

unprejudiced or philosophical spirit adorned with moral and political

reflections, but the meaning, altogether different, of a philosophical

search of the sphere above or below that of history--in fact, of

a theological search, which remained theological, however lay or

speculative it may have been. And since a search of this sort always

leads to a rationalized mythology, there is no reason why the name of

'mythology' should not be extended to the philosophy of history, or

the name of 'philosophy of history,' to mythology, as I have extended

it, calling all transcendental conceptions of history 'philosophy of

history,' for they all separate the fact and the idea, the event and

its explication, action and end, the world and God. And since the

philosophy of history is transcendental in its internal structure,

it is not surprising that it showed itself to be such in all the

very varied forms that it assumed in the romantic period, even among

philosophers as avid of immanence as Hegel, a great destroyer of

Platonism, who yet remained to a considerable extent engaged in it,

so tenacious is that enemy which every thinker carries in himself and

which he should tear from his heart, yet cannot resist.

But without entering into a particular account of the assumptions

made by the romantics and idealists in the construction of their

'philosophies of history,' it will be sufficient to observe the

consequences, in order to point out the transcendental tendency

of their constructions. These were such as to compromise romantic

histories in the method and to damage them in the execution, though

they were at first so vigorously conceived as a unity of philosophy

and philology. One of the consequences was precisely the falling again

into contempt of erudition among those very people who adopted and

promoted it, and on other occasions a recommendation of it in words and

a contempt of it in deeds. This contradictory attitude was troubled

with an evil conscience, so much so that its recommendations sound but

little sincere, the contempt timid, when it shows itself, though it

is more often concealed. Nevertheless one discovers fleeting words of

revelation among these tortuosities and pretences, such as that of an

_a priori history_ (Fichte, Schelling, Krause, and, to a certain extent

at least, Hegel), which should be true history, deduced from the pure

concepts, or rendered divine in some vision of the seer of Patmos, a

history which should be more or less different from the confusion

of human events and facts, as philosophical history, leaving outside

it as refuse a merely _narrative_ history, which should serve as raw

material or as text for the sermons and precepts of the moralists and

politicians. And we see rising from the bosom of a philosophy, which

had tried to make history of itself, by making philosophy also history

(proof that the design had not been really translated into act), the

distinction between philosophy and history, between the historical and

the philosophical way of thinking, and the mutual antipathy and mutual

unfriendliness of the two orders of researchers. The 'professional'

historians were obliged to defend themselves against their progenitors

(the philosophers), and they ended by losing all pity for them, by

denying that they were philosophers and treating them as intruders and

charlatans.

Unpleasantness and ill-will were all the more inevitable in that the

'philosophers of history'--that is to say, the historians obsessed

with transcendency--did not always remain content (nor could they do

so, speaking strictly) with the distinction between philosophical and

narrative history, and, as was natural, attempted to harmonize the

two histories, to make the facts harmonize with the schemes which

they had imagined or deduced. With this purpose in view, they found

themselves led to use violence toward facts, in favour of their system,

and this resulted in certain most important parts being cut out, in a

Procrustean manner, and in others that were accepted being perverted

to suit a meaning that was not genuine but imposed upon them. Even

the chronological divisions, which formed a merely practical aid to

narratives, were tortured (as was the custom in the Middle Ages) that

they might be elevated to the rank of ideal divisions. And not only

was the light of truth extinguished in the pursuit of these caprices,

not only were individual sympathies and antipathies introduced (take

as an instance typical of all of them the idealization of Hellas and

of this or that one of the Hellenic races), but there appeared a

thing yet more personally offensive to the victims--that is to say,

there penetrated into history, under the guise of lofty philosophy,

the personal loves and hates of the historian, in so far as he was a

party man, a churchman, or belonged to this or that people, state,

or race. This ended in the invention of Germanism, the crown and

perfection of the human race, a Germanism which, claiming to be the

purest expression of Arianism, would have restored the idea of the

elect people, and have one day undertaken the journey to the East.

Thus were in turn celebrated semi-absolute monarchy as the absolute

form of states, speculative Lutheranism as the absolute form of

religion, and other suchlike vainglorious vaunts, with which the pride

of Germany oppressed the European peoples and indeed the whole world,

and thus exacted payment in a certain way for the new philosophy with

which Germany had endowed the world. But it must not be imagined that

the pride of Germany was not combated with its own arms, for if the

English speculated but little and the French were too firm in their

belief in the _Gesta Dei per Francos_ (become the gestes of reason

and civilization), yet the peoples who found themselves in less happy

conditions, and felt more keenly the censure of inferiority or of

senility thus inflicted upon them, reacted: Gioberti wrote a _Primato

d'Italia,_ and Ciezkowski a _Paternostro,_ which foretold the future

primacy of the Slavonic people and more especially of the Poles.

