[1]See, for example, the work of Flint; but since, less radical than Flint, Hegel and the Hegelians themselves also ended in admitting the concourse of the two opposed methods, traces of this perversion are also to be found in their 'philosophies of history.' Here, too, is to be noted the false analogy by which Hegel was led to discover the same relation between a priori and historical facts as between mathematics and natural facts:Man muss mit dem Kreise dessen, worin die Prinzipien fallen, wenn man es so nennen will, a priori vertraut sein, so gut als Kepler mit den Ellipsen, mit Kuben und Quadraten und mit den Gedanken von Verhältnissen derselbena priorischon vorher bekannt sein musste, ehe er aus den empirischen Daten seine unsterblichen Gesetze, welche aus Bestimmungen jener Kreise von Vorstellungen bestehen, erfinden konnte.(Cf. Vorles. üb. d. Philos, d. Gesch.,ed. Brunstäd, pp. 107-108.)
[1]See, for example, the work of Flint; but since, less radical than Flint, Hegel and the Hegelians themselves also ended in admitting the concourse of the two opposed methods, traces of this perversion are also to be found in their 'philosophies of history.' Here, too, is to be noted the false analogy by which Hegel was led to discover the same relation between a priori and historical facts as between mathematics and natural facts:Man muss mit dem Kreise dessen, worin die Prinzipien fallen, wenn man es so nennen will, a priori vertraut sein, so gut als Kepler mit den Ellipsen, mit Kuben und Quadraten und mit den Gedanken von Verhältnissen derselbena priorischon vorher bekannt sein musste, ehe er aus den empirischen Daten seine unsterblichen Gesetze, welche aus Bestimmungen jener Kreise von Vorstellungen bestehen, erfinden konnte.(Cf. Vorles. üb. d. Philos, d. Gesch.,ed. Brunstäd, pp. 107-108.)
[2]Not even the above-mentioned Flint carried it out, for he lost him-self in preliminaries of historical documentation and never proceeded to the promised construction.
[2]Not even the above-mentioned Flint carried it out, for he lost him-self in preliminaries of historical documentation and never proceeded to the promised construction.
The true remedy for the contradictions of historical determinism and of the 'philosophy of history' is quite other than this. To obtain it, we must accept the result of the preceding confutation, which shows that both are futile, and reject, as lacking thought, both the 'designs' of the philosophy of history and the causal chains of determinism. When these two shadows have been dispersed we shall find ourselves at the starting-place: we are again face to face with disconnected brute facts, with facts that are connected, but not understood, for which determinism had tried to employ the cement of causality, the 'philosophy of history,' the magic wand of finality. What shall we do with these facts? How shall we make them clear rather than dense as they were, organic rather than inorganic, intelligible rather than unintelligible? Truly, it seems difficult to do anything with them, especially to effect their desired transformation. The spirit is helpless before that which is, or is supposed to be, external to it. And when facts are understood in that way we are apt to assume again that attitude of contempt of the philosophers for history which has been well-nigh constant since antiquity almost to the end of the eighteenth century (for Aristotle history was "less philosophical" and less serious than poetry,for Sextus Empiricus it was "unmethodical material"; Kant did not feel or understand history). The attitude amounts to this: leave ideas to the philosophers and brute facts to the historians—let us be satisfied with serious things and leave their toys to the children.
But before having recourse to such a temptation, it will be prudent to ask counsel of methodical doubt (which is always most useful), and to direct the attention precisely upon those brute and disconnected facts from which the causal method claims to start and before which we, who are now abandoned by it and by its complement, the philosophy of history, appear to find ourselves again. Methodical doubt will suggest above all things the thought that those facts are apresuppositionthat hasnot been proved, and it will lead to the inquiry as towhether the proof can be obtained. Having attempted the proof, we shall finally arrive at the conclusion thatthose facts really do not exist.
For who, as a matter of fact, affirms their existence? Precisely the spirit, at the moment when it is about to undertake the search for causes. But when accomplishing that act the spirit does not already possess the brute facts (d'abord la collection des faits) and then seek the causes (après, la recherche des causes); but it makes thefacts bruteby that very act—that is to say, it posits them itself in that way, because it is of use to it so to posit them. The search for causes, undertaken by history, is not in any way different from the procedure of naturalism, already several times illustrated, which abstractly analyses and classifies reality. And to illustrate abstractly and to classify implies at the same time to judge in classifying—that is to say, to treat facts, not as acts of the spirit, conscious in the spirit that thinks them, but as external brute facts. TheDivine Comedyis that poem which we create again in our imagination in all its particulars as we read it and which we understand critically as a particular determination of the spirit, and to which we therefore assign its place in history, with all its surroundings and all its relations. But when this actuality of our thought and imagination has come to an end—that is to say, when that mental process is completed—we are able, by means of a new act of the spirit, separately to analyse its elements. Thus, for instance, we shall classify the concepts relating to 'Florentine civilization,' or to 'political poetry,' and say that theDivine Comedywas an effect of Florentine civilization, and this in its turn an effect of the strife of the communes, and the like. We shall also thus have prepared the way for those absurd problems which used to annoy de Sanctis so much in relation to the work of Dante, and which he admirably described when he said that they arise only when lively æsthetic expression has grown cold and poetical work has fallen into the hands of dullards addicted to trifles. But if we stop in time and do not enter the path of those absurdities, if we restrict ourselves purely and simply to the naturalistic moment, to classification, and to the classificatory judgment (which is also causal connexion), in an altogether practical manner, without drawing any deductions from it, we shall have done nothing that is not perfectly legitimate; indeed, we shall be exercising our right and bowing to a rational necessity, which is that of naturalizing, when naturalization is of use, but not beyond those limits. Thus the materialization of the facts and the external or causal binding of them together are altogether justified as pure naturalism. And even the maxim which bids us to stop at 'proximate' causes—that is to say, not to force classification so farthat it loses all practical utility—will find its justification. To place the concept of theDivine Comedyin relation to that of 'Florentine civilization' may be of use, but it will be of no use whatever, or infinitely less use, to place it in relation to the class of 'Indo-European civilization' or to the 'civilization of the white man.'
Let us then return with greater confidence to the point of departure, the true point of departure—that is to say, not to that of facts already disorganized and naturalized, but to that of the mind that thinks and constructs the fact. Let us raise up the debased countenances of the calumniated 'brute facts,' and we shall see the light of thought resplendent upon their foreheads. And that true point of departure will reveal itself not merely as a point of departure, but both as a point of arrival and of departure, not as the first step in historical construction, but the whole of history in its construction, which is also its self-construction. Historical determinism, and all the more 'philosophy of history,' leave thereality of historybehind them, though they directed their journey thither, a journey which became so erratic and so full of useless repetitions.
