7* THE INTERPRETATION Mil ■** OF HISTORY By MAX NORDAU TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY M. A. HAMILTON WILLEY BOOK COMPANY NEW YORK Copyright, 19 10, by MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY New York All Ktghts Reserved THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. History and the Writing of History . . i II. The Customary Philosophy of History . 47 III. The Anthropomorphic View of History . 88 IV. Man and Nature 133 V. Society and the Individual . . . .159 VI. The Psychological Roots of Religion . 206 VII. The Psychological Premises of History . 251 VIII. The Question of Progress . . . .316 IX. Eschatology 362 X. The Meaning of History — Conclusion . 391 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY CHAPTER I HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY The confusion almost everywhere prevalent between history and the writing of history will be firmly avoided in the course of the subsequent inquiry. The philosophy of history, even in the hands of its most distinguished exponents, has tended far too much to identify the object of description and the description itself. There is some- thing almost ludicrous in the unconscious arrogance of this. The lordly declaration of the historian, " History is that portion of the world's story which is established by tradition and recorded in written history," 1 is prompted by the confident self-importance of the bureau- crat, who cries, " quod non est in actis, non est in mundo ! " The ancients were wiser when they admitted that there had been heroes before Agamemnon, although — " illacrimabiles Urgentur ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro " — 1 Ferdinand Erhardt, "The Sphere of History: Problems of His- torical Research," Berne, 1906, p. 4. Even so clear a thinker as P. Lacombe ("De l'Histoire consideree comme Science," Paris, 1894) gives this narrow definition: "History is all that ive know of the doings of our ancestors" (italics are mine). 2 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY eternal night holds them, unwept and unhonoured, be- cause unsung by the bard; or, as Sadi in Gulistan de- clares : " Many a hero now forgotten sleepeth quiet underground, And upon the earth no echoes of his glory ever sound." Friedrich Schiller had none of the arrogance of his followers, or of their desire for self-glorification. He did not hold that nothing is history but what is repre- sented by the historian. On the contrary, in his " What is Universal History, and why should it be studied? " he says: "The historian selects from this mass of occur- rences those which have had a direct influence, and one which can readily be traced, upon the present aspect of the world and the condition of the generations living at this day." This limitation, borrowed by Schiller from Kant, 1 appears at first sight to be illuminating, but closer examination hardly justifies it. Schiller himself recognizes that a " long series of causally interconnected events can be traced from the present moment to the origin of the human species." How, then, can anyone presume to make an arbitrary selection among these countless causes of which effects continue to be operative in the most recent development? Why should those occurrences only be selected which 1 Emmanuel Kant, collected works, edited by G. Hartenstein, Leipzig, 1867, vol. iv., "Idea of a Universal History from the International Point of View," p. 157: "They (our descendants) will doubtless only value the history of ancient times, whose records must have long since disappeared, in the light of what really in- terests them — namely, the good or harm done by nations and gov- ernments from the international point of view." HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 3 " have exercised an influence which can readily be traced" upon the present aspect of the world and the condition of the generations alive to-day? Is an influ- ence less direct and important when it can be traced, not with ease, but with great difficulty? A superficial view of any human event will suggest visible causes which are hardly ever the real ones. 1 The forces which determine events are often deeply hidden: the most penetrating insight and laborious investigation is neces- sary before they and their interrelation can be discov- ered. Knowledge which stops short at " the occurrences which have exercised an influence which can readily be traced upon the present aspect of the world " may ac- 1 To avoid breaking the thread of my argument, I will give some concrete examples in this note. Popular accounts of the movement for North American independence place its beginning on December 16, 1773, with the attack on the tea-ships in Boston harbour, and describe it as being caused by the English stamp and Custom dues. Edouard Laboulaye ("Histoire Politique des £tats Unis," Paris, 1855) occupies nearly 200 pages (vol. ii., pp. 1-186) in showing that the beginnings of the secession of the United States coincide with the beginning of the English settlement itself. George Ban- croft ("History of the United States," Boston, 1852) takes the same view. Vols, iv.-vi. deal with " The American Revolution," the beginning of which he puts as far back as 1748. Bancroft does not reach the attack on the tea-ships till p. 487 of vol. vi. The latest historian of the North American Revolution, Mary A. M. Marks ("England and America, 1763-1783: the History of a Re- action"), dates its beginning as 1763, finds its causes in the strife of parties in England, and concludes: "The history of the loss of America is the history of a Tory reaction." Wolfgang Menzel (" The Last 120 Years of Universal History," Stuttgart, i860, vol. ii., p. 1) begins his account of the French Revolution thus : " The greatest event of modern times, the French Revolution, began on the day on which . . . the long-desired meet- ing of the States-General was opened by Louis XVI." On the other hand, Louis Blanc writes in his " Histoire de la Revolution 4 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY count for such a view of history as Scribe expresses in his " Verre d'Eau," or Pascal, 1 when he declares that the history of the world would have been different had Cleo- patra's nose been of a different shape. No doubt our sympathy is principally, if not exclusively, aroused by something whose relation to " the present aspect of the world and the condition of the generation living at this day " can be easily seen. But how nebulous is the con- ception of history which this criterion affords us ! Ac- cording to it, what was history for the past generation is no longer so for us, and what is history for us will be so no longer for the generation succeeding. What was history to the Indians and Japanese has never existed for Frangaise," Paris, 1847, vol. L, Preamble: "History begins and ends nowhere. The facts which compose a world process are 90 confused and so obscurely connected that there is no event of which the first cause or final result can be stated with certainty. . . . How, then, can the real starting-point of the French Revolution be established?" He begins, therefore, with John Hus, and doe9 not reach until p. 258, vol. ii., the summoning of the States-General, which Menzel regarded as the beginning of the Revolution. Maxime du Camp (" Souvenirs de l'Armee," Paris, 1848, pp. 65 et seq.) ascribes the origin of the February revolution to the fact that Sergeant Giacomoni, of the 14th