SPECIAL HISTORIES 145 tat in thus explaining their true nature we do not wish to contest the right to existence of tables and encyclo- paedias of the history of science, far less to throw discredit upon the present direction of studies, by means of which, at the call of the history of the sciences, useful research is stimulated in directions that have been long neglected. Nor do we intend to move any objection to histories of science in the form of tables and encyclo- paedias on the ground that it is impossible for the same student to be equally competent as to problems of quite different nature, such as are those of the various sciences; for it is inconceivable that a philosopher exists with a capacity equal to the understanding of each and every philosophical problem (indeed, the mind of the best solver of certain problems is usually the more closed to others); or that a critic and historian of poetry and art exists who tastes and enjoys equally all forms of poetry and art, however versatile he be. Each one has his sphere marked out more or less narrowly, and each is universal only by means of his particularity.
Finally, we shall not repeat the same demonstration for political history and ethics, where the claim to represent the whole of history in a single line of develop- ment has had less occasion to manifest itself. It is usually more readily admitted there that every history is particular — that is to say, determined by the political and ethical problem or problems with which history is concerned in time and place, and which every history therefore occasionally rethinks from the beginning.
The analogy, then, between different kinds of special history is to be considered perfect, and the anomaly between them excluded, for they all obey the principle of particularity, that is, particular universality (whatever be 146 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY the appearance to the contrary). But if, as histories, they all proceed according to the nature of what we have explained as historiography, in so far as they are special each one conforms to the concept of its speciality. It is in this sense alone that each one is anomalous in respect to the others, preserving, that is to say, its own peculiar nature. We have explained that the claim to treat the history of poetry and of art in the same way as philosophy is erroneous, not only because it misconceives the true concept of history, but also because it misrepresents the nature of art, conceiving it as philosophy and dissipating it in a dialectic of concepts, or because it leaves out, in the history of art, just that by reason of which art is art, looking upon it as something secondary, or at best giving it a place beside the social or conceptual activities. This error is precisely analogous to that of those who from time to time suggest what they term the * psychological ' reform of philosophy — that is to say, they would like to treat it as dependent upon the psychology of philosophers and of the social environ- ment, thus placing it on a level, sometimes with the history of the sentiments, at others with that of fancies and Utopias, or with what is not the history of philosophizing. Such persons lack the knowledge of what philosophy is, as the others lack the knowledge of poetry and art. Anyone desirous of arriving at a rapid knowledge of the difference between the history of philosophy and the history of poetry should observe how the one, owing to the nature of its object, is led to examine theories in so far as they are the work of pure mind) and therefore to develop a history in which thoughts represent the dramatis person*, while the other is led by the nature of its object to examine works of art in so far as they are works of imagination, which SPECIAL HISTORIES 147 gives expression to movements of feeling, and therefore to develop a history of imaginative and sensitive points of view. The former, therefore, though it does not neglect actions, events, and imagination, regards them as the humus of pure thought and takes the form of a history of concepts without persons, either real or imaginary, while the latter, which also does not neglect actions, events, and thoughts in its turn regards them as the humus of imaginary creations and takes the form of a history of ideal or imaginary personalities, which have divested themselves of the ballast of practical interests and of the curb of concepts. The plans, too, which they draw up and with which they cannot dispense, any more than can any human dialectic, answer to these different tendencies — that is to say, with the one they are schemes or general types of modes of thinking, with the other schemes containing ideal personalities. t If the history of philosophy has several times tried to devour the history of poetry and art, it may also be said to have several times tried to devour the history of practice, that of politics and ethics, or * social history,* as people prefer to call it in our day. It has also been asserted that such history should be set free from the chroniclism in which it had become involved and assume a scientific and rigorous form. To do this, it was needful to reduce it to a history of * ideas,* which are the true and essential practical acts, because they generate them — that is to say, the error which we noted above in respect to poetry and art has here been repeated^JWhat is peculiar to practical acts has been neglected, and only the * ideas,* which are their antecedents and consequents, have been retained. But on other occasions the * ideas * to which it was claimed to reduce practical acts were not really ideas or intellectual formations, but truly practical 148 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY acts, sentiments, dispositions, customs, institutions. The originality of political and ethical history was thus unconsciously confirmed. Its object is just what can be designated with the single word institutions, taking the word in its widest