Part 2

To understand is not simply difficult, it is also endless. But this fact does not make it hopeless. The understanding of history grows by what it feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, constantly reveals more to be understood. Our illustrations may serve us again. From the accessible records of the battle of Marathon we can understand with tolerable success the immediate antecedents and consequents of that great event. But in calling the event great we do not simply eulogize its participants. We indicate, rather, that its antecedents and consequents have been far-reaching and momentous. Greece, we say, was saved. But what are we to understand by that salvation? To answer we must write and rewrite her own history, the history of what she has been and is; and with every fresh writing the battle of Marathon becomes better understood. It becomes a different battle with a different truth. And more than this: with every rewriting we understand better what went before and what followed after until the battle itself becomes but the symptom of deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's present struggle. Already its history has begun with many volumes. Following the example of Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are writing it contemporaneously by summers and winters. The consequences they can only guess at, but they have done much with the antecedents, so much that the last fifty years of Europe are better understood than they were a year ago. The record of them has changed little; our understanding of them has changed much. It has changed so much that they have already become a different half-century from what they were. The truth about them last year is not the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence what will the truth about them be?

I venture another illustration, one from the history of philosophy. I choose Plato. He is such a commanding figure that the desire to understand him is exceptionally keen. The record of his life and of his conscious aims and purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no assured authorities on these points. That is greatly to be regretted, because a correct record is naturally the best of aids towards a correct understanding. But the unsatisfactory record is not very material to the illustration in hand. The record might be correct, but Plato would, even so, remain an historical figure to be understood. He would continue to be the producer of what we call Platonism, and we should have to understand him as that producer. In that case, evidently, the details of his life, his span of years, his immediate aims and activities would involve but the beginning of an inquiry which would last as long as Plato is studied by those who would understand him. Who, then, would be the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle wrote, or the man about whom Professor Paul Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is the man about whom they both write, but that can mean only that he is the man about whom writers can write so diversely. He is not the same man to Professor Shorey that he was to Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a nice question which of the two disciples has given us the correct estimate of their master. Who was the real Plato? And that question could still be asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its record, what it is not, a continuous and uniformly accepted tradition. For it is quite evident that the Platonic tradition has grown from age to age as students of Plato have tried to understand him and to understand also what other students have understood about him. The true Plato is still the quest of Platonists.

It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth, and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known.

History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. It may afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time. That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date. Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written. It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of history itself.

The writer of history may, consequently, attain his purpose within the limits of the practical and moral difficulties which beset it in either of two ways. He may give us the contemporaneous understanding of what has happened in terms of the outlook and perspective of his own day, giving us a vision of what has gone before as an enlightened mind of his time might see it. His history might then be that of ancient peoples beheld in the new perspective into which they have now been placed. Could he, by miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they would doubtless fail to recognize their own history, truthful as it might be. But comprehension might dawn upon them as they read, and they might exclaim: "These were the things we were really doing, but we did not know it at the time; we have discovered what we were; our history has revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, by the restrained exercise of his imagination, may give us what has happened in the perspective of the time in which it happened, or in a perspective anterior to his own day. He may seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination to days no longer ours and to ways of feeling and acting no longer presently familiar. Such a history would be less comprehensive and complete than the former. It would also be more difficult to write, because historical imagination of this kind is rare and also because it is not easy to divest the past of its present estimate. Yet the imagination has that power and enables us to live again in retrospect what others have lived before us. But in both cases the history would be an active conservation of events in time; it would reveal their truth, their meaning, and their purpose.

If now we ask what may be this truth and meaning, or in what sense may we appropriately speak of a purpose in history, we pass from history to philosophy. No longer shall we be concerned with the purpose of writing history, but rather with the character of the facts which stimulate that purpose and assist in its attainment. From history as the attempt to preserve memory and promote understanding we pass to history as a characteristic of natural processes. We shall try to analyze what the career of things in time involves; but we shall keep this career in mind in those aspects of it which bear most significantly upon the history of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Murray, Gilbert. "Ancient Greek Literature." D. Appleton & Co., 1908. Page 133.

[2] Austin, Mary. "The Man Jesus." Harper, 1915.

[3] Flint, Robert. "History of the Philosophy of History." Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894. Page 5.