Line Infantry Regiment, took upon himself to have a man shot, apparently a painter's model, who had tried to hit the captain of his battalion in the face with a torch. It is regarded as an irrefutable fact by many French publicists that the war of 1870 was caused by the "forgery" introduced by Bis- marck into King William's despatch regarding his interview with Count Benedetti. The sinking of the Maine in the harbour of Havana is cited as the cause of the Spanish-American War, etc. 1 Blaise Pascal, " Lettres Provinciales et Pensees," new edition, Paris, 1821, vol. ii., p. 155: "If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been different." HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 5 Europeans and Americans, and vice versa. History, then, changes with place and time. The chapters that are greeted with universal excitement to-day will be as stale to-morrow as the novel which is read one day by all the world, only to be cast into the waste-paper basket on the next. It wanders through the darkness of the past like a man with a lantern. There is a dim circle of light around it, moving as it moves from place to place. As it passes on, darkness falls upon the spot that was brightly lit up yesterday, and what it now illumines will to-morrow again be plunged in gloom. - Since the caprice, or call it personality, of the historian will decide the manner in which he treats, limits, and selects his material, and this according to the definition laid down by historians in a body, is history itself, we logically arrive at the droll conclusion that the writer of history creates it ! The historian, and not heroes or peoples, creates it ! What a great man is this historian ! Those who toil at the loom of time sink into insig- nificance in comparison with the man who stands behind, looking on more or less attentively, and recording their labours more or less correctly. History ceases to be a series of objective events in regular progression, whether that progression be intelligible and capable of a clear and comprehensible description or not, and becomes depend- ent on the cast of a mind of a particular human being who selects from the mass of recorded material what suits his interests, gratifies his feelings, and falls in with his peculiar aspirations; its arrangement depends on his understanding, and its form on his artistic ability. In one word, history has no longer an objective, but merely a subjective existence; and yet^Ranke speaks of wishing 6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 14 to extinguish his Self," in order to display the naked reality of things. Well might Georg Simmel * remark : " The gratification of Ranke's wish to extinguish his Self in order to see facts in themselves would destroy the success which he imagined that he would gain by it. Self once extinguished, there would be nothing left to observe the Not-Self." I would add, that nothing would be left to feel the sympathy with human beings and their deeds which is the impulse to any description of historical events. The personality of the historian governs all historical narration, Ranke's included — speaks in and through it in the effort to impress itself upon the reader. Let us quote once more the settled verdict of antiquity. The ancients felt, no doubt, that the writing of history was an art, not a science, aiming not at truth, but beauty, and assigned to it therefore an aesthetic value only. 2 In its early Herodotean origins, history was a form of story-telling, distinguished from Epos only, if at all, by 'Georg Simmel, "Problems of the Philosophy of History: a Scientific Study," Leipzig, 1892, p. 18. 'Aristotle, "Poetics," chap. ix. : "Poetry is more philosophical and useful than history." Theodor Mommsen ("Roman History," Berlin, 1885, P- 5) admits that "fancy is 'the mother of history, as of all ooetry," and thereby recognizes the blood relationship of the two — a remarkable admission on the part of an investigator ■who was at such pains to present history to the world in the light of a scientific activity. The admission has, however, become a commonplace with historians, who constantly repeat it, as, to take the most recent example, A. F. Pollard ("Factors in Modern History," London, 1907, p. 1): "I make no apology for placing imagination in the forefront of all the qualifications indispensable for the student and teacher of history. . . . Probably it includes fact as well as fiction, and signifies the power of realizing things unseen." HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 7 its prose form ; * and to-day, despite all its claims to rank among the sciences, despite its wordy, painful efforts to pass as a child of truth, its real affinities are with the novel. The only difference between the historian and the novelist is that the invention of the former is limited in regard to the facts of which a recognized version is current. He cannot arbitrarily contradict what is ac- cepted by the majority as established : but the play of his imagination is uncontrolled in all save the few directions that are enclosed by indisputable records. There is no exaggeration in saying that history as it is written is a kind of roman a these novel, 2 generally consciously, more rarely unconsciously. To speak of a science of history is to play with a term whose meaning cannot be arbitra- rily altered. Science, in the most limited and only cor- rect meaning of the word, is simply the knowledge of the causal connection of phenomena, and of the universal natural laws which they express. It is true that the word is used in a wider sense to cover the descriptive sciences, which confine themselves, in the lack of any mental nexus between concrete facts, to observing them 1 E. Vacherot, "La Science et la Conscience," Paris, 1870, p. 94: " In the hands of the ancient authors history is amusing and moral, rather than historical." P. 96: " Livy's fabulous tales of the origin of Rome only need the genius, language, and songs of an- cient Greece to make them a real poem, like the 'Iliad.'" P. 100: " Quintus Curtius has tried to make the history of Alexander a heroic poem in soaring and flowery prose." P. 103 : " Ancient his- tory is always more or less epic and dramatic, an inexhaustible source of pleasure and feeling," etc. Quintilian, " De Instit. Orat.," ii. 4, says naively: " Graecis historis plerumque poetico similis esse Hcentia." Not only "Graecis"! 