Yet another consequence of the 'philosophies of history' was the

reflourishing of 'universal histories,' in the fallacious signification

of complete histories of humanity, indeed of the cosmos, which the

Middle Ages had narrated in the chronicles ab origine mundi and _de

duabus civitatibus and de quattuor imperiis_, and the Renaissance and

enlightenment had reduced to mere vulgar compilations, finding the

centre for its own interest elsewhere. The _imagines mundi_ returned

with the philosophies of history, and such they were themselves,

transcendental universal histories, with the 'philosophy of nature'

belonging to them. The succession of the nations there took the place

of the series of empires: to each nation, as formerly to each empire,

was assigned a special function, which once fulfilled, it disappeared

or fell to pieces, having passed on the lamp of life, which must not

pass through the hands of any nation more than once. The German nation

was to play there the part of the Roman Empire, which should never

die, but exist perpetually, or until the consummation of the ages and

the Kingdom of God. To develop the various forms of the philosophy of

history would aid in making clear the internal contradictions of the

doctrine and in ascribing the reasons for the introduction of certain

corrections for the purpose of doing away with the contradictions

in question, but which in so doing introduced others. And in making

an examination of this kind a special place should be reserved for

Vico, who offers a 'philosophy of history' of a very complex sort,

which on the one side does not negate, but passes by in silence the

Christian and medieval conception (as it does not deny St Augustine's

conception of the two cities or of the elect and Gentile people, but

only seriously examines the history of the latter), while on the other

side it resumes the ancient Oriental motive of the circles (courses

and recourses), but understands the course as growth and development,

and the recourse as a dialectical return, which on the other hand

does not seem to give rise to progress, although it does not seem to

exclude it, and also does not exclude the autonomy of the free will or

the exception of contingency. In this conception the Middle Ages and

antiquity ferment, producing romantic and modern thought.[1] But in the

romantic period the idea of the circle (which yet contained a great

mental claim that demanded satisfaction) gave place to the idea of a

linear course, taken from Christianity and from progress to an end,

which concludes with a certain state as limit or with entrance into a

paradise of indefinite progress, of incessant joy without sorrow. In

a conception of this kind there is at one time a mixture of theology

and of illuminism, as in Herder, at another an attempt at a history

according to the ages of life and the forms of the spirit, as with

Fichte and his school; then again the idea realizes its logical ideal

in time, as in Hegel, or the shadow of a God reappears, as in the

deism of Laurent and of several others, or the God is that of the old

religion, but modernized, noble, judicious, liberal, as in moderate

Catholicism and Protestantism. And since the course has necessarily an

end in all these schemes, announced and described and therefore already

lived and passed by, attempts to prolong, to prorogue, or to vary that

end have not been wanting, such personages as the Abbots Gioacchini

arising and calling themselves the 'Slav apocalyptics' or by some other

name, and adding new eras to those described. But this did not change

anything in the general conception. And there was no change effected in

it by the philosophies of history of the second Schelling, for example,

which are usually called irrationalistic, or of the pessimists, because

it is clear that the decadence which they describe is a progress in the

opposite sense, a progress in evil and in suffering, having its end in

the acme of evil and pain, or leading indeed to a redemption and then

becoming a progress toward the good. But if the idea of circles, which

repeat themselves identically, oppresses historical consciousness,

which is the consciousness of perennial individuality and diversity,

this idea of progress to an end oppresses it in another way, because

it declares that all the creations of history are imperfect, save

the last, in which history comes to a standstill and which therefore

alone has absolute value, and which thus takes away from the value of

reality in favour of an abstraction, from existence in favour of the

inexistent. And both of these--that is to say, all the philosophies of

history, in whatever way determined--lay in ambush to overwhelm the

conceptions of development and the increase in historiographical value

obtained through it by romanticism; and when this injury did not occur

(as in several notable historians, who narrated history admirably,

although they professed to obey the rules of the abstract philosophy

of history, which they saluted from near or far, but took care not to

introduce into their narratives), it was a proof that the contradiction

had not been perceived, or at least perceived as we now perceive it,

in its profound dissonance. It was a sign that romanticism too had

problems upon which it laboured long and probed deeply, and others upon

which it did not work at all or only worked a little and kept waiting,

satisfying them more or less. History too, like the individual who

works, does 'one thing at a time,' neglecting or allowing to run on

with the help of slight provisional improvements the problems to which

it cannot for the time being attend, but ready to direct full attention

to them when its hands are free.

[1] The exposition and criticism of Vico's thought are copiously dealt

with in the second volume of my _Saggi filosofici i La filosofia di

Giambattista Vico_ (Bari, 1911).