II

THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY

History leads to philosophy when it raises in a fundamental way the question of truth. As we have seen, the term "truth," when applied to history, has a double meaning. It may mean that the record of what has happened is correct, and it may mean that the understanding of what has happened is correct. If the record is correct, its truth seems to be something fixed once for all and unchanging. The perfect record may never be possessed, but it seems to be ideally possible, because the events which the record would keep in memory must have happened, and, therefore, might have been recorded if fortune had been favorable. If, however, the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth can not be something fixed once for all. It is fixed only from time to time. One correct understanding of what has happened does not displace another as truth might displace error, but one supplements and enlarges another. Histories which have gone before are not undone by those that follow after. They are incorporated into them in a very real way. Historical truth, therefore, when it does not mean simply the correctness of the records of history, is progressive. If the record of what has happened is correct, its truth is perpetual; if the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth is contemporaneous. Now what does this distinction involve? Does it involve merely the recognition that facts may remain unchanged while our knowledge of them grows? A suspicion, at least, has been created that it involves something more, namely, the recognition that the facts themselves, being something "evolved and acted," are also progressive. Historical facts are careers in time. It is their occurrence which is recorded and it is their career which is understood. We may, therefore, undertake an inquiry into the nature of facts like these.

We may start from the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them, for it is clear that whatever the character of the facts may be, our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. The past is dead and gone. It is something over and done with, so that any change in it is forever impossible. We should then, if we would be precise, say, not that it is the past which grows and enlarges, but only our knowledge of it. We recover and conserve it in memory and imagination only, and as we recover it more and more completely and relate it more and more successfully, we know and understand it better. Plato is dead, and not one feature, circumstance, or action of his life can now be changed. He lives only in the memory of man; and because he lives there and stimulates the imagination, there is born a Plato of the imagination. There are thus two Platos, the one real and the other historical. The one lived and died long ago; the other still lives in human history. The real Plato has produced the historical Plato and affords a check upon historians in their representation of him. That representation may approach progressively nearer to what the real Plato was like, but it can never be the man who has passed away. History would be thus a branch of human knowledge, and grow with the growth of knowledge, while its objects remain unchanged. That is why history has constantly to be rewritten. Furthermore, in the rewriting, new types of history appear with new or altered emphases. The moral and religious type is supplemented by the political, and the political by the economic and social. For with the growth of knowledge the past looks different to us and we discover that what appeared once adequate has to be revised.

We may admit, therefore, that history, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a kind of human knowledge. Like all knowledge it leads us to recognize that there is a distinction between knowledge itself and its objects, and that the progressive character of knowledge indicates an approximation to an adequate representation of the objects and not changes in their own character. This distinction in its application to history is evidently not a distinction between literature and its subject-matter. For the past, if we now take the past to be the proper subject-matter of written history, appears to have a twofold character. It is all that has happened precisely as it happened, and it is all that is remembered and known, precisely as it is remembered and known. There are, we may say, a real past and an historical past. The latter never is the former, but always a progressively more adequate representation of the former.

Now this distinction between the real past and the historical past may be fruitful. It may also be treacherous, for the terms in which it is expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very easy to claim that the real past is after all only the historical past, because the past itself being dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved in history. Yet properly understood, the distinction is essential to any philosophical comprehension of what history is. It points out that history is not the past, but is its recovery and conservation. Events begin and end; men are born and die; events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. But it is not their disappearance which constitutes their existence in time a history. Their historical existence is a kind of continuing life. It may be that it continues only in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly illustrates the nature of history as a process in time. In other words the life of knowledge, of memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never to return in the precise and identical manner of their first existence, they are conserved, and continue the process of dying as occurrences in order to live as a history. Yesterday as yesterday is gone forever. Its opportunities are over and its incidents dead. As an historical yesterday it lives as material for to-day's employment. It becomes an experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy. History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying; whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed.

But the conservation of what happens is obviously not a perpetuation. History is not the staying of events, for time forbids that they stay. The conservation is rather a utilization, a kind of employment or working over of material. Through it discriminations and selections are made and connections discovered; the moving panorama is converted into an order of events which can be understood, because consequences are seen in the light of their antecedents and antecedents are seen in the light of the consequences to which they lead. There is thus a genuine incorporation of what has happened into what does happen, of yesterday into to-day, so that yesterday becomes a vital part of to-day and finds its enlargement and fulfilment there. We can thus write our own biographies. It is possible for us to discover what mistakes we have made and what ends we have attained. Our history appears thus to be a utilization of material, a realization of ends, a movement with purpose in it. Selection is characteristic of it very profoundly. Other histories, of other men, of times, of peoples, of institutions, we write in the same way because in the same way we discover and understand what has happened in their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utilizing, selective, and purposeful movement in time, history appears to be when we restrict it to the domain of human knowledge.