1 For more complete treatment and establishment of this idea, see my " Contemporary Frenchmen," Berlin, 1901, pp. 19 et seq. 8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY as exactly as possible, and arranging them according to external resemblances for the sake of convenience. Yet Herbert Spencer, for example, deprecated as untrust- worthy the use of the word science for such a mere cata- logue and arrangement of bare empiric facts. Now his- tory is not a science in the strict sense. Success may for the moment appear to crown the efforts of the philo- sophic historian to trace a causal connection between events, and lay down laws governing their progress; but criticism makes short work of theories so hatched and dogmatic assertions without any facts behind them. Nor is it a descriptive science. The events it registers are forever withdrawn from actual observation, exam- ination, and experiment, and nothing can be re-estab- lished from the traces and records that are left, or from the testimony of human witnesses, except by the as- sistance of the subjective factor in guessing at conclu- sions, interpreting, and rounding off. 1 Inaccuracy of description need only be mentioned, in the second place, as a less essential objection. History is never successful in conceiving events and setting them down exactly as they took place. It is superfluous to recall the innumerable hackneyed anecdotes of the im- possibility of acquiring from the various accounts of eye-witnesses an irrefutable picture of any event whatso- ever. Possibly in the comparatively near future the developed methods of observing and recording facts, the increased use of the phonograph and the snapshot, * H. v. Humboldt, " The Task of the Historian," Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, for the years 1820-21, Berlin, 1822, p. 305: "Thus no more truth is to be ascribed to the facts of history than to the results of tradition and investigation." HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 9 may enable us to obtain an objective record of that aspect of phenomena visible to the senses which will be definite and incontrovertible. But even so the gain will not be very great. The aspect of history which is represented by concrete events is far the least important. That which is great and vital, the drama of the human soul, is completely hidden from direct observation. The historian's task, accord- ing to Maurenbrecher, is to study the inner life of the actors in events, and give an account of their motives and aims. Let him devote himself to this task, by all means ; but what likelihood is there that he will solve it correctly ? Knowledge of what is in the heart of a man is, according to the Bible, reserved to God alone. The maxim of the ancients, " know thyself," is, in fact, the recognition that to do so is difficult, wellnigh impossible. The secret of a man's personality is often hidden from his own inward view, and impenetrable to that of an out- sider. No one who has the least suspicion of the com- plexity of a highly differentiated intellectual life will attempt to penetrate the inner processes of thought, the underlying motives of action, and lay bare the ramifica- tions that interpenetrate the bedrock of character, tem- perament, and the subconscious life of man, the alluvial deposits of his life's experience, and the mysteries of the attractions and repulsions that sway him. The his- torian has to deal with psychology in the concrete, with supposition and conjecture, not science: he is a creative poet whose characterization may be illuminating and convincing like that of the novelist or the playwright, without any assurance that it thereby resembles the truth. Every historian, even of the most moderate io THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY gifts, tends to conceive the great figures of the past and the present after a fashion of his own, different from that of his fellows. Wallenstein is far from being a unique instance of a character " whose portrait wavers " (Schiller) in history. Seldom, indeed, save in the case of persons wholly or semi fabulous, who are not really known at all, or known only through a single author, is there any unanimity of judgment or delineation. Con- fusion comes as soon as the sources of information are more abundant, until inaccuracies, contradictions, and subjective interpolations hide the true physiognomy of the person who is described, even from the sharpest critic. 1 Anyone who has sufficiently emerged from obscurity to arouse even the most transitory interest on the part of his contemporaries will throw up his hands in amaze- ment over the judgments passed upon him, his person- ality and his influence, and over the personal im- pressions he has made on different minds ; and the more important the individual, the wider the circle of ob- servations that he excites, and the greater the number of busybodies who feel called upon to express an opinion about him, the more striking is the distortion which his image undergoes. The incapacity of most people to see others as they are, or to understand them, is only equalled by the impudent assurance with which they give utterance to their senseless and superficial judgments upon them, judgments often hatefully stupid and unjust. 1 K. Lamprecht, " Old and New Tendencies in the Science of His- tory," Berlin, 1896, p. 18: "The history of persons is always romantic in character, because the inner motives are beyond our knowledge " — a remarkable admission from a historian, and one to be re- membered. HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY n Let a historian even venture to record the events of the present or very recent past, and he finds himself assailed by passionate objections, not all inspired by party feelings, by a storm of justification not confined to those concerned in their concealment of truths painful to their vanity or interest. The excited opposition called forth by the German histories of Tritetschke and Sybel, Justin McCarthy's " History of Our Own Times," Kinglake's " History of the Crimean War," Thiers' " History of the Revolution and the Empire," Louis Blanc's " History of the July Monarchy," and Gabriel Jianotaux' " History of the Third Republic," may be recalled. 1 What is depressing is that this arid con- troversy seldom contributes to real enlightenment on the points in dispute: it issues finally only in the setting up of one assertion and one opinion against another. Certainly no such storm was roused by Grote, Momm- sen, or Maspero. At the most, some unexpected in- scriptions will roguishly emerge and scatter to the winds pages or even whole sections of their narrative. But 1 Apart from polemical articles in newspapers and magazines, see, among others: against Thiers' character of Napoleon, Barni, "Napoleon i er et son Historien, M. Thiers," Paris, 1869, also Lanfrey and Taine: against Sybel's account of the effect of Sadowa on the French Government, Emile Ollivier, " L'Empire Liberal," vol. viii., " L'Annee Fatale," Paris, 1906. It may be noted, by way of example, that Livy's patriotism pre- vented him from mentioning the conquest of Rome by Porsenna, with which he was familiar; and that Grote, in his "History of Greece," vol. ii., pp. 216, 217, relates that the early English his- torians, from Hardyng and Monmouth to Holinshed and Milton, recorded the descent of the English Kings from Brutus and Julius Oesar, and that, when later students suppressed this account as fabulous, they were accused on that ground of want of patriotism- even of crime. " 12 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY Alcibiades and Themistocles, Marius and Sulla, Rameses and Psammetichus, hold their peace whatever is said of them. They are wise. Could they express an opinion, they would, like the living, utterly fail to recognize themselves in the pictures drawn by their his- torians. Objective truth is as inaccessible to the writers of history as is Kant's " Thing in Itself " to human knowl- edge. For the events of the past he has to rely upon official records, which even the most cautious and well- informed criticism cannot wholly clear of the colouring given them by the desire to conceal unpleasing facts, or upon the circumstantial evidence and the testimony of eye-witnesses whose unreliability is the only certain thing about them. At the best, his representation of character is an embodiment of psychological guesses that may or may not be fortunate. The attempt to discern the causal