VII

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM

The philosophies of history offended the historical consciousness

in three points, as to which it has every right to be jealous: the

integrity of historical events, the unity of the narration with the

document, and the immanence of development. And the opposition to the

'philosophy of history,' and to the historiography of romanticism in

general, broke out precisely at these three points, and was often

violent. This opposition had at bottom a common motive, as has been

shown clearly by the frequent sympathy and fraternizing among those

who represent it, though dissensions as to details are common among

them. It is, however, best to consider it in its triplicity for reasons

of clearness, and to describe it as that of the _historians,_ the

_philologists,_ and the _philosophers._

To the historians, by whom we mean those who had a special disposition

for the investigation of particular facts rather than theories, and a

greater acquaintance with and practice of historical than speculative

literature, is due the saying that history _should be history and

not philosophy._ Not that they ventured to deny philosophy, for on

the contrary they protested their reverence for it and even for

religion and theology, and condescended to make an occasional rapid

and cautious excursion into those waters; but they generally desired

to steer their way through the placid gulfs of historical truth,

avoiding the tempestuous oceans of the other discipline: philosophy was

relegated to the horizon of their works. Nor did they even contest,

at least in principle, the right of existence of those grandiose

constructions of 'universal history,' but they recommended and

preferred national or otherwise monographical histories, which can be

sufficiently studied in their particulars, substituting for universal

histories collections of histories of states and of peoples. And since

romanticism had introduced into those universal histories and into

the national histories themselves its various practical tendencies

(which the philosophy of history had then turned into dogmas), the

historians placed abstention from national and party tendencies upon

their programme, although they reserved the right of making felt their

patriotic and political aspirations, but, as they said, without for

that reason altering the narrative of the facts, which were supposed

to move along independently of their opinions, or chime in with them

spontaneously in the course of their natural development. And since

passion and the philosophic judgment had been confused and mutually

contaminated in romanticism, the abstention was extended also to

the judgment as to the quality of the facts narrated; the _reality_

and not the value of the fact being held to be the province of the

historian, appeal being made to what theorists and philosophers had

thought about it, where a more profound consideration of the problem

was demanded. History should not be either German or French, Catholic

or Protestant, but it should also not pretend to apply a more ample

conception to the solution of these or similar antitheses, as the

philosophers of history had tried to do, but rather should neutralize

them all in a wise scepticism or agnosticism, and attenuate them in a

form of exposition conducted in the tone of a presidential summing-up,

where careful attention is paid to the opinions of opposed parties and

courtesy is observed toward all. There was diplomacy in this, and it

is not astonishing that many diplomatists or disciples of diplomacy

should collaborate in this form of history, and that the greatest of

all the historians of this school, Leopold Ranke, in whom are to be

found all the traits that we have described, should have had a special

predilection for diplomatic sources. He always, indeed, combated

philosophy, especially the Hegelian philosophy, and greatly contributed

to discredit it with the historians, but he did this decorously,

carefully avoiding the use of any word that might sound too rough or

too strong, professing the firm conviction that the hand of God shows

itself in history, a hand that we cannot grasp with ours, but which

touches our face and informs us of its action. He completed his long

and very fruitful labours in the form of monographs, avoiding universal

constructions. When, at the end of his life, he set to work to compose

a Weltgeschichte, he carefully separated it from the universe,

declaring that it would have been "lost in phantasms and philosophemes"

had he abandoned the safe ground of national histories and sought for

any other sort of universality than that of nations, which "acting upon

one another, appear one after the other and constitute a living whole."

In his first book he protested with fine irony that he was not able

to accept the grave charge of judging the past or of instructing the

present as to the future, which had been assigned to history, but he

felt himself capable only of showing "how things really had happened"

(wie es eigentlich gewesen) this was his object in all his work, and he

held fast to it, thus culling laurels unobtainable by others, attaining

even to the writing of the history of the popes of the period of the

Counter-Reformation, although he was a Lutheran and remained so all his

life. This history was received with favour in all Catholic countries.

His greatest achievement was to write of French history in a manner

that did not displease the French. A writer of the greatest elegance,

he was able to steer between the rocks, without even letting appear his

own religious or philosophical convictions, and without ever finding

himself under the obligation of forming a definite resolution, and

in any case never pressing too hard upon the conceptions themselves

to which he had recourse, such as 'historical ideas,' the perpetual

struggle between Church and State, and the conception of the State.

Ranke was the ideal and the master to many historians within, and to

some without, his own country. But even without his direct influence,

the type of history that he represented germinated everywhere, a little

earlier or later according to position and to the calming down of the

great political passions and philosophical fervour in the different

countries. This took place, for instance, in France earlier than in

Italy, where the idealistic philosophy and the national movement made

their strength felt in historiography after 1848, and even up to 1860.

But the type of history which I should almost be disposed to baptize

with the name of 'diplomatic,' taking seriously the designation that

I had at first employed jocosely, still meets with success among

the moderately disposed, who are lovers of culture, but do not wish

to become infected with party passions or to rack their brains with

philosophical speculations: but, as may be imagined, it is not always

treated with the intelligence, the balance, and the finesse of a

Leopold Ranke.

The ambition of altogether rejecting the admission of thought into

history, which has been lacking to the diplomatic historians (because

they were without the necessary innocence for such an ambition), was,

on the other hand, possessed by the philologists, a most innocent

group. They were all the more disposed to abound in this sense, since

their opinion of themselves, which had formerly been most modest, had

been so notably increased, owing to the high degree of perfection

attained by research into chronicles and documents and by the recent

foundation (which indeed had not been a creation ex nihilo) of the

critical or historical method, which was employed in a fine and close

examination into the origin of sources and the reduction of these, and

in the internal criticism of texts. This pride of the philologists

prevailed, the method reaching its highest development in a country

like Germany, where haughty pedantry flourishes better than elsewhere,

and where, as a result of that most admirable thing, scientific

seriousness, 'scientificism' is much idolized. This word was also

ambitiously adopted for everything that concerns the surroundings and

the instruments of true and proper science, such as is the case with

the collection and criticism of narratives and documents. The old

school of learned men, French and Italian, who did not effect less

progress in 'method' than was attained during the nineteenth century in

Germany, did not dream that they were thus producing 'science,' much

less did they dream of vying with philosophy and theology, or that

they could drive them from their positions and take their places with

the documentary method. But in Germany every mean little copier of a

text, or collector of variants, or examiner of the relations of texts

and conjecturer as to the genuine text, raised himself to the level of

a scientific man and critic, and not only dared to look upon himself

as the equal of such men as Schelling, Hegel, Herder, or Schlegel,

but did so with disdain and contempt, calling them 'anti-methodical.'