We shall make the ingenuous Taine confess that what we are saying is the truth when we ask him what he means by thecollection des faitsand learn from him in reply that the collection in question consists of two stages or moments, in the first of which documents are revived in order to attain,à travers la distance des temps, l'homme vivant, agissant, doué de passions, muni d'habitudes, avec sa voix et sa physionomie, avec ses gesteset ses habits, distinct et complet comme celui que tout à l'heure nous avons quitté dans la rue;and in the second is sought and foundsous l'homme extérieur l'homme intérieur, "l'homme invisible," "le centre," "le groupe des facultés et des sentiments qui produit le reste," "le drame intérieur," "la psychologie."Something very different, then, from collections de faits I If the things mentioned by our author really do come to pass, if we really do make live again in imagination individuals and events, and if we think what is within them—that is to say, if we think the synthesis of intuition and concept, which is thought in its concreteness—history is already achieved: what more is wanted? There is nothing more to seek. Taine replies: "We must seek causes." That is to say, we must slay the living 'fact' thought by thought, separate its abstract elements—a useful thing, no doubt, but useful for memory and practice. Or, as is the custom of Taine, we must misunderstand and exaggerate the value of the function of this abstract analysis, to lose ourselves in the mythology of races and ages, or in other different but none the less similar things. Let us beware how we slay poor facts, if we wish to think as historians, and in so far as we are such and really think in that way we shall not feel the necessity for having recourse either to the extrinsic bond of causes, historical determinism, or to that which is equally extrinsic of transcendental ends, philosophy of history. The fact historically thought has no cause and no end outside itself, but only in itself, coincident with its real qualities and with its qualitative reality. Because (it is well to note in passing) the determination of facts as real facts indeed, but ofunknown nature, asserted but not understood, is itself also an illusion of naturalism (which thus heralds its other illusion, that of the'philosophy of history'). In thought, reality and quality, existence and essence, are all one, and it is not possible to affirm a fact as real without at the same time knowing what fact it is—that is, without qualifying it.
Returning to and remaining in or moving in the concrete fact, or, rather, making of oneself thought that thinks the fact concretely, we experience the continual formation and the continual progress of our historical thought and also make clear to ourselves the history of historiography, which proceeds in the same manner. And we see how (I limit myself to this, in order not to allow the eye to wander too far) from the days of the Greeks to our own historical understanding has always been enriching and deepening itself, not because abstract causes and transcendental ends of human things have ever been recovered, but only because an ever increasing consciousness of them has been acquired. Politics and morality, religion and philosophy and art, science and culture and economy, have become more complex concepts and at the same time better determined and unified both in themselves and with respect to the whole. Correlatively with this, the histories of these forms of activity have become ever more complex and more firmly united. We know 'the causes' of civilization as little as did the Greeks; and we know as little as they of the god or gods who control the fortunes of humanity. But we know the theory of civilization better than did the Greeks, and, for instance, we know (as they did not know, or did not know with equal clearness and security) that poetry is an eternal form of the theoretic spirit, that regression or decadence is a relative concept, that the world is not divided into ideas and shadows of ideas, or into potencies and acts, that slavery is not a category of thereal, but a historical form of economic, and so forth. Thus it no longer occurs to anyone (save to the survivals or fossils, still to be found among us) to write the history of poetry on the principle of the pedagogic ends that the poets are supposed to have had in view: on the contrary, we strive to determine the forms expressive of their sentiments. We are not at all bewildered when we find ourselves before what are called 'decadences,' but we seek out what new and greater thing was being developed by means of their dialectic. We do not consider the work of man to be miserable and illusory, and aspiration and admiration for the skies and for the ascesis joined thereunto and averse to earth as alone worthy of admiration and imitation. We recognize the reality of power in the act, and in the shadows the solidity of the ideas, and on earth heaven. Finally, we do not find that the possibility of social life is lost owing to the disappearance of the system of slavery. Such a disappearance would have been the catastrophe of reality, if slaves were natural to reality—and so forth.
This conception of history and the consideration of historiographical work in itself make it possible for us to be just toward historical determinism and to the 'philosophy of history,' which, by their continual reappearance, have continually pointed to the gaps in our knowledge, both historical and philosophical, and with their false provisional solutions have heralded the correct solutions of the new problems which we have been propounding. Nor has it been said that they will henceforth cease to exercise such a function (which is the beneficial function of Utopias of every sort). And although historical determinism and the 'philosophy of history' have no history, because they do not develop, they yet receive a content from the relation in whichthey stand to history, which does develop—that is to say, history develops in them, notwithstanding their covering, extrinsic to their content, which compels to think even him who proposes to schematize and to imagine without thinking. For there is a great difference between the determinism that can now appear, after Descartes and Vico and Kant and Hegel, and that which appeared after Aristotle; between the philosophy of history of Hegel and Marx and that of gnosticism and Christianity. Transcendency and false immanency are at work in both these conceptions respectively; but the abstract forms and mythologies that have appeared in more mature epochs of thought contain this new maturity in themselves. In proof of this, let us pause but a moment (passing by the various forms of naturalism) at the case of the 'philosophy of history.' We observe already a great difference between the philosophy of history, as it appears in the Homeric world, and that of Herodotus, with whom the conception of the anger of the gods is a simulacrum of the moral law, which spares the humble and treads the proud underfoot; from Herodotus to the Fate of the Stoics, a law to which the gods themselves are subjected, and from this to the conception of Providence, which appears in late antiquity as wisdom that rules the world; from this pagan providence again to Christianity, which is divine justice, evangelical preparation, and educative care of the human race, and so on, to the refined providence of the theologians, which as a rule excludes divine intervention and operates by means of secondary causes, to that of Vico, which operates as dialectic of the spirit, to the Idea of Hegel, which is the gradual conquest of the consciousness of self, which liberty achieves during the course of history, till we finallyreach the mythology of progress and of civilization, which still persists and is supposed to tend toward the final abolition of prejudices and superstitions, to be carried out by means of the increasing power and divulgation of positive science.
In this way the 'philosophy of history' and historical determinism sometimes attain to the thinness and transparency of a veil, which covers and at the same time reveals the concreteness of the real in thought. Mechanical causes thus appear idealized, transcendent deities humanized, and facts are in great part divested of their brutal aspect. But however thin the veil may be, it remains a veil, and however clear the truth may be, it is not altogether clear, for at bottom the false persuasion still persists that history is constructed with the 'material' of brute facts, with the 'cement' of causes, and with the 'magic' of ends, as with three successive or concurrent methods. The same thing occurs with religion, which in lofty minds liberates itself almost altogether from vulgar beliefs, as do its ethics from the heteronomy of the divine command and from the utilitarianism of rewards and punishments. Almost altogether, but not altogether, and for this reason religion will never be philosophy, save by negating itself, and thus the 'philosophy of history' and historical determinism will become history only by negating themselves. The reason is that as long as they proceed in a positive manner dualism will also persist, and with it the torment of scepticism and agnosticism as a consequence.