connection of events and the laws that reg- ulate them is often merely arbitrary, and frequently quite capricious. Written history can never compass the actual event. It is not science, but literature: a branch of fiction, good, bad, or indifferent; a supposition as to the way in which things might have happened ; an attempt to show the way in which they ought to have happened, or to prove that they did, as a matter of fact, happen in this or that way; a subjective intuition on the part of men who have to depend on vague, uncertain, or even inadequate information; who are, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by certain tendencies, and led away by their own feelings, prejudices, sympathies, and antipathies, even where they are honest, which is not always the case. HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 13 Carlyle was a historian, but he did not hesitate to describe his own profession in the most contemptuous terms : ' " Alas, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck, and burnt bones, does assiduous Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History and Philosophy of History . . . and over your Historical Library it is as if all the Titans had written for themselves: ' Dry rub- bish shot here'! " It is as superficial, as unreasonable to identify history as it is and history as it is written as to confound the processes of Nature with the delusions of the human senses. History has its own existence, different, apart from, and transcending written history, before which it was, which it called into being, and which awkwardly tries to follow it. History in the widest sense is the sum of the episodes of the human struggle for existence. The definition hardly needs explanation. History, it implies, is the record of all, great and small, that man has done and suffered, all that he has thought, imagined, and achieved within the limits of that natural and artificial environment into which he was born, in which he has to live, and by which any satisfaction of his needs and impulses is conditioned. Between the dreary existence of the most obscure and miserable creature upon earth and the triumphal progress of a world conqueror there is no essential difference. In each the same psycho- physical forces are at work; each is determined by the same natural laws. The fate of the one is of interest to no one in the wide world save himself; his departure is 'Carlyle, "Past and Present," London (Ward, Lock and Co.), no date, p. 36. i 4 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY as unnoticed as his entrance : the other is a ruler of men, whose thoughts and actions dominate the lives of thou- sands — nay, millions — of his fellow-creatures. Yet the difference between them is quantitative, not qualitative. Mankind is instinctively aware of this essential equality of all human individualities and their destinies, whether they be such as enter into the purview of the historian, or such as for him possess no significance, or, it may be, are merely creatures of the imagination. Any char- acter, whether real or imaginary, great or small, that is so described that we feel the impress of his reality, can enter into the circumstances of his life, share intimately in his thoughts and feelings, joys and sorrows, fills as important a place in our minds and memories as any hero of world-wide renown. Alexander the Great is perhaps no better known and no more admired than Robinson Crusoe; many a mighty general or statesman might envy the fame of the wandering scholar Thomas Platter, or Knight Hans von Schweinichen. The immor- tality of Samuel Johnson does not rest on his works, in which the present generation finds small pleasure, but on the insight into every detail of the man and his daily existence given us by the faithful Boswell. Julie, Ophelia, Jane Eyre, Virginia, Manon Lescaut are nearer to the mind and heart of posterity than Cleopatra, Agrippina, or Queen Anne. A creation like Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, or Gottfried Keller's Poor Henry, which the seeing eye of genius has lent the vivid touch of individuality, and placed before us as a man, is as unforgettable as any historical character whatsoever. Across the memory of the human race past events flit like shadows ; no fixed boundaries separate the real from HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 15 the imaginary. Howsoever powerful a great man's influence may have been on his contemporaries and im- mediate successors, it seldom lasts a hundred, never a thousand, years, and for posterity he is but one among the myriad causes, near and remote, that have each played their indistinguishable part in creation, without possessing any immediate significance in themselves. With the loss of their direct influence, there passes even from the men who have really lived and have made history that which distinguishes them alike from the great mass of average mankind, who live unknown, and leave no mark behind them, and from the creations of the poetic imagination, than whom they become not more interesting but less, if their human personality have not been made real to us by the artistic methods with which history proper has nothing to do. 1 I have defined history as the sum of the episodes that make up man's struggle for existence. In it, therefore, is included not only the combatant man, but the foes with which he has unceasingly to struggle — that is, not only his human competitors for the conditions of ex- istence, but Nature herself. The play of the world forces, whether regular, as they normally are, or con- vulsive, as upon occasion, are as much a part of history as the course of man's efforts to assert and maintain himself against all other powers. There is a recent historical school that concerns itself solely with spiritual and moral forces in history, and 1 P. Lacombe, " De l'Histoire consideree comme Science," Paris, 1894, Introduction, p. cxii: "The artistic historian has, as his first aim, to stir the feelings, even if his method be that of actuality. . . . My objection to him is that he brings in narratives and considerations that have, or pretend to have, a scientific character." 1 6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY conceives it as the conflict, triumph, defeat, and mutual adjustment of human wills, leaving altogether on one side, as unimportant and worthy only of a casual notice, any events that have not been completed in human thought or feeling before being translated into act. It tends to despise the old chroniclers, 1 who faithfully de- vote the same space to recording dearths, earthquakes, and floods, hail-storms, unusual cold in winter or heat in summer, and the appearances of comets, that they gave to wars, coronations, and the deaths of princes, thus assigning the same importance to events resulting from the operation of human will and those originating in the blind chance over which man has no control. This contempt is misplaced. The modesty of the honest old chroniclers is more consonant with the true function of the historian than the lofty confidence of those modern adepts who arrogate to themselves the decision as to what is and what is not important on the wide stream of the processes of the universe, of nature, and of human life. The purely natural events that are entirely outside the action of the human will have had a greater influence on the destiny, not only of individuals, groups, or nations, but of