This pseudo-scientific haughtiness diffused itself from Germany over

the other European countries, and has now reached America, though in

other countries than Germany it met more frequently with irreverent

spirits, who laughed at it. Then for the first time there manifested

itself that mode of historiography which I have termed 'philological'

or 'erudite' history. That is to say, the more or less judicious

compilations of sources which used to be called _Antiquitates, Annales,

Penus, Thesauri,_ presented themselves disguised as histories, which

alone were dignified and scientific. The faith of these historians

was reposed in a narrative of which every word could be supported by

a text, and there was nothing else whatever in their work, save what

was contained in the texts, torn from their contexts and repeated

without being thought by the philologist narrator. Their object

was that their histories should reach the rank of comprehensive

compilations, starting from those relating to particular times,

regions, and events, and finally attaining to the arrangement of the

whole of historical knowledge in great encyclopædias, out of which

articles are to be supplied, systematic or definitional, put together

by groups of specialists, directed by a specialist, for classical,

romantic, Germanic, Indo-European, and Semitic philology. With a view

to alleviating the aridity of their labours, the philologists sometimes

allowed themselves a little ornament in the shape of emotional

affections and ideal view-points. With this purpose, they had recourse

to memories of their student days, to the philosophical catchwords

which had been the fashion at the time, and to the ordinary sentiments

of the day toward politics, art, and morality. But they did all this

with great moderation, that they might not lose their reputation for

scientific gravity, and that they might not fail in respect toward

scientific philological history, which disdains the vain ornaments in

which philosophers, dilettantes, and charlatans delight. They ended

by tolerating historians of the type above described, but as a lesser

evil, and as a general rule inclined to pardon the sins arising out

of their commerce with 'ideas' in favour of the 'new documents' which

they had discovered or employed, and which they could always dig out of

their books as a useful residue, while purifying them from 'subjective'

admixtures--that is to say, from the elaboration of them which had

been attempted. Philosophy was known to them only as 'philosophy of

history,' but even thus rather by reason of its terrible ill-fame than

from direct acquaintance. They remembered and were ever ready to repeat

five or six anecdotes concerning errors in names and dates into which

celebrated philosophers had actually fallen, easily forgetful of the

innumerable errors into which they fell themselves (being more liable

as more exposed to danger); they almost persuaded themselves that

philosophy had been invented to alter the names and confuse the dates

which, had been confided to their amorous care, that it was the abyss

opened by the fiend to lead to the perdition of serious 'documentary

history.'

The third band of those opposed to the philosophy of history was

composed of philosophers or of historian--philosophers, but of those

who rejected the name and selected another less open to suspicion,

or tempered it with some adjective, or accepted it indeed, but

with opportune explanations: they styled themselves positivists,

naturalists, sociologists, empiricists, criticists, or something of

that sort. Their purpose was to do something different from what the

philosophers of history had done, and since these had worked with the

conception of the _end,_ they all of them swore that they would work

with the conception of the _cause;_ they would search out the cause

of every fact, thus generalizing more and more widely the causes or

the cause of the entire course of history: those others had attempted

a _dynamic_ of history; they would work at a _mechanic_ of history, a

social physics. A special science arose, opposed to the philosophy of

history, in which that naturalistic and positivistic tendency became

exalted in its own eyes: sociology. Sociology classified facts of human

origin and determined the laws of mutual dependence which regulated

them, furnishing the narratives of historians with the principles of

explanation, by means of these laws. Historians, on the other hand,

diligently collected facts and offered them to sociology, that it might

press the juice out of them--that is to say, that it might classify

and deduce the laws that governed them. History and sociology, then,

stood to one another in the same relation as physiology and zoology,

physics and mineralogy, or in another relation of the same sort; they

differed from the physical and natural sciences only by their greater

complexity. The introduction of mathematical calculation seemed to

be the condition of progress for history as for all the sciences,

physical and natural. A new 'science' came forward to support this

notion, in the shape of that humble servant of practical administration

and inspired creation of bureaucracy known as statistics. And since

the whole of science was being modelled upon the idea of a factory

of condensation, so were 'syntheses' invoked and outlined for

history--that is to say, historical frameworks, in which the laws and

facts chat dominate single histories should be resumed, as though in a

sort of table or atlas, which should show at a glance causes and the

facts which arose from them. Need we recall the names and supporters

of this school--Comte, Buckle, Taine, and so on, until we come to those

recent historians who follow them, such as Lamprecht and Breysig? Need

we recall the most consequent and the most paradoxical programmes or

the school, as, for instance, Buckle's introduction to his history of

civilization or Bourdeau's book on the _Histoire des historiens?_ These

and similar positivistic doctrines are present to the memory, either

because they are nearest to us chronologically, or because the echo

of the noise they made in the world has not yet ceased, and we see

everywhere traces of their influence. Everywhere we see it, and above

all in the prejudice which they have solidly established (and which we

must patiently corrode and dissolve), that history, true history, is to

be constructed by means of the _naturalistic_ method, and that _causal_

induction should be employed. Then there are the manifold naturalistic

conceptions with which they have imbued modern thought: race, heredity,

degeneration, imitation, influence, climate, historical factors, and so

forth. And here, too, as in the case of the philosophies of history,

since it suffices us to select only the essential in each fact, we

shall not dwell upon the various particular forms of it--that is to

say, upon the various modes in which historical causes were enunciated

and enumerated, and upon the various claims that one or other of them

was supreme: now the race, now the climate, now economy, now technique,

and so forth. Here, too, the study of the particular forms would be of

use to anyone who wished to develop in particular the dialectic and to

trace the internal dissolution of that school, to demonstrate in its

particular modes its intrinsic tendency to surpass itself, though it

failed to do so by that path.

We have already mentioned that the three classes of opponents of

the 'philosophies of history' and the three methods by which they

proposed to supplant it--diplomatic, philological, and positivistic

history--showed that they disagreed among themselves. Confirmation of

this may now be found in the contempt of the diplomatic historians

for mere erudition and in their diffidence for the constructions of

positivism, the erudite, for their part, being fearful of perversions

of names and dates and shaking their heads at diplomatic histories

and the careless style of the men of the world who composed them.