The negation of the philosophy of history, in history understood concretely, is its ideal dissolution, and since that so-called philosophy is nothing but an abstract and negative moment, our reason for affirming thatthe philosophy of historyis dead is clear. It is dead in its positivity, dead as a body of doctrine, dead in this way, with all the other conceptions and forms of the transcendental. I do not wish to attach to my brief (but in my opinion sufficient) treatment of the argument the addition of an explanation which to some will appear to be (as it appears to me) but little philosophical and even somewhat trivial. Notwithstanding, since I prefer the accusation of semi-triviality to that of equivocation, I shall add that since the criticism of the 'concepts' of cause and transcendental finality does not forbid the use of these 'words,' when they are simple words (to talk, for example, in an imaginative way of liberty as of a goddess, or to say, when about to undertake a study of Dante, that our intention is to 'seek the cause' or 'causes' of this or that work or act of his), so nothing forbids our continuing to talk of 'philosophy of history' and of philosophizing history, meaning the necessity of treating or of a better treatment of this or that historical problem. Neither does anything forbid our calling the researches of historical gnoseology 'philosophy of history,' although in this case we are treating the history, not properly ofhistory, but ofhistoriography, two things which are wont to be designated with the same word in Italian as in other languages. Neither do we wish to prevent the statement (as did a German professor years ago) that the 'philosophy of history' must be treated as 'sociology'—that is to say, the adornment with that ancient title of so-called sociology, the empirical science of the state, of society and of culture.
These denominations are all permissible in virtue of the same right as that invoked by the adventurer Casanova when he went before the magistrates inorder to justify himself for having changed his name—"the right of every man to the letters of the alphabet." But the question treated above is not one of the letters of the alphabet. The 'philosophy of history,' of which we have briefly shown the genesis and the dissolution, is not one that is used in various senses, but a most definite mode of conceiving history—the transcendental mode.
We therefore meet the well-known saying of Fustel de Coulanges that there are certainly "history and philosophy, but not the philosophy of history," with the following: there is neither philosophy nor history, nor philosophy of history, but history which is philosophy and philosophy which is history and is intrinsic to history. For this reason, all the controversies—and foremost of all those concerned with progress—which philosophers, methodologists of history, and sociologists believe to belong to their especial province, and flaunt at the beginning and the end of their treatises, are reduced for us to simple problems of philosophy, with historical motivation, all of them connected with the problems of which philosophy treats.
In controversies relating to progress it is asked whether the work of man be fertile or sterile, whether it be lost or preserved, whether history have an end, and if so of what sort, whether this end be attainable in time or only in the infinite, whether history be progress or regress, or an interchange between progress and regress, greatness and decadence, whether good or evil prevail in it, and the like. When these questions have been considered with a little attention we shall see that they resolve themselves substantially into three points: the conception of development, that of end, and that of value. That is to say, they are concerned with the whole of reality, and with history only when it isprecisely the whole of reality. For this reason they do not belong to supposed particular sciences, to the philosophy of history, or to sociology, but to philosophy and to history in so far as it is philosophy. When the ordinary current terminology has been translated into philosophical terms it calls forth immediately the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis by means of which those problems have been thought and solved during the course of philosophy, to which the reader desirous of instruction must be referred. We can only mention here that the conception of reality as development is nothing but the synthesis of the two one-sided opposites, consisting of permanency without change and of change without permanency, of an identity without diversity and of a diversity without identity, for development is a perpetual surpassing, which is at the same time a perpetual conservation. From this point of view one of the conceptions that has had the greatest vogue in historical books, that ofhistorical circles,is revealed as an equivocal attempt to issue forth from a double one-sidedness and a falling back into it, owing to an equivocation. Because either the series of circles is conceived as composed of identicals and we have only permanency, or it is conceived as of things diverse and we have only change. But if, on the contrary, we conceive it as circularity that is perpetually identical and at the same time perpetually diverse, in this sense it coincides with the conception of development itself.
In like manner, the opposite theses, as to the attainment or the impossibility of attainment of the end of history, reveal their common defect of positing the end asextrinsicto history, conceiving of it either as that which can be reached in time (progressus ad finitum),or as that which can never be attained, but only infinitely approximated (progressus ad infinitum). But where the end has been correctly conceived asinternal—that is to say, all one with development itself—we must conclude that it is attained at every instant, and at the same time not attained, because every attainment is the formation of a new prospect, whence we have at every moment the satisfaction of possession, and arising from this the dissatisfaction which drives us to seek a new possession.[1]
Finally, the conceptions of history as a passage from evil to good (progress), or from good to evil (decadence, regression), take their origin from the same error of entifying and making extrinsic good and evil, joy and sorrow (which are the dialectical construction of reality itself). To unite them in the eclectic conception of an alternation of good and evil, of progress and regress, is incorrect. The true solution is that of progress understood not as a passage from evil to good, as though from one state to another, but as the passage from the good to the better, in which the evil is the good itself seen in the light of the better.
These are all philosophical solutions which are at variance with the superficial theses of controversialists (dictated to them by sentimental motives or imaginative combinations, really mythological or resulting in mythologies), to the same extent that they are in accordance with profound human convictions and with the tireless toil, the trust, the courage, which constitute their ethical manifestations.
By drawing the consequences of the dialecticalconception of progress something more immediately effective can be achieved in respect to the practice and history of historiography. For we find in that conception the origin of a historical maxim, in the mouth of every one, yet frequently misunderstood and frequently violated—that is to say, that to history pertains not tojudge,but toexplain,and that it should be notsubjectivebutobjective.
Misunderstood, because the judging in question is often taken in the sense of logical judgment, of that judgment which is thinking itself, and the subjectivity, which would thus be excluded, would be neither more nor less than the subjectivity of thought. In consequence of this misunderstanding we hear historians being advised to purge themselves of theories, to refrain from the disputes arising from them, to restrict themselves to facts, collecting, arranging, and squeezing out the sap (even by the statistical method). It is impossible to follow such advice as this, as may easily be seen, for such 'abstention from thought' reveals itself as really abstention from 'seriousness of thought,' as a surreptitious attaching of value to the most vulgar and contradictory thoughts, transmitted by tradition, wandering about idly in the mind, or flashing out as the result of momentary caprice. The maxim is altogether false, understood or misunderstood in this way, and it must be taken by its opposite—namely, that history must always judge strictly, and that it must always be energetically subjective without allowing itself to be confused by the conflicts in which thought engages or by the risks that it runs. For it is thought itself, and thought alone, which gets over its own difficulties and dangers, without falling even here into that frivolous eclecticism which tries to find a middle term betweenour judgment and that of others, and suggests various neutral and insipid forms of judgment.