signification — that is to say, understanding by it all practical arrangements of human individuals and societies, from the most recondite sentiments to the most obvious modes of life (which, too, are always will in action) w All are equally historical productions, the sole effective historical productions perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a long history, of which we become conscious from time to time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we can now practically do, all our sentiments as so-called civilized men — courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, and the like — all our institutions in the strict sense of the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the spirit, utilitarian or moral) — the family, the state, commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on — have a long history; and according as one or other of those sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true ' nature ' — that is to say, its historical genesis. Any- one who has followed the developments of modern social historiography with care and attention has been able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the chroniclistic chaos of disaggregated notes of events in ordered series of histories of social values, and that its field of research is the history of the human soul in its practical aspect; either when it produces general histories of civilization (always due to particular motives SPECIAL HISTORIES 149 and limited by them), or when it presents histories of classes, peoples, social currents, sentiments, institutions, and so forth. > Biography, too (only when not limited to a mere chroniclistic collection of the experiences of an individual or to a poetical portrait, improperly regarded as a historical work), is the history of an * institution ' in the philosophical acceptation of the word and forms part of the history of practice: because the individual, in the same way as a people or a social class, is the formation of a character, or complex of specific attitudes and actions consequent upon them; and it is of this that historical biography consists, not of the individual looked upon as external or private or physical, or what- ever it be called.
We might be expected to indicate the place or function of the history of science and of religion, in order to render to a certain extent complete this rapid review of special histories, in which general history realizes itself in turn — it never exists outside of them. But if science differs from philosophy in being partly theoretical and partly practical, and religion is an attempt to explain reality by means of myth and to direct the work of man according to an ideal, it is evident that the history of science enters to some extent into the history of philo- sophical thought and to some extent forms part of that of needs and institutions; indeed, since the moment which sets science to work and endows it with its peculiar character is the practical or suitable moment, it really belongs to the history of institutions in the very wide sense described; and the history of religion forms to some extent part of the history of institutions and to some extent part of the history of philosophy; indeed, since the dominating moment is here mythical conception or i jo THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY philosophical effort, the history of religion is substan- tially that of philosophy. Other more particular dis- quisitions in connexion with this argument would be out of place in the present treatise, which is not especially concerned with the theory and methodology of par- ticular special histories (coincident with the treatment of the various spheres of philosophy, aesthetics, logic, etc.), and aims only at indicating the directions in which they must necessarily develop.1 1 It will be of further use to draw attention here, in a note, to the already mentioned distinction between the history of practice in politics and in ethics, because thus alone can be set at rest the variance which runs through historiography, between political history or history of states and history of humanity or of civilization, especially from the eighteenth century onward. In Germany it is one of the elements in the intricate debate between Geschichte and Kultur geschichte, and it has sometimes been described as a conflict between French historiography (Voltaire and his followers), or histoire de la civilisation, and the Germanic (Moser and his followers), or history of the state. One side would absorb and subject the history of culture or social history to that of the state, the other would do the opposite j and the eclectics, as usual, without knowing much about it, place the one beside the other, inert, history of politics and history of civilization, thus destroying the unity of history. The truth is that political history and history of civilization have the same rela- tions between one another in the practical field as those between the history of poetry or of art and the history of philosophy or thought in the theoretical field. They correspond to two eternal moments of the spirit — that of the pure will, or economic moment, and that of the ethical will. Hence we also see why some will always be attracted rather by the one than the other form of history: according as to whether they are moved chiefly by political or chiefly by moral interests.
APPENDIX III PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY HAVING established the unity of philosophy and historiography, and shown that the division between the two has but a literary and didactic value, because it is founded upon the possibility of placing in the foreground of verbal exposition now one and now the other of the two dialectical elements of that unity, it is well to make quite clear what is the true object of the treatises bearing the traditional title of philosophic * theory ' or c system ': to what (in a word) philosophy can be reduced.