Finally, the positivists looked upon the latter as people who did not

go to the bottom of things, to their general or natural causes, and

reproved the erudite with their incapacity for rising to the level

of laws and to the establishment of facts in accordance with these

laws, sociological, physiological, or pathological. But there is

further confirmation of what has been noted in respect to the common

conception that animated them all and of their substantial affinity,

because when the erudite wished to cloak themselves in a philosophy

of some sort, they very readily strutted about draped in some shreds

of positivistic thought or phraseology. They also participated in the

reserve and in the agnosticism of the positivists and the diplomatic

historians toward speculative problems, and in like manner it was

impossible not to recognize the justice of their claim that evidence

should be reliable and documents authentic. The diplomatic historians

agreed with them in the formula that history should not be philosophy

and that research should dispense with finality and follow the line

of causality. In fact, all three sorts of opponents, at one with the

transcendency of the philosophy of history, negated the unity of

history with philosophy, but in various degrees and with various

particular meanings, with various preliminary studies and in various

ways. And although these schools were in agreement as to what they

negated, all three of them become for us exposed to a criticism which

unites them beneath a single negation. For not even do the ability and

the intelligence of a Ranke avail to give vigour to the moderatism

and to maintain firmly the eclecticism of diplomatic history, and

the transaction breaks down before the failure on the part of those

who attempted it, owing to its being contrary to their own powers

and intrinsically impossible. The idea of an agnostic history turns

out to be fallacious--that is to say, of a history that is not

philosophical but does not deny philosophy, that is not theological

but is not anti-theological, limiting itself to nations and to their

reciprocal influence upon one another, because Ranke himself was

obliged to recognize powers or ideals that are superior to nations and

that as such require to be speculatively justified in a philosophy or

in a theology. In this way he laid himself open to the accusations

of the positivists, who discredited his ideas as 'mystical.' For the

same reason others were proceeding to reduce them little by little

from the position of ideals or movements of the spirit to natural and

physiological products, as was attempted by Lorenz, an ardent follower

of Ranke, who, with his doctrine of generation and of heredity, fell

into that physiologism and naturalism from which the master had

preserved himself. And when this passage from spirituality to nature

was accomplished, the dividing line between history and pre-history,

between history of civilization and history of nature, was also not

respected. On the other hand, a return was made to the 'philosophies

of history,' when ideas were interpreted as transcendental and as

answering to the designs of the divine will, which governs the world

according to a law and conducts it according to a plan of travel. The

boasted impartiality and objectivity, which was based upon a literary

device of half-words, of innuendoes, of prudent silences, was also

equally illusory, and the Jesuit who objected to Ranke and his history

of the popes will always prevail from the point of view of rigorous

criticism--either the Papacy is always and everywhere what it affirms

itself to be, an institution of the Son of God made man, or it is a

lie. Respect and caution are out of place here. _Tertium non datur._

Indeed, it was not possible to escape from taking sides by adopting

that point of view; at the most a third party was thus formed,

consisting of the tolerant, the tepid, and the indifferent. The slight

coherence of Ranke's principles can be observed in that part of his

_Universal History_ where, when speaking of Tacitus he touches upon

his own experience as a teacher of history, he declares that "it is

impossible to speak of a tranquil and uniform progressive development

of historiography either among the ancients or the moderns, because the

object itself is formed in the course of time and is always different,

and conceptions depend upon the circumstances among which the author

lives and writes." He thus comes to perform an act of resignation

before blind contingentism, and the present historical sketch shows

how unjust this is, for it has traced the organic and progressive

development of historical thought from the Greeks to modern times. And

the whole of the _Universal History_ is there to prove, on the other

hand, that his slight coherence of ideas, or web of ideas that he left

intentionally vague, made it difficult for him to give life to a vast

historical narrative, so lacking in connexion, so heavy, and sometimes

even issuing in extraneous reflections, such, for example, as those

in the first pages of the first volume, where there is a comparison

of Saul and Samuel with the emperors at strife with the popes, and of

the policy of Rehoboam and Jeroboam with the political strife between

the centralizing states and the centrifugal regions of modern times.

We find in general in Ranke an inevitable tendency to subside into the

pragmatic method. And what has been said of Ranke is to be repeated

of his disciples and of those who cultivated the same conciliatory

type of history. As for philological history, the description that

has been given of the programme makes clear its nullity, for it leads

by a most direct route to a double absurdity. When the most rigorous

methods of examining witnesses is really applied, there is no witness

that cannot be suspected and questioned, and philological history

leads to the negation of the truth of that history which it wishes to

construct. And if value be attributed to certain evidence arbitrarily

and for external reasons, there is no extravagance that may not be

accepted, because there is no extravagance that may not have honest,

candid, and intelligent men on its side. It is not possible to reject

even miracles by the philological method, since these repose upon the

same attestations which make certain a war or a peace treaty, as Lorenz

has shown by examining the miracles of St Bernard in the light of the

severest philological criticism. In order to save himself from the

admission of the inconceivable and of the nullification of history,

which follows the nullification of witnesses, there remains nothing

but appeal to thought, which reconstitutes history from the inside,

and is evidence to itself, and denies what is unthinkable for the very

reason that it is not to be thought. This appeal is the declaration of

bankruptcy for philological history. We may certainly say that this

form of history more or less sustains itself as history, to the extent

that it has recourse to all the aids furnished by history proper, and

contradicts itself; or it contradicts itself and yet does not sustain

itself, or only for a little while and in appearance, by again adopting

the methods of pragmaticism, of transcendency, and of positivism. And

the last of these in its turn encounters the same experiences in a

different order, because its principle of history that explains facts

causally presupposes the facts, which as such are thought and therefore

are in a way already explained. Hence a vicious circle, evident in the

connexion between history and sociology, each one of which is to be

based upon and at the same time to afford a base for the other, much

in the same way as a column which should support a capital and at the

same time spring from it. But if, with a view to breaking the circle,

history be taken as the base and sociology as its fulfilment, then the

latter will no longer be the explanation of the former, which will find

its explanation elsewhere. And this will be, according to taste, either

an unknown principle or some form of thought that acts in the same way

as God, and in both cases a transcendental principle. Hence we have the

fact of positivism leading to philosophies of history, as exemplified

in the Apocalypses and the Gospels of Comte, of Buckle, and of others

of like sort: they are all most reverent theologians, but chaotic,

falling back into those fallacious conceptions which had been refuted

by romantic historiography.