But the true and legitimate meaning, the original motive for that 'judging,' that 'subjectivity,' which it condemns, is that history should not apply to the deeds and the personages that are its material the qualifications of good and evil, as though there really were good and evil facts in the world, people who are good and people who are evil. And it is certainly not to be denied that innumerable historiographers, or those who claim to be historiographers, have really striven and still strive along those lines, in the vain and presumptuous attempt to reward the good and punish the evil, to qualify historical epochs as representing progress or decadence—in a word, to settle what is good and what is evil, as though it were a question of separating one element from another in a compound, hydrogen from, oxygen.
Whoever desires to observe intrinsically the above maxim, and by doing so to set himself in accordance with the dialectic conception of progress, must in truth look upon every trace or vestige of propositions affirming evil, regression, or decadence as real facts, as a sign of imperfection—in a word, he must condemn every trace or vestige ofnegativejudgments. If the course of history is not the passage from evil to good, or alternative good and evil, but the passage from the good to the better, if history should explain and not condemn, it will pronounce onlypositivejudgments, and will forge chains of good, so solid and so closely linked that it will not be possible to introduce into them even a little link of evil or to interpose empty spaces, which in so far as they are empty would not represent good but evil. A fact that seems to be only evil, an epoch that appearsto be one of complete decadence, can be nothing but anon-historicalfact—that is to say, one which has not been historically treated, not penetrated by thought, and which has remained the prey of sentiment and imagination.
Whence comes the phenomenology of good and evil, of sin and repentance, of decadence and resurrection, save from the consciousness of the agent, from the act which is in labour to produce a new form of life?[2]And in that act the adversary who opposed us is in the wrong; the state from which we wish to escape, and from which we are escaping, is unhappy; the new one toward which we are tending becomes symbolized as a dreamed-of felicity to be attained, or as a past condition to restore, which is therefore most beautiful in recollection (which here is not recollection, but imagination). Every one knows how these things present them-selves to us in the course of history, manifesting themselves in poetry, in Utopias, in stories with a moral, in detractions, in apologies, in myths of love, of hate, and the like. To the heretics of the Middle Ages and to the Protestant reformers the condition of the primitive Christians seemed to be most lovely and most holy, that of papal Christians most evil and debased. The Sparta of Lycurgus and the Rome of Cincinnatus seemed to the Jacobins to be as admirable as France under the Carlovingians and the Capetians was detestable. The humanists looked upon the lives of the ancient poets and sages as luminous and the life of the Middle Ages as dense darkness. Even in times near our own has been witnessed the glorification of the Lombard communes and the depreciation of the Holy Roman Empire, and the very opposite of this, according as the facts relating to thesehistorical events were reflected in the consciousness of an Italian longing for the independence of Italy or of a German upholding the holy German empire of Prussian hegemony. And this will always happen, because such is the phenomenology of the practical consciousness, and these practical valuations will always be present to some extent in the works of historians. As works, these are not and cannot ever be pure history, quintessential history; if in no other way, then in their phrasing and use of metaphors they will reflect the repercussion of practical needs and efforts directed toward the future. But the historical consciousness, as such, is logical and not practical consciousness, and indeed makes the other its object; history once lived has become in it thought, and the antitheses of will and feeling that formerly offered resistance have no longer a place in thought.
For if there are no good and evil facts, but facts that are always good when understood in their intimate being and concreteness, there are not opposite sides, but that wider side that embraces both the adversaries and which happens just to be historical consideration. Historical consideration, therefore, recognizes as of equal right the Church of the catacombs and that of Gregory VII, the tribunes of the Roman people and the feudal barons, the Lombard League and the Emperor Barbarossa. History never metes out justice, but alwaysjustifies; she could not carry out the former act without making herself unjust—that is to say, confounding thought with life, taking the attractions and repulsions of sentiment for the judgments of thought.
Poetry is satisfied with the expression of sentiment, and it is worthy of note that a considerable historian, Schlosser, wishing to reserve for himself the right and duty ofjudging historical facts with Kantian austerity and abstraction, kept his eyes fixed on theDivine Comedy—that is to say, a poetical work—as his model of treatment. And since there are poetical elements in all myths, we understand why the conception of history known asdualistic—that is to say, of history as composed of two currents, which mix but never resolve in one another their waters of good and evil, truth and error, rationality and irrationality—should have formed a conspicuous part, not only of the Christian religion, but also of the mythologies (for they really are such) of humanism and of illuminism. But the detection of this problem of the duality of values and its solution in the superior unity of the conception of development is the work of the nineteenth century, which on this account and on account of other solutions of the same kind (certainly not on account of its philological and archæological richness, which was relatively common to the four preceding centuries) has been well called 'the century of history.'
Not only, therefore, is history unable to discriminate between facts that are good and facts that are evil, and between epochs that are progressive and those that are regressive, but it does not begin until the psychological conditions which rendered possible such antitheses have been superseded and substituted by an act of the spirit, which seeks to ascertain what function the fact or the epoch previously condemned has fulfilled—that is to say, what it has produced of its own in the course of development, and therefore what it has produced. And since all facts and epochs are productive in their own way, not only is not one of them to be condemned in the light of history, but all are to be praised and venerated. A condemned fact, a fact that is repugnant, is not yet a historical proposition, it is hardly even thepremiss of a historical problem to be formulated. A negative history is a non-history so long as its negative process substitutes itself for thought, which is affirmative, and does not maintain itself within its practical and moral bounds and limit itself to poetical expressions and empirical modes of representation, in respect of all of which we can certainly speak (speak and not think), as we do speak at every moment, of bad men and periods of decadence and regression.
If the vice of negative history arises from the separation, the solidification, and the opposition of the dialectical antitheses of good and evil and the transformation of the ideal moments of development into entities, that other deviation of history which may be known as elegiac history arises from the misunderstanding of another necessity of that conception—that is to say, the perpetual constancy, the perpetual conservation of what has been acquired. But this is also false by definition. What is preserved and enriched in the course of history is history itself, spirituality. The past does not live otherwise than in the present, as the force of the present, resolved and transformed in the present. Every particular form, individual, action, institution, work, thought, is destined to perish: even art, which is called eternal (and is so in a certain sense), perishes, for it does not live, save to the extent that it is reproduced, and therefore transfigured and surrounded with new light, in the spirit of posterity. Finally, truth itself perishes, particular and determined truth, because it is not rethinkable, save when included in the system of a vaster truth, and therefore at the same time transformed. But those who do not rise to the conception of pure historical consideration, those who attach themselves with their whole soul to an individual, a work, a belief, aninstitution, and attach themselves so strongly that they cannot separate themselves from it in order to objectify it before themselves and think it, are prone to attribute the immortality which belongs to the spirit in universal to the spirit in one of its particular and determined forms; and since that form, notwithstanding their efforts, dies, and dies in their arms, the universe darkens before their gaze, and the only history that they can relate is the sad one of the agony and death of beautiful things. This too is poetry, and very lofty poetry. Who can do otherwise than weep at the loss of a beloved one, at separation from something dear to him, cannot see the sun extinguished and the earth tremble and the birds cease their flight and fall to earth, like Dante, on the loss of his beloved "who was so beautiful"? But history is neverhistory of death, buthistory of life, and all know that the proper commemoration of the dead is the knowledge of what they did in life, of what they produced that is working in us, the history of their life and not of their death, which it behoves a gentle soul to veil, a soul barbarous and perverse to exhibit in its miserable nakedness and to contemplate with unhealthy persistence. For this reason all histories which narrate the death and not the life of peoples, of states, of institutions, of customs, of literary and artistic ideals, of religious conceptions, are to be considered false, or, we repeat, simply poetry, where they attain to the level of poetry. People grow sad and suffer and lament because that which was is no longer. This would resolve itself into a mere tautology (because if it was, it is evident that it is no longer), were it not conjoined to the neglect of recognizing what of that past has not perished—that is to say, that past in so far as it is not past but present, the eternal life of the past. It is in this neglect,in the incorrect view arising out of it, that the falsity of such histories resides.