human existence as a whole, than the whole range of what is assumed by historians to be essential and im- portant — than the foundation of states, the establish- ment of religions, the rise and development of social institutions, the conceptions of law and property, con- 1 All the Renaissance historians modestly call their histories " Chronica " — e.g., to name only those of the sixteenth century, Cario, Cluverius, Gamerus, Genebrard, Kupferschmied, Macker, and Ne- ander. HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 17 stitutional and metaphysical ideas. An ice age of some thousand years' duration, following upon a considerable period of temperate warmth, will more completely trans- form all human conditions than any possible action of a man or a people. Even a local disturbance may cause changes within a limited area of time and space at least as great as any efforts of human will and energy. If the disappearance of Atlantis be no fiction, but a fact, is it not a fact far more significant for humanity than any State formation to which history devotes volumes — nay, libraries? Has not the separation of England from the mainland, established by geology, had far greater political consequences than the Norman Inva- sion under William the Conqueror — consequences that at the close of thousands of years are far from being exhausted? The Great Flood recorded in the history of nearly every people, the earthquakes that destroyed Lisbon in 1755, San Francisco in 1903, the fires that laid London in ashes in 1666, Chicago in 1874, have been far more destructive of human life than most of the sieges, battles, and campaigns described at such length in history. There is no historical justification for any such an- tithesis of intellectual and natural forces, of human will and chance. Any line of distinction must be arbitrary, any separation artificial. The boundary between his- tory and the philosophy of history is crossed when any attempt is made to select among the forces which have determined, and do still determine, human destiny, one which is regarded as essential, and to neglect the rest. History aims at the description of events ; the philosophy of history claims to understand their causal connection 18 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY and their meaning. No sound conclusions can be reached by a dualistic philosophy of history which re- fuses to recognize the same natural forces and laws at work everywhere, causing islands and whole continents to disappear beneath or rise above the ocean, and calling forth individual men to be conquerors and lawgivers, to mould and model nations, or which turns away its gaze from the irrational accidents of lifeless matter and closes its eyes to all but spiritual forces. 1 Who can say what would have happened if the Armada had con- quered England? Europe, at any rate, would not have been what it is to-day; and the cause of the difference between what it is to-day and what it might have been is surely the storm that destroyed the Armada — a mere accident, a blind natural force that could by no stretch of language be described as spiritual or moral. How would history have developed supposing that Grouchy had marched on Waterloo, and so decided the battle, which after midday stood even, in Napoleon's favour? Was it blind chance or Grouchy's will that decided it otherwise? It is impossible, when looking at the course of his- tory, to distinguish what is due to the influence of natural events and what to that of human will, unless we wilfully and without any rational justification leave aside or neglect one whole aspect of things. The naive chronicler may be open to the charge of artlessly string- 1 Georg Simmel, " Problems of the Philosophy of History," Leip- zig, 1892, p. 1: "If history is to be more than a puppet-show, it must record psychic processes." Yes, but does Simmel prove that we are not the puppets of the forces at work in nature? He assumes that which has to be proved — namely, that man makes his history, instead of its being made by nature through him. HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY i^ ing together, after the manner of a gossiping village barber, odd fragments of information that mean nothing to the reader of another age or place. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the pretentious historian, who presents the results of his critical research as a con- tribution to science, and considers his style like an artist, does, by the very fact of selection, introduce into his mat- ter a philosophical tendency which belongs to him, and not to it. The objection to Zola's theory of naturalism in fiction is valid against the writer who selects the human will as the only motive-power of importance in history. Zola claimed to give a complete representation of actual life as it is. It was pointed out that, as a mat- ter of fact, he selected by subjective inclination, with reference to an end subjectively conceived, a few aspects of actuality, which he then linked together as it suited him, and interpreted in accordance with his own idea. Thus, history at the moment when it thinks itself most objective is merely naturalistic fiction, merely " history through the medium of a temperament," 1 with the hand- icap that the action of temperament in altering and blurring lines is far more fatal on the complicated and 1 This passage had long been written when the same idea wa3 expressed, almost in the same words, by Professor Gabriel Monod, in an address which he gave on the occasion of his forty years' jubilee as teacher of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, May 26, 1907. " Zola," he said, " has defined Art as Nature through the medium of a temperament. . . . We see historical actu- ality through a temperament also. We study it as history. But if we wish to re-animate it, a personal creative effort is necessary in the representation, and the reinforcement of science by art. Historical actuality is never known to us in all the complexity of its exact and unconditional truth. ... It is a dream-face." The correspondence ii so remarkable as to be worth noting.^ 20 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY crowded canvas of history than in the simple portraiture of the novelist. History is not a descriptive science, because it has no means by which phenomena can be immediately per- ceived or objectively determined. Far less, when it is absolutely impossible for it to foretell a single event with even approximate certainty, can it be called an exact science, of which the distinguishing mark is precisely this power to determine beforehand what under certain conditions must happen. It is driven on to seek to know the laws of which phenomena are the manifestation — immutable laws, the same to-day, to-morrow, yesterday. 