Truly, when faced with such histories as these, superficial or

unintelligent or rude and fantastic, romanticism, conscious of the

altitude to which it had elevated the study of the development of human

affairs, might have exclaimed (and indeed it did exclaim by the mouth

of its epigoni) to its adversaries and successors, in imitation of the

tone of Bonaparte on the 18th of Brumaire: "What have you done with the

history which I left to you so brilliant? Were these the new methods,

by means of which you promised to solve the problems which I had not

been able to solve? I see nothing in them but _revers et misère!_" But

we who have never met with absolute regressions during the secular

development of historiography shall not allow ourselves to be carried

away upon the polemical waves now beating against the positivistic and

naturalistic school which is our present or recent adversary, to the

point of losing sight of what it possessed that was substantially its

own, and owing to which it really did represent progress. We shall also

refrain from drawing comparisons between romanticism and positivism,

by measuring the merits of both, and concluding with the assertion

of the superiority of the former; because it is well known that such

examinations of degrees of merit, the field of professors, are not

permissible in history, where what follows ideally after is virtually

superior to that from which it is derived, notwithstanding appearances

to the contrary. And in the first place, it would be erroneous,

strictly speaking, to believe that what had been won by romanticism had

been lost in positivism, because when the histories of this period are

looked upon from other points of view and with greater attention, we

see how they were all preserved. Romanticism had abolished historical

dualism, for which there existed in reality positive and negative,

elect and outcast, facts. Positivism repeated that all facts are

facts and all have an equal right to enter history. Romanticism had

substituted the conception of development for the abysses and the

chasms that previous historiography had introduced into the course

of events, and positivism repeated that conception, calling it

_evolution._ Romanticism had established periods in development, either

in the form of a cycle of phases, like Vico, or as phases without

a circle and in linear order, like the German romantics, and had

exemplified the various phases as a series of the forms of the spirit

or of psychological forms, and positivism renewed these conceptions

(although owing to the lack of culture usual with its adherents it

often believed that it had made discoveries never made before), as can

be proved by a long series of examples. These range from the _three

ages_ of mental development of Comte to the _eight phases_ of social

development or _four political periods_ which are respectively the

'novelties' of the contemporaries Lamprecht and Breysig. Romanticism,

judging that the explanation of events by means of the caprices, the

calculations, and the designs of individuals taken atomistically was

frivolous, took as the subject of history the universals, the Idea,

ideas, the spirit, nations and liberty and positivism; it also rejected

individualistic atomicism, talking of _masses, races, societies,

technique, economy, science, social tendencies_; of everything, in

fact, with the exception that the caprice of Tizius and Caius was

now no longer admitted. Romanticism had now not only reinforced the

histories of ideal values, but had conceived them as in organic

connexion; positivism in its turn insisted upon the _interdependence

of social factors_ and upon the unity of the real, and attempted to

fill up the interstices of the various special histories by means of

the history of _civilization_ and of _culture,_ and so-called _social_

history, containing in itself politics, literature, philosophy,

religion, and every other class of facts. Romanticism had overthrown

heteronomous, instructive, moralizing, serviceable history, and

positivism in its turn boasted that its history was a _science,_ an

end in itself, like every other science, although like every science

it afforded the basis for practice, and was therefore capable of

application. Romanticism had enhanced the esteem for erudition, and

had given an impetus to intercourse between it and history. But whence

did the erudition and philology of the positivistic period derive

that pride which made them believe that they were themselves history,

save from the consciousness that they had inherited from romanticism,

which they had preserved and exaggerated? Whence did they inherit the

substance of their method save (as Fueter well notes) from the romantic

search for the primitive, the genuine, the ingenuous, which manifested

itself in Wolf, who inaugurated the method? It is well to remember that

Wolf was a pre-romantic, an admirer of Ossian and of popular poetry.

And, finally, what is the meaning of the efforts of positivism to

seek out the _causes_ of history, the series of historical facts, the

_unity_ of the factors and their dependence upon a _supreme cause,_

save the speculations of the romantics themselves upon the manner,

the end, and the value of development? Whoever pays attention to all

these and other resemblances which we could enumerate must conclude

that positivism is to romanticism as was the enlightenment to the

Renaissance--that is to say, it is not so much its antithesis as it is

the logical prosecution and the exaggeration of its presuppositions.