It sometimes happens that historians, intent upon narrating those scenes of anguish in a lugubrious manner and upon celebrating the funerals which it pleases them to call histories, remain partly astounded and partly scandalized when they hear a peal of laughter, a cry of joy, a sigh of satisfaction, or find an enthusiastic impulse springing up from the documents that they are searching. How, they ask, could men live, make love, reproduce their species, sing, paint, discuss, when the trumps were sounding east and west to announce the end of the world? But they do not see that such an end of the world exists only in their own imaginations, rich in elegiac motives, but poor in understanding. They do not perceive that such importunate trumpet-calls have never in reality existed. These are very useful, on the other hand, for reminding those who may have forgotten it that history always pursues her indefatigable work, and that her apparent agonies are the travail of a new birth, and that what are believed to be her expiring sighs are moans that announce the birth of a new world. History differs from the individual who dies because, in the words of Alcmæon of Crete, he is not able τὴν ἀρχήν τῷ τέλει προσάψαι, to join his beginning to his end: history never dies, because she always joins her beginning to her end.
[1]For the complete development of these conceptions, see my study ofThe Conception of Becoming, in theSaggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, pp. 149-175 (Bari, 1913). (English translation of the work on Hegel by Douglas Ainslie. Macmillan, London.)
[1]For the complete development of these conceptions, see my study ofThe Conception of Becoming, in theSaggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, pp. 149-175 (Bari, 1913). (English translation of the work on Hegel by Douglas Ainslie. Macmillan, London.)
[2]For what relates to this section, see my treatment ofJudgments of Value,in the work before cited.
[2]For what relates to this section, see my treatment ofJudgments of Value,in the work before cited.
Enfranchising itself from servitude to extra-mundane caprice and to blind natural necessity, freeing itself from transcendency and from false immanence (which is in its turn transcendency), thought conceives history as the work of man, as the product of human will and intellect, and in this manner enters that form of history which we shall callhumanistic.This humanism first appears as in simple contrast to nature or to extra-mundane powers, and posits dualism. On the one side is man, with his strength, his intelligence, his reason, his prudence, his will for the good; on the other there is something that resists him, strives against him, upsets his wisest plans, breaks the web that he has been weaving and obliges him to weave it all over again. History, envisaged from the view-point of this conception, is developed entirely from the first of these two sides, because the other does not afford a dialectical element which can be continually met and superseded by the first, giving rise to a sort of interior collaboration, but represents the absolutely extraneous, the capricious, the accidental, the meddler, the ghost at the feast. Only in the former do we find rationality combined with human endeavour, and thus the possibility of a rational explication of history. What comes from the other side is announced, but not explained: it is not material for history, but at the most for chronicle. This first form of humanistic history is known under the various names ofrationalistic, intellectualistic,abstractistic, individualistic, psychologicalhistory, and especially under that ofpragmatichistory. It is a form generally condemned by the consciousness of our times, which has employed these designations, especiallyrationalismandpragmatism, to represent a particular sort of historiographical insufficiency and inferiority, and has made proverbial the most characteristic pragmatic explanations of institutions and events, as types of misrepresentation into which one must beware of falling if one wish to think history seriously. But as happens in the progress of culture and science, even if the condemnation be cordially accepted and no hesitation entertained as to drawing practical consequences from it in the field of actuality, there is not an equally clear consciousness of the reasons for this, or of the thought process by means of which it has been attained. This process we may briefly describe as follows.
Pragmatic finds the reasons for historical facts in man, but in manin so far as he is an individual made abstract, and thus opposed as such not only to the universe, but to other men, who have also been made abstract. History thus appears to consist of the mechanical action and reaction of beings, each one of whom is shut up in himself. Now no historical process is intelligible under such an arrangement, for the sum of the addition is always superior to the numbers added. To such an extent is this true that, not knowing which way to turn in order to make the sum come out right, it became necessary to excogitate the doctrine of 'little causes,' which were supposed to produce 'great effects.' This doctrine is absurd, for it is clear that great effects can only have real causes (if the illegitimate conceptions of great and small, of cause and effect, be applicable here). Such a formula, then, far from expressing the law of historicalfacts, unconsciously expresses the defects of the doctrine, which is inadequate for its purpose. And since the rational explanation fails, there arise crowds of fancies to take its place, which are all conceived upon the fundamental motive of the abstract individual. The pragmatic explanation of religions is characteristic of this; these are supposed to have been produced and maintained in the world by the economic cunning of the priests, taking advantage of the ignorance and credulity of the masses. But historical pragmatic does not always present itself in the guise of this egoistic and pessimistic inspiration. It is not fair to accuse it of egoism and utilitarianism, when the true accusation should, as we have already said, be levelled at its abstract individualism. This abstract individualism could be and sometimes was conceived even as highly moral, for we certainly find among the pragmatics sage legislators, good kings, and great men, who benefit humanity by means of science, inventions, and well-organized institutions. And if the greedy priest arranged the deceit of religions, if the cruel despot oppressed weak and innocent people, and if error was prolific and engendered the strangest and most foolish customs, yet the goodness of the enlightened monarch and legislator created the happy epochs, caused the arts to flourish, encouraged poets, aided discoveries, encouraged industries. From these pragmatic conceptions is derived the verbal usage whereby we speak of the age of Pericles, of that of Augustus, of that of Leo X, or of that of Louis XIV. And since fanciful explanations do not limit themselves merely to individuals physically existing, but also employ facts and small details, which are also made abstract and shut up in themselves, being thus also turned into what Vico describes as 'imaginative universals,' in like mannerall these modes of explanation known as 'catastrophic' and making hinge the salvation or the ruin of a whole society upon the virtue of some single fact are also derived from pragmatic. Examples of this, which have also become proverbial, because they refer to concepts that have been persistently criticized by the historians of our time, are the fall of the Roman Empire, explained as the result of barbarian invasions, European civilization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the result of the Crusades, the renascence of classical literatures, as the result of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and of the immigration of the learned Byzantines into Italy—and the like. And in just the same way as when the conception of the single individual did not furnish a sufficient explanation recourse was for that reason had to a multiplicity of individuals, to their co-operation and conflicting action, so here, when the sole cause adduced soon proved itself too narrow, an attempt was made to make up for the insufficiency of the method by the search for and enumeration of multiple historical causes. This enumeration threatened to proceed to the infinite, but, finite or infinite as it might be, it never explained the process to be explained, for the obvious reason that the continuous is never made out of the discontinuous, however much the latter may be multiplied and solidified. The so-called theory of the causes or factors of history, which survives in modern consciousness, together with several other mental habits of pragmatic, although generally inclined to follow other paths, is rather a confession of powerlessness to dominate history by means of individual causes, or causes individually conceived, than a theory; far from being a solution, it is but a reopening of the problem.
