premiss 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 separa- tion, 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 other- wise than in the present, as the force of the present, resolved and transformed in the present. Every parti- cular 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, an 92 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY institution, 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 never history of deaths but history of /ife, 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 insti- tutions, 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, THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY 93 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 im- pulse 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 in- defatigable 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 Alcmaeon of Crete, he is not able rrjv apxvv T(P reXei 7rpoadyjraiy to join his beginning to his end: history never dies, because she always joins her beginning to her end.
E VI THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY NFRANCHISING 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 call humanistic.
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 of rationalistic, intellectualisticy abstract- 94 THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 95 istic, individualistic, psychological history, and especially under that of pragmatic history. It is a form generally condemned by the consciousness of our times, which has employed these designations, especially rationalism and pragmatism, to represent a particular sort of historio- graphical 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 man in 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 historical 96 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY facts, 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 funda- mental motive of the abstract individual. The prag- matic 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 Per "cles, 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 manner THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 97 all those 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, ex- plained 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 enumera- tion 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, how- ever 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.
98 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 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 to sa Majeste 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 intelligence con* THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 99 tributes 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 develop- ment, regressions, the triumph of evil. The individual, engaged with external forces however conceived, some- times 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 com- pleted the criticism of pragmatic and the redemption of humanism has been variously and more or less well ioo THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY formulated in the course of the history of thought as mind or reason that constructs history, as the ' provi- dence ' 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 attempt THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 101 made 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 misunder- standing, 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 proposi- tions 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 recog- nition of the new concept, which it substantially follows in its judgments.
102 THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY 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 pro- visional 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 as deluded (satisfied indeed beyond their desires and hopes), then certainly as illuded, even though bene- volently illuded. Individuals and Providence, or indi- viduals 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 point THE HUMANITY OF HISTORY 103 of 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 illu- sions, proposing to himself ends that he fails to attain and attaining ends that he has not seen. Schopen- hauer (imitating Hegel) has made popular the illusions of love, by means of which the will leads the indi- vidual to propagate the species; and we all know that illusions are not limited to those that men and women exercise toward one another (Jes tromperies reciproques), but that they enter into our every act, which is always accompanied by hopes and mirages that are not fol- lowed 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 —