Even its final conversion into theology corresponds to that of

romanticism. This is for the rest an obvious matter, for transcendency

is always transcendency, whether it be thought of as that of a God

or of reason, of nature or of matter. But thinking of it as Matter

or Nature, this naturalistic and materialistic travesty, which at

first seems odious or ridiculous, of the problems and conceptions of

romanticism, of the idea into cause, of development into evolution,

of the spirit into mass and the like, to which one would at first be

inclined to attribute the inferiority of positivistic historiography,

is, on the contrary, for the close observer the progress made by it

upon romanticism. That travesty contains the energetic negation of

history as moved by extramundane forces, by external finalities,

by transcendental laws, just both in its motive and in its general

tendency, and the correlative affirmation that its law must be sought

in reality, which is one and is called 'nature.' The positivism,

which on no account wished to hear anything of 'metaphysic,' had in

mind the dogmatic and transcendental metaphysic, which had filtered

into the thought of Kant and of his successors; and the target of its

contempt was a good one, although it ended by confusing metaphysic

with philosophy in general, or dogmatic with critical metaphysic,

the metaphysic of being with that of the mind, and was not itself

altogether free from that which it undertook to combat. But this does

not prevent its repugnance to 'metaphysic' and, restricting ourselves

to what is our more immediate interest, to the 'philosophy of history'

from having produced durable results. Thanks to positivism historical

works became less naïve and richer in facts, especially in that class

of facts which romanticism had neglected, such as the dispositions

that are called natural, the processes that are called degenerative or

pathological, the spiritual complications that are called psychological

illusions, the interests that are called material, the production and

the distribution of wealth, or economic activity, the facts of force

and violence, or of political and revolutionary power. Positivism,

intent upon the negation of transcendency and upon the observation of

what appertained to it, felt itself to be, and was in that respect, in

the right. And each one of us who pays due attention to that order of

things and renews that negation is gathering the fruit of positivism,

and in that respect is a positivist. Its very contradictions had the

merit of making more evident the contradictions latent in romantic

historiography. This merit must be admitted to the most extravagant

doctrines of the positivists, such as that of Taine, that knowledge

is a true hallucination and that human wisdom is an accident (_une

rencontre_), which presumed irrationality to be the normal condition,

much as Lombroso believed that genius is madness. Another instance

of this is the attempt to discover in what way heterogeneity and

historical diversity come into existence, if homogeneity is posited;

and again the methodical canon that the explanation of history is to

be found in causality, but is to stop at genius and virtue, which are

without it, because they refuse to accept of causal explanation, or

the frightful Unknowable, which was placed at the head of histories

of the real, after so great a fuss being made about that Titan

science which was ready to scale the skies. But since romanticism

had left spirit and nature without fusion, the one facing the other,

it was just that if in the first place spirit swallowed up nature

without being able to digest it (because, as had been laid down, it

was indigestible), now nature was engaged in doing the same thing to

spirit, and with the same result. So just and logical was this that

not a few of the old idealists went over to the crassest materialism

and positivism, and that confession of not being able to see their way

in the confusion was at once instructive and suggestive, as was also

the perplexity decorated with the name of 'agnosticism.' And as the

precise affirmation of the positivity of history represented an advance

in thought, so the antithesis of materialism, pushed to an extreme, was

an advance in the preparation of the new problem and in the new way of

solving the relation between spirit and nature. _Oportet ut scandala,

eveniant,_ and this means that even scandal, the scandal of the absurd,

and of offensive false criticisms of human conscience, is an advance.

VIII

THE NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY CONCLUSION

The romantic current not only maintained itself in its excesses during

the dominion of positivism, and, as we have shown, insinuated itself

even into its naturalistic antithesis, but it also persisted in its

genuine form. And although we have not spoken of pedantic imitators

and conservatives--whose significance is slight in the history of

thought, that is to say, confined to the narrow sphere in which they

were compelled to think for themselves--we have nevertheless recorded

the preservation of romanticism in the eclecticism of Ranke, who

adhered to the theories of Humboldt (another 'diplomatist'). Idealistic

and romantic motives continued to illuminate the intellect and soul

among the philosophers, from Humboldt to Lotze and from Hartmann to

Wundt and those who corresponded to them in other countries. The like

occurred in historiography properly so called, and could not but

happen, because, if the formulas of agnosticism and of positivism had

been followed to the letter, all light of thought would have been

extinguished in blind mechanicism--that is to say, in nothing--and no

historical representation would have been possible. Thus political,

social, philosophical, literary, and artistic history continued to

make acquisitions, if not equally important with those of the romantic

period (the surroundings were far more favourable to the natural

sciences and to mathematics than to history), yet noteworthy. This is

set forth in a copious volume upon historiography (I refer to the work

of Fueter already several times mentioned in this connexion). There

due honour will be found accorded to the great work accomplished by

Ranke, which the rapidity of my course of exposition has induced me to

illustrate rather in its negative aspects, causing me, for instance,

to allude solely to the contradictions in the _History of the Popes,_

which is notwithstanding a masterpiece. The cogent quality of the

romantic spirit at its best is revealed in the typical instance of

Taine, who is so ingenuously naturalistic in his propositions and in

the directive principles of his work, yet so unrestrainedly romantic

in particular instances, as, for example, in his characterization of

the French poets or of the Dutch and Italian painters. All this led to

his ending in the exaggerated anti-Jacobin romanticism of his _Origines

de la France contemporaine,_ in the same way that Zola and the other

verists, those verbal enemies of romanticism, were lyrical in all

their fiction, and the leader of the school was induced to conclude

his works with the abstract lyricism of the _Quatre évangiles._ What

has been observed of Taine is to be applied to Buckle and to the

other naturalists and positivists, obliged to be historical against

their will, and to the positivists who became followers of historical

materialism, and found the dialectic established in their house without

being able to explain what it was or whence it came. Not all theorists

of historiography showed themselves to be so resolutely and madly

naturalistic as Bourdeau and one or two others; indeed these were few

in number and of inferior reputation. Eclecticism prevailed among

the majority of them, a combination of necessity and of liberty, of

masses and individuals, of cause and end, of nature and spirit: even

the philosophy of history was admitted, if in no other form, then as a

_desideratum_ or a problem to be discussed at a convenient time (even

though that were the Greek Kalends). Eclecticism, too, presented the

greatest variety, from the low level of a trivial arranging of concepts

in an artificial manner to the lofty heights of interior labour, from

which it seemed at every moment that a new gospel, no longer eclectic,

must issue.