Pragmatic therefore fails to remain human—that is to say, to develop itself as rationality; even in the human side to which it clings and in which it wishes to maintain and oppose itself to the natural or extra-natural; and having already made individuals irrational and unhuman by making them abstract, it gradually has recourse to other historical factors, and arrives finally at natural causes, which do not differ at all in their abstractness from other individual causes. This means that pragmatic, which had previously asserted itself as humanism, falls back into naturalism, from which it had distinctly separated itself. And it falls into it all the more, seeing that, as has been noted, human individuals have been made abstract, not only among themselves, but toward the rest of the universe, which remains facing them, as though it were an enemy. What is it that really rules history according to this conception? Is it man, or extra-human powers, natural or divine? The claim that history exists only as an individual experience is not maintainable; and in the pragmatic conception another agent in history is always presumed, an extra-human being which, at different times and to different thinkers, is known as fate, chance, fortune, nature, God, or by some other name. During the period at which pragmatic history flourished, and there was much talk of reason and wisdom, an expression of a monarchical or courtly tinge is to be found upon the lips of a monarch and of a philosopher who was his friend: homage was paid tosa Majesté le Hasard!Here too there is an attempt to patch up the difficulty and to seek eclectic solutions; in order to get out of it, we find pragmatic affirming that human affairs are conducted half by prudence and half by fortune, that intelligencecontributes one part, fortune another, and so on. But who will assign the just share to the two competitors? Will not he who does assign it be the true and only maker of history? And since he who does assign it cannot be man, we see once again how pragmatic leads directly to transcendency and irrationality through its naturalism. It leads to irrationality, accompanied by all its following of inconveniences and by all the other dualisms that it brings with it and which are particular aspects of itself, such as the impossibility of development, regressions, the triumph of evil. The individual, engaged with external forces however conceived, sometimes wins, at other times loses; his victory itself is precarious, and the enemy is always victorious, inflicting losses upon him and making his victories precarious. Individuals are ants crushed by a piece of rock, and if some ant escapes from the mass that falls upon it and reproduces the species, which begins again the labour from the beginning, the rock will fall, or always may fall, upon the new generation and may crush all of its members, so that it is the arbiter of the lives of the industrious ants, to which it does much injury and no good. This is as pessimistic a view as can be conceived.
These difficulties and vain-tentatives of pragmatic historiography have caused it to be looked upon with disfavour and to be rejected in favour of a superior conception, which preserves the initial humanistic motive and, removing from it the abstractness of the atomicized individual, assures it against any falling back into agnosticism, transcendency, or the despair caused by pessimism. The conception that has completed the criticism of pragmatic and the redemption of humanism has been variously and more or less wellformulated in the course of the history of thought as mind or reason that constructs history, as the 'providence' of mind or the 'astuteness' of reason.
The great value of this conception is that it changes humanism from abstract to concrete, from monadistic or atomistic to idealistic, from something barely human into something cosmic, from unhuman humanism, such as that of man shut up in himself and opposed to man, into humanism that is really human, the humanity common to men, indeed to the whole universe, which is all humanity, even in its most hidden recesses—that is to say, spirituality. And history, according to this conception, as it is no longer the work of nature or of an extra-mundane God, so it is not the impotent work of the empirical and unreal individual, interrupted at every moment, but the work of that individual which is truly real and is the eternal spirit individualizing itself. For this reason it has no adversary at all opposed to it, but every adversary is at the same time its subject —that is to say, is one of the aspects of that dialecticism which constitutes its inner being. Again, it does not seek its principle of explanation in a particular act of thought or will, or in a single individual or in a multitude of individuals, or in an event given as the cause of other events, or in a collection of events that form the cause of a single event, but seeks and places it in the process itself, which is born of thought and returns to thought, and is intelligible through the auto-intelligibility of thought, which never has need of appealing to anything external to itself in order to understand itself. The explanation of history becomes so truly, because it coincides with its explication; whereas explanation by means of abstract causes is a breaking up of the process; the living having been slain, there is a forced attemptmade to obtain life by setting the severed head again upon the shoulders.
When the historians of our day, and the many sensible folk who do not make a profession of philosophy, repeat that the history of the world does not depend upon the will of individuals, upon such accidents as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or upon anecdotes; that no historical event has ever been the result of deception or misunderstanding, but that all have been due to persuasion and necessity; that there is some one who has more intelligence than any individual whatever—the world; that the explanation of a fact is always to be sought in the entire organism and not in a single part torn from the other parts; that history could not have been developed otherwise than it has developed, and that it obeys its own iron logic; that every fact has its reason and that no individual is completely wrong; and numberless propositions of the same sort, which I have assembled promiscuously—they are perhaps not aware that with such henceforth obvious statements they are repeating the criticism of pragmatic history (and implicitly that of theological and naturalistic history) and affirming the truth of idealistic history. Were they aware of this, they would not mingle with these propositions others which are their direct contradiction, relating to causes, accidents, decadences, climates, races, and so on, which represent the detritus of the conception that has been superseded. For the rest, it is characteristic of the consciousness called common or vulgar to drag along with it an abundant detritus of old, dead concepts mingled with the new ones; but this does not detract from the importance of its enforced recognition of the new concept, which it substantially follows in its judgments.
Owing to the already mentioned resolution of all historiographical questions into general philosophy, it would not be possible to give copious illustrations of the new concept of history which the nineteenth century has accepted in place of the pragmatic conception without giving a lengthy exposition of general philosophy, which, in addition to the particular inconvenience its presence would have here, would lead to the repetition of things elsewhere explained. Taking the position that history is the work, not of the abstract individual, but of reason or providence, as admitted, I intend rather to correct an erroneous mode of expressing that doctrine which I believe that I have detected. I mean the form given to it by Vico and by Hegel, according to which Providence or Reason makes use of the particular ends and passions of men, in order to conduct them unconsciously to more lofty spiritual conditions, making use for this purpose of benevolent cunning.