It seems, however, idle so to restrict it. For other things besides our knowledge grow--animals and plants, and the stars even. They, too, have a history, and it may be that their history, being also an affair in time, is not unlike in character to our own growth in knowledge. Or perhaps it were even better to say that both they and our knowledge illustrate equally what history is, discovering time itself to be the great historian. All time-processes, that is, appear to be, when we attentively consider them, processes which supplement, complete, or transform what has gone before. They are active conservations and utilizations of the past as material. They save what has happened from being utterly destroyed, and, in saving it, complete and develop it. Time is, thus, constantly rounding out things, so to speak, or bringing them to some end or fulfilment. That is why we call its movement purposeful.

Yet there have been philosophies which have tried to make of time a magical device by which man might represent to himself in succession that which in itself is never in succession. They picture his journey through life as a journey through space where all that he sees, one thing after another, comes successively into view like the houses on a street along which he may walk. But as the houses do not exist in succession, neither do the facts he discovers. They, too, come into view as he moves along. These philosophies, consequently, would have us think of a world in itself, absolute and complete, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be subtracted. It is somehow fixed and finished now; but our human experience, being incomplete and unfinished, gives to it the appearance of a process in time and discloses to us what it would be like if all its factors and the laws which hold them in perfect equilibrium were experienced in succession. History would thus be a kind of temporal revelation of the absolute and we should read it as we read a book, from cover to cover, discovering page by page a story which is itself finished when we begin.

Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the world to be thus finished and complete in itself and only appearing to us as a temporal revelation, has often thought of movements in time as only the results of preceding movements. Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the effect of what has already happened, rather than the active conservation and working over of what has already happened. The past is made the cause and producer of the present, so that the state of the world at any moment is only the result or outcome of what it was in the preceding moment. To-day is thought to be the effect of yesterday and the cause of to-morrow, and is thus but a transition from one day to another. Time-processes are thus robbed of any genuine activity or productivity, and time itself is made to be nothing but the sequential order in which events occur. Purpose, conservation, utilization, and all that active supplementing and working over of the past on which we have dwelt, become illusions when applied to the world at large. They represent our way of conceiving things, but not nature's way of doing things.

But these philosophies, as Professor Bergson especially among recent philosophers has pointed out,[4] gain whatever force they have principally from the fact that they think of time in terms of space. They picture it as a line already drawn, when they should picture it as a line in the process of being drawn. As already drawn, the line has a beginning, an end, and consequently, a middle point. Let us call the middle point the present. All the line to the left of that point we will call the past and all to the right of it the future. We thus behold time spatially with all its parts coexistent as the points on the line. Events are then conceived to move from the past through the present into the future, just as a pencil point may pass from the beginning of the line through its middle point to the end. But, unlike the pencil point, they can not go backward. This fact gives us a characteristic by which we may distinguish time from space even if we have represented time spatially. The spatial order is reversible, the temporal is not. Time is like a line on which you can go forward, but on which you can not go backward. But you can go forward. Everything goes from the past to the future. The present is but the transition point of their going.

There are, undoubtedly, advantages in thinking of time in this spatial way. Thereby we are able to make calendars and have a science of mechanics. It affords a basis for many successful predictions. But, quite evidently, time is neither such a line nor anything like it. Nothing whatever goes from the past through the present into the future. We can not make such a statement intelligible. For "to go" from the past to the future is not like going from New York to Boston. Boston is already there to go to, but the future is not anywhere to go to. And New York is there to leave, but the past is not anywhere to leave. What then is this mysterious "going" if its starting-point and its end are both non-existent now? Clearly it is a "going" only in a metaphorical sense. We call it a "going" because we can so represent it by dates and places. We can say that here we have been going from Friday through Saturday to Sunday. But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past nor future, that it is neither yesterday nor to-morrow, and that if we go anywhere we must start to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday will be yesterday. But note now the strange situation into which we have fallen--only in the future is this day ever in the past! And that is true of every day in the world's history. It becomes a past day only in its own future.