1 Froude 2 held that history cannot foretell events that depend upon the will of man, because that will is free. But this freedom of the will is a dogma incapable of proof. The law of causality which governs our thought admits of no metaphysical vagueness. It compels us to assume that the will, a force that initiates movement, is, like every other force, subject to that law. Its apparent 1 Hume (sect. 2, part ii.) demands an eschatology of all sciences. St. Simon also remarks that it is the task of all sciences " to see in order to foresee" (voir, pour prevoir), and Condorcet felt this so strongly that, in the last book of his " Esquisse d'un Tableau His- torique du Progres de l'Esprit Humain," he boldly attempts to fore- cast future history, declaring: "If man can almost confidently fore- tell natural phenomena, as soon as he knows their laws . . . why should it appear chimerical to represent the probable destiny of the human race side by side with historical results?" P. S. L. Buchez ("Introduction a la Science de l'Histoire," second edition, Paris, 1812, book i., chap, ii.) maintains with Condorcet that history can foresee and foretell, and is thus a science. What a pity that he was so modest as to refrain from foreseeing and foretelling a single event! * James Anthony Froude, " Short Studies on Great Subjects," Lon- don, 1867, vol. i., p. 11. HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 21 freedom is an illusion, due to the fact that the mind does not perceive the relation between the stimulus to an act of will and the resultant operation of the will. Each act of will is the one possible response of a given organism to a given stimulus under given conditions. A difference in one element in the system, a different constitution of the organism, a different kind of strength of stimulus, or its application under different circumstances, will cause the response of the will to be different, but nothing else can alter it. Conversely, the elements are not the result of chance or arbitrary attraction; they are links in the iron chain of cause and effect that extends into infinity, above and below the limits of our knowledge. Deny this, and you deny causality, and declare that the planets are not strictly determined in their course by mechanical necessity, but can move at will in or out of their ap- pointed track. The thoughts and actions of men are regulated by the same compulsion that keeps the stars in their course, and were history a science like astronomy, even though the behaviour of the elements might re- main hidden, it would at least be able to foretell the actions of men and that part of history which depends upon the operation of human will, just as astronomy is able to foretell the movements of the heavenly bodies. An historian who confines himself to the sober speech of fact, and restrains his " seething brain " and his " eye in a fine frenzy rolling," can only venture upon prophe- cies so general and so much of the nature of platitudes that they rouse no interest at all. It is safe to foretell that no human institution can last for ever, that every State, every society, every law, every custom, must in time alter or disappear. We all'know or guess so much. 22 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY History cannot give us even the smallest reliable indica- tion as to the things about which we should really like to know — namely, when and how the existing order is to terminate, and what is to take its place. Any would-be astrologer or cheiromant who had nothing more to tell those who came to him to have the veil of the future withdrawn than that they must one day die, would soon be labelled ass or knave by the most credulous of his clients. In one word, nothing can be foretold of the course of human life, whether of individuals, groups, or communities, beyond the universal law of elementary biological necessity, to which no exception is known — the law which is itself only a particular instance of the com- plex interrelation and interaction of biological and cos- mic laws whose concrete operations we are completely unable to forecast, ignorant as we are of the extent and action of the forces at work in human life. The his- torian has been paradoxically described as the prophet of the past. It is one of those phrases that suggest meaning without really conveying any. If it does mean anything, it can only be this: the historian is no man of science, but a seer who guesses or divines, not the future, but the past, and if you don't believe him, down with your shil- ling. History may have no scientific value, though it is said to be a means of education : historia magistra vita. Even this claim cannot be substantiated. Written his- tory does not touch the realities of history; it hardly even skims over its extreme surface. It can only search, guess, surmise. But without accurate knowledge there can be no useful instruction. Moreover, the information conveyed, even if accurate, could be of no use to those HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 23 who have new actions before them. Every moment in history is the result of a relation between the forces in operation and the general conditions under which they operate, and the combination can never be either re- peated or modified. Therefore, it is of no assistance to a man living now to know how certain people acted under given circumstances in the past. The circumstances are not the same ; and even if he wished to imitate the action, he could not. Were he to make some clumsy attempt, the result would not be identical. As a matter of fact, no single person or group of persons has ever allowed their action to be determined by historical precedent. In forming a resolution, the determining factor is the neces- sity of the present, not the experience of the past. The only way in which more or less accurate historical knowl- edge does operate is seen in the case where one genera- tion transmits to another a prejudice, an attraction or repulsion, a confidence or mistrust, an appreciation or depreciation, that may have originally been sound, and has not been discovered by the descendant to be so no longer. In this case knowledge in the ancestor creates ignorance in the descendant, and gives rise to conclusions that are false, because based on premises no longer ac- curate. The great conquerors, rulers, and law givers have never possessed what is called the historical sense : that they had it not was the condition of their success. Their eyes, troubled by no visions of the past, were fixed on the visible present. With no thought for what had stirred the men of bygone days, they saw the needs and opportunities of the present. History was never their teacher. As a matter of fact, the mass of mankind have no real 24 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY — no organic, if I may use the word — interest in his- torical narrative or in history itself. They have a deep- seated impulse to observe, to study, and as far as possible to understand nature, to use all their available knowl- edge to interpret her. Long before they have consciously reflected, they are dimly aware that knowledge is their best weapon, both of attack and defence, in the life-and- death struggle they have to wage with her; that the wages of ignorance here are death, and the rewards of every advance in knowledge are greater security, a longer tenure, and better conditions of existence. They cherish such cognizance as they have won, and transmit it as their most precious possession to their descendants. The mystic tales of forgotten secrets possessed by the ancient Egyptians, Chaldees, Indians, and Aztecs, represent, no doubt, some branch of nature knowledge acquired at one time and again lost. The play of nature's mighty forces, the phenomena revealed once or periodically in a per- plexing whirl of movement, rouse in man an excitement that lasts from childhood to old age, a noble curiosity that compels all save the weak in intellect, the man who is a morbid exception, to gaze and to try to understand. No such instinctive desire for knowledge exists in the case of his own past. The vast majority even of edu- cated people are completely indifferent to it. They never think of it. They are at no pains to remember it. If they consulted their personal inclinations, they would never either burden their own memories with it, or as- sign any importance to burdening the memories of their descendants. Every now and then the papers contain the results of the examination of soldiers in history; and they invari- HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 25 ably prove that people are either completely ignorant, even of quite recent events, or that they have a ridicu- lously false conception of them. Italians of this gen- eration know neither Cavour nor Garibaldi. 