Were this form exact, or were it necessary to take it literally (and not simply as an imaginative and provisional expression of the truth), I greatly fear that a shadow of dualism and transcendency would appear in the heart of the idealistic conception. For in this position of theirs toward the Idea or Providence, individuals would have to be considered, if not asdeluded(satisfied indeed beyond their desires and hopes), then certainly asilluded, even though benevolently illuded. Individuals and Providence, or individuals and Reason, would not make one, but two; and the individual would be inferior and the Idea superior—that is to say, dualism and the reciprocal transcendency of God and the world would persist. This, on the other hand, would not be at variance from the historical pointof view with what has been several times observed as to the theological residue at the bottom of Hegel's, and yet more of Vico's, thought. Now the claim of the idealistic conception is that individual and Idea make one and not two—that is to say, perfectly coincide and are identified. For this reason, there must be no talking (save metaphorically) of the wisdom of the Idea and of the folly or illusion of individuals.
Nevertheless it seems indubitably certain that the individual acts through the medium of infinite illusions, proposing to himself ends that he fails to attain and attaining ends that he has not seen. Schopenhauer (imitating Hegel) has made popular the illusions of love, by means of which the will leads the individual to propagate the species; and we all know that illusions are not limited to those that men and women exercise toward one another (les tromperies réciproques), but that they enter into our every act, which is always accompanied by hopes and mirages that are not followed by realization. And the illusion of illusions seems to be this: that the individual believes himself to be toiling to live and to intensify his life more and more, whereas he is really toiling to die. He wishes to see his work completed as the affirmation of his life, and its completion is the passing away of the work; he toils to obtain peace in life, but peace is on the contrary death, which alone is peace. How then are we to deny this dualism between the illusion of the individual and the reality of the work, between the individual and the Idea? How are we to refute the only explanation which seems to compose in some measure the discord—namely, that the Idea turns the illusions of the individual to its own ends, even though this doctrine lead inevitably to a sort of transcendency of the Idea?
But the real truth is that what results from the observations and objections above exposed is not the illusion of the individual who loves, who tries to complete his work, who sighs for peace, but rather the illusion of him who believes that the individual is illuded: the illusory is the illusion itself. And this illusion appears in the phenomenology of the spirit as the result of the well-known abstractive process, which breaks up unity in an arbitrary manner and in this case separates the result from the process or actual acting, in which alone the former is real; the accompaniment from the accompanied, which is all one with the accompaniment, because there is not spirit and its escort, but only the one spirit in its development, the single moments of the process, of the continuity, which is their soul; and so on. That illusion arises in the individual when he begins to reflect upon himself, and at the beginning of that reflection, which is at the same time a dialectical process. But in concrete reflection, or rather in concrete consciousness, he discovers that there is no end that has not been realized, as well as it could, in the process, in which it was never an absolute end—that is to say, an abstract end, but both a means and an end.
To return to the popular theory of Schopenhauer, only he who looks upon men as animals, or worse than animals, can believe that love is a process that leads only to the biological propagation of the species, when every man knows that he fecundates his own soul above all prior to the marriage couch, and that images and thoughts and projects and actions are created before children and in addition to them. Certainly, we are conscious of the moments of an action as it develops—that is to say, of its passage and not of its totality seen in the light of a new spiritual situation, such as we strive to obtainwhen, as we say, we leave the tumult behind us and set ourselves to write our own history. But there is no illusion, either now or then; neither now nor then is there the abstract individual face to face with a Providence who succeeds in deceiving him for beneficial ends, acting rather as a doctor than as a serious educator, and treating the race of men as though they were animals to train and make use of, instead of men to educate—that is to say, develop.
After having concentrated the mind upon a thought of Vico and of Hegel, can it be possible to set ourselves down to examine those of others which afford material to the controversies of historians and methodologists of history of our time? These represent the usual form in which appear the problems concerning the relation between the individual and the Idea, between pragmatic and idealistic history. Perhaps the patience necessary for the descent into low haunts is meritorious and our duty; perhaps there may be some useful conclusion to be drawn from these common disputes; but I must beg to be excused for not taking part in them and for limiting myself to the sole remark that the question which has been for some time discussed, whether history be the history of 'masses' or of 'individuals,' would be laughable in its very enunciation, if we were to understand by 'mass' what the word implies, a complex of individuals. And since it is not a good method to attribute laughable ideas to adversaries, it may be supposed that on this occasion what is meant by 'mass' is something else, which moves the mass of individuals. In this case, anyone can see that the problem is the same as that which has just been examined. The conflict between 'collectivistic' and 'individualistic' historiography will never be composed so long as the formerassigns to collectivity the power that is creative of ideas and institutions, and the latter assigns it to the individual of genius, for both affirmations are true in what they include and false in what they exclude—that is to say, not only in their exclusion of the opposed thesis, but also in the tacit exclusion, which they both make, of totality as idea.
A warning as to a historiographical method, so similar in appearance to that which I have been defending as to be confounded with it, may perhaps be more opportune. This method, which is variously calledsociological, institutional,andof values,preserves among the variety of its content and the inequality of mental level noticeable in its supporters the general and constant characteristic of believing that true history consists of the history of societies, institutions, and human values, not of individual values. The history of individuals, according to this view, is excluded, as being a parallel or inferior history, and its inferiority is held to be due either to the slight degree of interest that it is capable of arousing or to its lack of intelligibility. In the latter case (by an inversion on this occasion of the attitude of contempt which was noted in pragmatic history) it is handed over to chronicle or romance. But in such dualism as this, and in the disagreement which persists owing to that dualism, lies the profound difference between the empirical and naturalistic conceptions of value, of institutions, and of societies, and the idealistic conception. This conception does not contemplate the establishment of an abstract history of the spirit, of the abstract universal, side by side with or beyond abstract individualistic or pragmatic history, but the understanding that individual and idea, taken separately, are two equivalent abstractions, each equallyunfitted for supplying its subject to history, and that true history is the history of the individual in so far as he is universal and of the universal in so far as individual. It is not a question of abolishing Pericles to the advantage of politics, or Plato to the advantage of philosophy, or Sophocles to the advantage of tragedy; but to think and to represent politics, philosophy, and tragedy as Pericles, Plato, and Sophocles, and these as each one of the others in one of their particular moments. Because if each one of these is the shadow of a dream outside its relation with the spirit, so likewise is the spirit outside its individualizations, and to attain to universality in the conception of history is to render both equally secure with that security which they mutually confer upon one another. Were the existence of Pericles, of Sophocles, and of Plato indifferent, would not the existence of the idea have for that very reason been pronounced indifferent? Let him who cuts individuals out of history but pay close attention and he will perceive that either he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he has cut out with them history itself.