Philosophy, in consequence of the new relation in which it has been placed, cannot of necessity be any- thing but the methodological moment of historiography: a dilucidation of the categories constitutive of historical judgments, or of the concepts that direct historical interpretation. And since historiography has for con- tent the concrete life of the spirit, and this life is life of imagination and of thought, of action and of morality (or of something else, if anything else can be thought of), and in this variety of its forms remains always one, the dilucidation moves in distinguishing between aesthetic and logic, between economic and ethic, uniting and dissolving them all in the philosophy of the spirit. If a philosophical problem shows itself to be altogether sterile for the historical judgment, we have there the proof that such problem is otiose, badly stated, and in reality does not exist. If the solution of a problem — that is to say, of a philosophical proposition — instead 152 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY of making history more intelligible, leaves it obscure or confounds it with others, or leaps over it and lightly condemns or negates it, we have there the proof that such proposition and the philosophy with which it is connected are arbitrary, though it may preserve interest in other respects, as a manifestation of sentiment or of imagination.
The definition of philosophy as * methodology ' is not at first exempt from doubts, even on the part of one ready to accept in general the tendency that it represents; because philosophy and methodology are terms often contrasted, and a philosophy that leads to a methodology is apt to be tainted with empiricism. But certainly the methodology of which we are here speaking is not at all empirical; indeed, it appears just for the purpose of correcting and taking the place of the empirical methodology of professional historians and of other such specialists in all that greater part of it where it is a true and proper, though defective, attempt toward the philosophical solution of the theo- retical problems raised by the study of history, or toward philosophical methodology and philosophy as methodology.
If, however, the above-mentioned dispute is settled as soon as stated, this cannot be said of another, where our position finds itself opposed to a widely diffused and ancient conception of philosophy as the solver of the mystery of the universe, knowledge of ultimate reality, revelation of the world of noumena, which is held to be beyond the world of phenomena, in which we move in ordinary life and in which history also moves. This is not the place to give the history of that idea; but we must at least say this, that its origin is religious or mythological, and that it persisted even PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 153 among those philosophers who were most successful in directing thought toward our earth as the sole reality, and initiated the new philosophy as methodology of the judgment or of historical knowledge. It persisted in Kant, who admitted it as the limit of his criticism; it persisted in Hegel, who framed his subtle researches in logic and philosophy of the spirit in a sort of mythology of the Idea.
Nevertheless, the diversity of the two conceptions manifested itself in an ever-increasing ratio, finding expression in various formulas of the nineteenth cen- tury, such as psychology against metaphysic, a philosophy of experience and immanence^ aprioristic against tran- scendental philosophy, positivism against idealism; and although the polemic was as a rule ill conducted, going beyond the mark and ending by unconsciously embracing that very metaphysic, transcendency, and apriority, that very abstract idealism, which it had set out to combat, the sentiment that inspired it was legitimate. And the philosophy of methodology has made it its own, has combated the same adversary with better arms, has certainly insisted upon a psychological view, but a speculative psychological view, immanent in history, but dialectically immanent, differing in this from positivism, that while the latter made necessary the contingent, it made the contingent necessary, thus affirming the right of thought to the hegemony. Such a philosophy is just philosophy as history (and so history as philosophy), and the determination of the philosophical moment in the purely categorical and methodological moment.
The greater vigour of this conception in respect to the opposite, the superiority of philosophy as methodology over philosophy as metaphysic, is shown by the capacity of the former to solve the problems of the latter by 154 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY criticizing them and pointing out their origin. Meta- physic, on the other hand, is incapable of solving not only the problems of methodology, but even its own problems, without having recourse to the fantastic and arbitrary. Thus questions as to the reality of the external world, of soul-substance, of the unknowable, of dualisms and of antitheses, and so forth, have dis- appeared in gnoseological doctrines, which have sub- stituted better conceptions for those which we formerly possessed concerning the logic of the sciences, explain- ing those questions as eternally renascent aspects of the dialectic or phenomenology of knowledge.
The view of philosophy as metaphysic is, however, so inveterate and so tenacious that it is not surprising that it should still give some sign of life in the minds of those who have set themselves free of it in general, but have not applied themselves to eradicating it in all its par- ticulars, nor closed all the doors by which it may return in a more or less unexpected manner. And if we rarely find it openly and directly displayed now, we may yet discern or suspect it in one or other of its aspects or attitudes, persisting like kinks of the mind, or uncon- scious preconceptions, which threaten to drive philosophy as methodology back into the wrong path, and to prepare the return, though but for a brief period, of the meta- physic that has been superseded.