1 Germans have never heard the name of Moltke or Roon, think that Bismarck was a great ruler or general, and are ab- solutely ignorant of the war of 1870. Frenchmen know nothing of Gambetta or Thiers, of Sedan, or the revolu- tion that followed it, and believe the most mythical and ridiculous stories about Napoleon. 2 And these are mostly young persons who have learned at least to read and write in their passage through the elementary scHool, and could very easily instruct themselves in any subject that they found attractive or interesting. Ex- perience proves that the very greatest historical event retains a real and vivid place in human memory only so long as there are men living who took part in it, who were personally affected by it, who watched it with keen interest and excitement themselves, or who have heard tell of it from someone who himself took part in or wit- nessed it — men, in a word, to whom the event was di- rectly or indirectly part of their own experience. This applies to all great events, and limits their remembrance to three generations at the most — contemporaries, their children, who catch from the lips of their parents some- thing of the force and freshness that belongs to the sight of one's own eyes, and perhaps the third generation, 1 Paola Lombroso, " Mario Carrara, Nella Pcnombra della Civilta (Da un' inchiesta sul pensiero del popolo)," Torino, 1906, pp. 47 et seg. 1 Roland, " L'Education Patriotique du Soldat," Paris, 1908, passim. 26 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY who may, if they are lucky, hear the story at the family board of " I have heard my father tell . . ." But the tale loses so much of its colour in this second relation that the impression it makes on the hearer is slight — too slight to impel him to transmit it to his children in his turn. The limitation of remembrance to three genera- tions is, in fact, a law based upon the actual processes of memory. Under normal healthy conditions only a revival of the associations or emotions that originally ac- companied an impression will call it up again to the surface of consciousness. As a rule however, strong emotion is only aroused and a chain of associations set going, by the immediate individual sense-stimulus and prompt reaction of consciousness and will that is present in a personal experience; no such effect is produced by the mere hearing and reading of words, which as often as not fail to suggest to the average dull and lethargic intelligence the ideas into which they require to be trans- lated. The account of a past event with no immediate practical bearing awakens no emotion, starts no manifold and diversified chain of associations: a more or less isolated fact in consciousness, it is soon forgotten, and has little prospect of ever being revived again in the form of a recollection. The law of three generations applies to events con- nected with a place, a tribe, or a species, and to the his- tory of the family also, which should be of the first and greatest interest to men of any degree of intellectual development. Civilized man — savages can for the moment be left out of account — normally knows nothing of his ancestors farther back than his grandparents. Beyond three generations all is obscurity, even under HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 27 the most favourable circumstances, when a family has remained fixed in one spot, has lived and moved and had its being in the same surroundings, and might find in the unchanging names of everything around it, whether the work of man or nature, in the buildings and the country- side, so many mnemonic aids to memory. If the family change its dwelling, even a recent past will vanish more quickly and completely with the disappearance of the landmarks and images that to some extent helped to keep it alive. At the best, an uncertain, wavering legend, with no distinct features, is all that then remains of .the ancestral story. On the journey of life, man travels within a little circle of light that is extinguished with him, and leaves no trace behind it save a dazzling of the eyes of some fellow-traveller. Outside this circle all is eternal darkness, broken only here and there by scattered sparks^ — a darkness that few care to try to illuminate. To this stern law of oblivion an exception seems to be afforded by certain great festival days in commemoration of important historical events yearly celebrated after thousands of years by the whole population of a locality or country. Rome still keeps as a festal day April 2 1, on which day it is naively assumed that the city was founded 2,660 years ago (753 B.C.). For four and a half cen- turies Basle has celebrated St. James's Day (August 26) ; every 9th of May Orleans recalls its deliverance from the English besiegers by Joan of Arc ( 1429) ; and England remembers on November 5 the failure of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, etc. But such remembrance is an illusion. The populace celebrate a festival without thinking much of its origin. Out of thousands of Eng- 28 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY lish boys who dance round Guy Fawkes' bonfire, hardly a hundred know anything about him. They sing away — " Remember, remember The fifth of November," but would be hard put to it to explain why the day should be remembered. In the course of the last century the custom has grown of establishing State celebrations on historical days, in which the population, willy-nilly, must take part, since the law prescribes it, and it is done by all public offices and institutions. In Germany there is Sedan Day, in France July 14, in Italy Constitu- tion Day, etc. But, recent as is the establishment of most of these celebrations, their origins are already becoming dim. In the schools, teachers impress the significance of Sedan Day upon the minds of their pupils by the writing of essays; and not without reason, for there are plenty of grown-up people to whom the name of Sedan conveys very little distinct meaning. Few of the countless multitudes who conscientiously celebrate the French national festal day, drink, dance, and enjoy the fireworks and illuminations, know anything about the storming of the Bastille; and there are numbers of Italians to whom no definite idea is suggested by " lo Statuto." The masses enjoy the jollification: they like to have it organized and patronized by the classes. The occasion matters little: to them the carnival, the satur- nalia, is the thing. What appears to the cultured minority as a historical reminder is to the majority, in spite of their board-school education, no different from any other spiritual or temporal holiday. It is in records, HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 29 and not