Since a fact is historical in so far as it is thought, and since nothing exists outside thought, there can be no sense whatever in the question, What arehistorical factsand what arenon-historical facts?A non-historical fact would be a fact that has not been thought and would therefore be non-existent, and so far no one has yet met with a non-existent fact. A historical thought links itself to and follows another historical thought, and then another, and yet another; and however far we navigate the great sea of being, we never leave the well-defined sea of thought. But it remains to be explained how the illusion is formed that there are two orders of facts, historical and non-historical. The explanation is easy when we recollect what has been said as to the chroniclizing of history which dies as history, leaving behind it the mute traces of its life, and also as to the function of erudition or philology, which preserves these traces for the ends of culture, arranging scattered items of news, documents, and monuments in an orderly manner. News, documents, and monuments are innumerable, and to collect them all would not only be impossible, but contrary to the ends themselves of culture, which, though aided in its work by the moderate and even copious supply of such things, would be hindered and suffocated by their exuberance, not to say infinity. We consequently observe that the annotator of news transcribes some items and omits the rest; the collectorof papers arranges and ties up in a bundle a certain number of them, tearing up or burning or sending to the dealer in such things a very large quantity, which forms the majority; the collector of antiques places some objects in glass cases, others in temporary safe custody, others he resolutely destroys or allows to be destroyed; if he does otherwise, he is not an intelligent collector, but a maniacal amasser, well fitted to provide (as he has provided) the comic type of the antiquarian for fiction and comedy. For this reason, not only are papers jealously collected and preserved in public archives, and lists made of them, but efforts are also made to discard those that are useless. It is for this reason that in the recensions of philologists we always hear the same song in praise of the learned man who has made a 'sober' use of documents, of blame for him who has followed a different method and included what is vain and superfluous in his volumes of annals, of selections from archives, or of collections of documents. All learned men and philologists, in fact, select, and all are advised to select. And what is the logical criterion of this selection? There is none: no logical criterion can be named that shall determine what news or what documents are or are not useful and important, just because we are here occupied with a practical and not with a scientific problem. Indeed, this lack of a logical criterion is the foundation of the sophism that tyrannizes over maniacal collectors, who reasonably affirm that everything can be of use, and would therefore unreasonably preserve everything—they wear themselves out in accumulating old clothes and odds and ends of all sorts, over which they mount guard with jealous affection. The criterion is the choice itself, conditioned, like every economic act, by knowledge of the actual situation, andin this case by the practical and scientific needs of a definite moment or epoch. This selection is certainly conducted with intelligence, but not with the application of a philosophic criterion, and is justified only in and by itself. For this reason we speak of the fine tact, or scent, or instinct of the collector or learned man. Such a process of selection may quite well make use of apparent logical distinctions, as those between public and private facts, capital and secondary documents, beautiful or ugly, significant or insignificant monuments; but in final analysis the decision is always given from practical motives, and is summed up in the act of preserving or neglecting. Now from this preserving or neglecting, in which our action is realized, is afterward invented anobjectivequality, attributed to facts, which leads to their being spoken of as 'facts that are worthy' and 'facts that are not worthy of history,' of 'historical' and 'non-historical' facts. But all this is an affair of imagination, of vocabulary, and of rhetoric, which in no way changes the substance of things.
When history is confounded with erudition and the methods of the one are unduly transferred to the other, and when the metaphorical distinction that has just been noted is taken in a literal sense, we are asked how it is possible to avoid going astray in the infinity of facts, and with what criterion it is possible to effect the separation of 'historical' facts from 'those that are not worthy of history.' But there is no fear of going astray in history, because, as we have seen, the problem is in every case prepared by life, and in every case the problem is solved by thought, which passes from the confusion of life to the distinctness of consciousness; a given problem with a given solution: a problem that generates other problems, but is nevera problem of choice between two or more facts, but on each occasion a creation of the unique fact, the fact thought. Choice does not appear in it, any more than in art, which passes from the obscurity of sentiment to the clearness of the representation, and is never embarrassed between the images to be chosen, because itself creates the image, the unity of the image.
By thus confounding two things, not only is an insoluble problem created, but the very distinction between facts that can and facts that cannot be neglected is also denaturalized and rendered void. This distinction is quite valid as regards erudition, for facts that can be neglected are always facts—that is to say, they are traces of facts, in the form of news, documents, and monuments, and for this reason one can understand how they can be looked upon as a class to be placed side by side with the other class of facts that cannot be neglected. But non-historical facts—that is to say, facts that have not been thought—would be nothing, and when placed beside historical facts—that is to say, thought as a species of the same genus—they would communicate their nullity to those also, and would dissolve their own distinctness, together with the concept of history.
After this, it does not seem necessary to examine the characteristics that have been proposed as the basis for this division of facts into historical and non-historical. The assumption being false, the manner in which it is treated in its particulars remains indifferent and without importance in respect to the fundamental criticism of the division itself. It may happen (and this is usually the case) that the characteristics and the differences enunciated have some truth in themselves, or at least offer some problem for solution: for example, when byhistorical facts are meant general facts and by non-historical facts those that are individual. Here we find the problem of the relation of the individual and the universal. Or, again, by historical facts are sometimes meant those that treat of history proper, and by non-historical the stray references of chronicles, and here we find the problem as to the relation between history and chronicle. But regarded as an attempt to decide logically of what facts history should treat and what neglect, and to assign to each its quality, such divisions are all equally erroneous.
Theperiodizationof history is subject to the same criticism. Tothinkhistory is certainlyto divide it into periods, because thought is organism, dialectic, drama, and as such has its periods, its beginning, its middle, and its end, and all the other ideal pauses that a drama implies and demands. But those pauses are ideal and therefore inseparable from thought, with which they are one, as the shadow is one with the body, silence with sound: they are identical and changeable with it. Christian thinkers divided history into that which preceded and that which followed the redemption, and this periodization was not an addition to Christian thought, but Christian thought itself. We modern Europeans divide it into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. This periodization has been subject to a great deal of refined criticism on the part of those who hold that it came to be introduced anyhow, almost dishonestly, without the authority of great names, and without the advice of the philosophers and the methodologists being asked on the matter. But it has maintained itself and will maintain itself so long as our consciousness shall persist in its present phase. The fact of its having been insensibly formed would appearto be rather a merit than a demerit, because this means that it was not due to the caprice of an individual, but has followed the development of modern consciousness itself. When antiquity has nothing more to tell us who still feel the need of studying Greek and Latin, Greek philosophy and Roman law; when the Middle Ages have been superseded (and they have not been superseded yet); when a new social form, different from that which emerged from the ruins of the Middle Ages, has supplanted our own; then the problem itself and the historical outlook which derives from it will also be changed, and perhaps antiquity and the Middle Ages and modern times will all be contained within a single epoch, and the pauses be otherwise distributed. And what has been said of these great periods is to be understood of all the others, which vary according to the variety of historical material and the various modes of viewing it. It has sometimes been said that every periodization has a 'relative' value. But we must say 'both relative and absolute,' like all thought, it being understood that the periodization is intrinsic to thought and determined by the determination of thought.