It seems to me opportune to provide here a clear statement of some of these preconceptions, tendencies, and habits, pointing out the errors which they contain and entail.
First of all the survivals of the past that are still common comes the view of philosophy as having a fundamental problem to solve. Now the conception of a fundamental problem is intrinsically at variance with PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 155 that of philosophy as history, and with the treatment of philosophy as methodology of history, which posits, and cannot do otherwise than posit, the infinity of philosophical problems, all certainly connected with one another, but not one of which can be considered fundamental, for just the same reason that no single part of an organism is the foundation of all the others, but each one is in its turn foundation and founded. If, indeed, methodology take the substance of its problems from history, history in its most modest but concrete form of history of ourselves, of each one of us as an individual, this shows us that we pass on from one to another particular philosophical problem at the prompt- ings of our life as it is lived, and that one or the other group or class of problems holds the field or has especial interest for us, according to the epochs of our life. And we find the same to be the case if we look at the wider but less definite spectacle afforded by the already men- tioned general history of philosophy — that is to say, that according to times and peoples, philosophical problems relating sometimes to morality, sometimes to politics, to religion, or to the natural sciences and mathematics, have in turn the upper hand. Every particular philosophical problem has been a problem of the whole of philosophy, either openly or by inference, but we never meet with a general problem of philosophy, owing to the contradiction thereby implied. And if there does seem to be one (and it certainly does seem so), it is really a question of appearances, due to the fact that modern philosophy, which comes to us from the Middle Ages and was elaborated during the religious struggles of the Renaissance, has preserved a strong imprint of theology in its didactic form, not less than in the psychological disposition of the greater part of those addicted to it.
156 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY Hence arises the fundamental and almost unique importance usurped by the problem of thought and being, which after all was nothing more than the old problem of this world and the next, of earth and heaven, in a critical and gnoseological form. But those who destroyed or who initiated the destruction of heaven and of the other world and of transcendental philosophy by immanent philosophy began at the same moment to corrode the conception of a fundamental problem, although they were not fully aware of this (for we have said above that they remained tram- melled in the philosophy of the Thing in Itself or in the Mythology of the Idea). That problem was rightly fundamental for religious spirits, who held that the whole intellectual and practical dominion of the world was nothing, unless they had saved their own souls or their own thought in another world, in the knowledge of a world of noumena and reality. But such it was not destined to remain for the philosophers, henceforth restricted to the world alone or to nature, which has no skin and no kernel and is all of a piece. What would happen were we to resume belief in a fundamental problem, dominating all others? The other problems would either have to be considered as all dependent upon it and therefore solved with it, or as problems no longer philosophical but empirical. That is to say, all the problems appearing every day anew in science and life would lose their value, either becoming a tautology of the fundamental solution or being com- mitted to empirical treatment. Thus the distinction between philosophy and methodology, between meta- physic and philosophy of the spirit, would reappear, the first transcendental as regards the second, the second aphilosophical as regards the first.
PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY 157 Another view, arising from the old metaphysical conception of the function of philosophy, leads to the rejection of distinction in favour of unity, thus con- forming to the theological conception that all distinctions are unified by absorption in God, and to the religious point of view, which forgets the world and its necessities in the vision of God. From this ensues a disposition which may be described as something between in- different, accommodating, or weak, in respect of particu- lar problems, and the pernicious doctrine of the double faculty is almost tacitly renewed, that is, of intellectual intuition or other superior cognoscitive faculty, peculiar to the philosopher and leading to the vision of true reality, and of criticism or thought prone to interest itself in the contingent and thus greatly inferior in degree and free to proceed with a lack of speculative rigour not permissible in the other. Such a disposition led to the worst possible consequences in the philosophical treatises of the Hegelian school, where the disciples (differing from the master) generally gave evidence of having meditated but little or not at all upon the problems of the various spiritual forms, freely accepting vulgar opinions concerning them, or engaging in them with the indifference of men sure of the essential, and therefore cutting and mutilating them without pity, in order to force them into their pre-established schemes with all haste, thus getting rid of difficulties by means of this illusory arrangement. Hence the emptiness and tire- someness of their philosophies, from which the historian, or the man whose attention is directed to the under- standing of the particular and the concrete, failed to learn anything that could be of use to him in the direction of his own studies and in the clearer formulation of his own judgments. And since the mythology of the idea