in the consciousness of man, that the historical part is preserved. Only in this sense is there a grain of truth in that arrogant assertion that " History is that portion of the world's story which is established by tradi- tion, and recorded in written history." History goes on, whether recorded or no ; whether its recollection by man is artificially preserved or allowed to fall into natural oblivion. Such knowledge as we possess is due solely to those witnesses of events who, instead of relying solely upon oral transmission, have preserved their experiences by writing and other arts. Without such aid the most civrlized nations, who have attained the highest intel- lectual and scientific development, would remember as little of their own history as the rude barbarians, from whom even the immediate past is shrouded in impene- trable darkness. The almost organic indifference of mankind to the past, to whatever lies outside the range of their imme- diate sense perception and apprehension, is an observed fact that it is vain to attempt to argue away. It seems, however, to be contradicted by the equally incontrover- tible fact of the existence of history in a highly developed form, regarded as a necessary element in a cultured edu- cation, and claiming the attention of governments, so- cieties, and countless individuals in the investigation and preservation of the recorded past. The contradiction is more apparent than real. A knowledge of history, un- like that of Nature and her laws, is not a biological ne- cessity: it is a psychological, and, above all, a sociologi- cal need. The individual, psychological basis upon which the origin and continued development of history rests is two- 30 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY fold, depending on two fundamental human attributes — curiosity and self-love. The origin of curiosity is the demand of the nerve- centres for impressions that must of necessity proceed from the external world. This demand, at first instinct- ive and accompanied in its satisfaction by a certain pleasure, acquires pari passu with the development of the organism the element of purpose : the impressions to be received from the external world must be such as antici- pate danger, and assist in the provision of nourishment and other gratifications. In the struggle for existence active curiosity is an advantage to the individual: it is the way of enlightenment. As differentiation advances, curiosity, which was directed to the mediately or imme- diately practical needs of the individual, forgets its origin in the functional requirements of the nerve- centres, and its purpose as alleviating the struggle for existence, and becomes that desire to know which, ap- parently severed from all selfish aims, strives solely for the attainment of new knowledge and the comprehension of the world of phenomena presented to its view. 1 And the individual whose curiosity has thus risen to the desire "Hermann Lotze ("Microcosm: Idea of a Natural History and History of Mankind: an Anthropological Essay," Leipzig, 1864, vol. iii., p. 3) is well aware of the meaning of curiosity, and continues that it is quite wrong to speak contemptuously of the " restlessness of vulgar curiosity," which, " without any sense of the different im- portance of different questions, tries to invent a history of the origin of every fact of experience, great or small." But he relapses into his usual mysticism when he goes on: "Yet it is from this vulgar curiosity that there was developed the profound longing to see this riddle of the universe, which is the history of the earth, emerge wholly from the higher world, and return thither when it has com- pleted the task for which it was sent forth." HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 31 to know is made uncomfortable and uneasy by every gap in his knowledge of the phenomena before him and of their causal connection. Just as a wild beast is terrified by a dark cavern difficult of access in his hunting- ground, and regards it as a mysterious danger until he has gathered the courage to penetrate to its depths, so man cannot rest until he fills up his gaps with solid masonry or hides them behind some painted screen. To the individual who has once risen to the desire to know, the darkness of the past is as troubling as that of the future, and the question of remote causes as torturing as that of those near at hand. In this desire to know and to understand lies the origin of all sciences, and of all super- stitions and other systems of self-deception and false guesses. Philosophic speculation, seeking to find the final cause, resolved itself for most men into the theological revelation which reveals nothing to the understanding. The theory of knowledge investigates the contents of our consciousness reduced to their simplest terms, and en- deavors to discover their origin. Prophecy, magic, and the other black arts that strive to penetrate the darkness of the future, seemed for long to the keenest and most mature intellects of the race to represent the brightest branch of human knowledge. 1 It is only necessary to * R. Campbell Thompson, " Late Babylonian Letters," London, 1907. Letter of the King of Assyria to Saduna, in Borsippe. He advises him especially to take possession of the clay tablets in the temple at Ezidda, with war prophecies inscribed on them: "If there be any charm I have not taught thee, and thou shouldst hear of it, search it out, and take and send to me." The importance at- tributed to the Sibylline books in Rome may be recalled. Compare also vEschylus, "Prometheus Vinctus," vers. 500 et seq., where Prometheus, citing the benefits he has conferred on man, mentions 32 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY recall the importance attached by Romans and Etruscans to the omens from the flight of birds and the inspection of their entrails in all State and religious observances; and in the East to the interpretation of dreams down to much more recent times. But the very eagerness of their desire to obtain foreknowledge of the future led men to subject the results of the would-be art of prophecy to such a severe examination as soon showed them to be mere twaddle, without so much as a kernel of truth. Cicero tells us that, late in antiquity, the augur, or harus- pex, had come to be regarded as a comic figure. Thoughtful men sadly admitted that means for the re- liable investigation of the future did not exist, and that this search, like that for the final cause, must be regret- fully abandoned. Thus, only the intellectually backward and absolutely uneducated sections of the populace con- tinued to believe in the primitive forms of revelation by lines on the hand, the interpretation of dreams, laying out of cards, astrology, the shapes in lead or coffee- grounds. Yet the irresistible desire to know the unknow- able lingers among the educated too. It is seen in the tentative eschatology which philosophy has even yet not wholly renounced and in the delight with which a specu- lative forecast like Wells' " Anticipations " is accepted by hundreds of thousands of people, who do not seem aware that the reason why such a speculation affords them so much pleasure is simply that it corresponds ex- as very important that he taught him to interpret dreams, under- stand signs, and foretell the future by magic arts: " rpSwovs T( iroWobi f^aviTK^s iffToix^a. K&Kpiva irp&roi e£ dveipdrwv of XP^I wrap, yevtvOai KX^Sdyas re 8v