This last form of eclecticism and the open attempts to renew romantic

idealism more or less completely, as well as romantic methods of

historiography, have become more frequent since modern consciousness

has withdrawn itself from positivism and has declared its bankruptcy.

But all this is of importance rather as a symptom of a real advance in

thought. And the new modern philosophies of intuition and philosophy

of values must be looked upon rather as symptoms than as representing

progress in thought (I mean in general, and not in the particular

thoughts and theories which often form a real contribution). The former

of these, however, while it correctly criticizes science as an economic

construction useless for true knowledge, then proceeds to shut itself

up in immediate consciousness, a sort of mysticism, where historical

dialectic finds itself submerged and suffocated; and the latter,

placing the conception of value as guardian of the spirit in opposition

to the conceptions of science like "a philosophical _cave canem_" (as

our imaginative Tari would have said), leaves open a dualism, which

stands in the way of the unity of history and of thought as history.

When we look around us, therefore, we do not discover that _new

philosophy_ which shall lay the foundations and at the same time afford

justification for the new historiography by solving the antithesis

between imaginative romanticism and materialistic positivism. And it

is clear that we are not even able to discuss such a philosophy as a

_demand,_ because the demand for a particular philosophy is itself the

thinking of that particular philosophy, and therefore is not a demand

but an actuality. Hence the dilemma either of saying nothing about it,

and in this case of not speaking even of positivism as a period that

has been closed and superseded, or of speaking of the new philosophy as

of something that lives and exists, precisely because it does live and

exist. And since to renounce talking of it has been rendered impossible

by the very criticism chat we have devoted to it, nothing remains save

to recognize that philosophy as something that exists, not as something

to be invoked. Only we must not _look around us_ in order to see where

it is, but return to _ourselves_ and have recourse to the thought

that has animated this historical sketch of historiography and to all

the historical explanations that have preceded it. In the philosophy

that we have delineated, reality is affirmed to be spirit, not such

that it is above the world or wanders about the world, but such as

coincides with the world; and nature has been shown as a moment and a

product of this spirit itself, and therefore the dualism (at least that

which has troubled thought from Thales to Spencer) is superseded, and

transcendency of all sorts, whether materialistic or theological in its

origin, has also been superseded with it. Spirit, which is the world,

is the spirit which develops, and is therefore both one and diverse, an

eternal solution and an eternal problem, and its self-consciousness is

philosophy, which is its history, or history, which is its philosophy,

each substantially identical with the other; and consciousness is

identical with self-consciousness--that is to say, distinct and one

with it at the same time, as life and thought. This philosophy, which

is in us and is ours, enables us to recognize it--that is to say, to

recognize ourselves outside of us--in the thought of other men which is

also our thought, and to discover it more or less clearly and perfectly

in the other forms of contemporary philosophy, and more or less clearly

in contemporary historiography. We have frequent opportunities of

effecting this recognition, which is productive of much spiritual

comfort. Quite lately, for instance, while I was writing these pages,

the historical work of a historian, a pure historian, came into my

hands (I select this instance among many) where I read words at the

very beginning which seemed to be my very own: "My book is based upon

the conviction that German historical inquiry must elevate itself to

freer movement and contact with the great forces of political life and

culture, without renouncing the precious tradition of its method, and

that it must plunge into philosophy and politics, without experiencing

injury in its end or essence, for thus alone can it develop its

intimate essence and be both universal and national."[1] This is the

philosophy of our time, which is the initiator of a new philosophical

and historiographical period. But it is not possible to write the

history of this philosophy and of this historiography, which is subject

and not _object_, not for the reason generally adopted, which we

have found to be false, since it separates the fact of consciousness

from the fact, but for the other reason that the history which we

are constructing is a history of 'epochs' or of 'great periods,' and

the new period is new, just because it is not a period--that is

to say, something closed. Not only are we not able to describe its

chronological and geographical outline, because we are ignorant as to

what measure of time it will fill (will it develop rapidly in thirty

or forty years, or will it encounter obstacles, yet nevertheless

continue its course for centuries?), what extent of countries it

will include (will it remain for long Italian or German, confined to

certain Italian or German circles, or will it diffuse itself rapidly

in all countries, both in general culture and in public instruction?),

but we are unable to limit _logically_ what may be its value outside

these considerations. The reason for this is that in order to be able

to describe its limitations, it must necessarily have developed its

antitheses--that is to say, the new problems that will infallibly arise

from its solutions, and this has not happened: we are ourselves on

the waves and we have not furled our sails in port preparatory to a

new voyage. _Bis hierher ist das Bewusstsein gekommen_ (Knowledge has

reached this point in its development), said Hegel, at the end of his

lectures upon the philosophy of history; and yet he had not the right

to say so, because his development, which went from the unconsciousness

of liberty to the full consciousness of it in the German world and in

the system of absolute idealism, did not admit of prosecution. But

we are well able to say so, for we have overcome the abstractness of

Hegelianism.

[1] Friedrich Meinecke, _Weltbürgerthum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur

Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates,_ second edition, preface, p.

vii. (München u. Berlin, Oldenburg, 1911.)