Yet another consequence of the 'philosophies of history' was the reflourishing of 'universal histories,' in the fallacious signification of complete histories of humanity, indeed of the cosmos, which the Middle Ages had narrated in the chronicles ab origine mundi and de duabus civitatibus and de quattuor imperiis, and the Renaissance and enlightenment had reduced to mere vulgar compilations, finding the centre for its own interest elsewhere. The imagines mundi returned with the philosophies of history, and such they were themselves, transcendental universal histories, with the 'philosophy of nature' belonging to them. The succession of the nations there took the place of the series of empires: to each nation, as formerly to each empire, was assigned a special function, which once fulfilled, it disappeared or fell to pieces, having passed on the lamp of life, which must not pass through the hands of any nation more than once. The German nation was to play there the part of the Roman Empire, which should never die, but exist perpetually, or until the consummation of the ages and the Kingdom of God.

To develop the various forms of the philosophy of history would aid in making clear the internal contradictions of the doctrine and in ascribing the reasons for the introduction of certain corrections for the purpose of doing away with the contradictions in question, but which in so doing introduced others. And in making an examination of this kind a special place should be reserved for Vico, who offers a 'philosophy of history' of a very complex sort, which on the one side does not negate, but passes by in silence the Christian and medieval conception (as it does not deny St Augustine's conception of the two cities or of the elect and Gentile people, but only seriously examines the[Pg 286] history of the latter), while on the other side it resumes the ancient Oriental motive of the circles (courses and recourses), but understands the course as growth and development, and the recourse as a dialectical return, which on the other hand does not seem to give rise to progress, although it does not seem to exclude it, and also does not exclude the autonomy of the free will or the exception of contingency. In this conception the Middle Ages and antiquity ferment, producing romantic and modern thought.[1]

he idea of the circle (which yet contained a great mental claim that demanded satisfaction) gave place to the idea of a linear course, taken from Christianity and from progress to an end, which concludes with a certain state as limit or with entrance into a paradise of indefinite progress, of incessant joy without sorrow. In a conception of this kind there is at one time a mixture of theology and of illuminism, as in Herder, at another an attempt at a history according to the ages of life and the forms of the spirit, as with Fichte and his school; then again the idea realizes its logical ideal in time, as in Hegel, or the shadow of a God reappears, as in the deism of Laurent and of several others, or the God is that of the old religion, but modernized, noble, judicious, liberal, as in moderate Catholicism and Protestantism. And since the course has necessarily an end in all these schemes, announced and described and therefore already lived and passed by, attempts to prolong, to prorogue, or to vary that end have not been wanting, such personages as the Abbots Gioacchini arising and calling themselves the 'Slav apocalyptics' or by some other name, and adding[Pg 287] new eras to those described. But this did not change anything in the general conception　The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879..

And there was no change effected in it by the philosophies of history of the second Schelling, for example, which are usually called irrationalistic, or of the pessimists, because it is clear that the decadence which they describe is a progress in the opposite sense, a progress in evil and in suffering, having its end in the acme of evil and pain, or leading indeed to a redemption and then becoming a progress toward the good. But if the idea of circles, which repeat themselves identically, oppresses historical consciousness, which is the consciousness of perennial individuality and diversity, this idea of progress to an end oppresses it in another way, because it declares that all the creations of history are imperfect, save the last, in which history comes to a standstill and which therefore alone has absolute value, and which thus takes away from the value of reality in favour of an abstraction, from existence in favour of the inexistent.

hese have their chief exponent in Vossius (1623). We cannot abstain from sometimes mentioning the literary form of the works of historians, nor from according their laurels to works of remarkable literary value, while noting their unsatisfactory historiographical methods; but to touch here and there upon, to discuss, to characterize, to eliminate, is of secondary importance and[Pg 168] does not form part of the proper function of historiography, whose object is the development of historiographical thought.

The distinction between this history and that of philology or erudition is less apparent but not less indubitable, always, be it well understood, in the sense explained, of a distinction that is not a separation. This warning should be understood in respect of other exclusions that we are about to effect, without our being obliged to repeat it at every step; for the connexion between history and philology is undeniable, not less than that between history and art, or history and practical life. But that does not prevent philology in itself being the collection, the rearrangement, the purification of material, and not history. Owing to this quality it forms a part rather of the history of culture than of that of thought. It would be impossible to disassociate it from the history of libraries, archives, museums, universities, seminaries, écoles des chartes, academical and editorial enterprises, and from other institutions and proceedings of an entirely practical nature. Fueter has therefore been right in excluding from his theme in his recent work on the history of modern historiography[2] "the history of merely philological research and criticism." This has not prevented him from taking store where apposite of the school of Biondo or of that of Maurini, or of the perfecting of the method of seeking for the sources attained by the German school in the nineteenth century. The confusion and lack of development observable in the old and solid work of Wachler[3] is perhaps due to his having failed to make[Pg 169] this distinction, to which recourse can also be had with advantage elsewhere. Wachler's work, entitled and conceived as "history of research and of the historical art from the Renaissance of letters in Europe onward," ended by assuming the appearance of a repertory or bibliographical catalogue.

by the distinction between the history of historiography and that of the practical tendencies, or tendencies of the social and political spirit, are more intricate. These indeed become incorporated with or at least leave their mark upon the works of historians; but it is just because we can only with difficulty perceive the line of demarcation that it is indispensable to make it quite clear. Such tendencies, such social and political spirit, belong rather to the matter than to the theoretical form of history; they are not so much historiography as history in the act and in its fieri. Machiavelli is a historian in so far as he tries to understand the course of events; he is a politician, or at least a publicist, when he posits and desires a prince, founder of a strong national state, as his ideal, reflecting this in his history. This history, in so far as it portrays that ideal and the inspiration and teaching that accompany it, here and there becomes fable (fabula docet). Thus Machiavelli belongs partly to the history of thought in the Renaissance and partly to the history of the practice of the Renaissance. Nor does this happen solely in political and social historiography, but also in literary and artistic, because there is not perhaps a critic in the world, however unprejudiced and broad in his ideas, who does not manifest tendencies in the direction of a literary renovation of his epoch together with his actual judgments and reconstructions. Now to the extent that he does this,[Pg 170] even if it be in the same book and on the same page or in the same period, he is no longer a critic, but a practical reformer of art. In one domain of history alone is this pacific accompaniment of interpretations and aspirations impossible—in the history of philosophy, because when, as here, there is a difference between historical interpretation and the tendency of the philosopher, the difference reveals the insufficiency of the interpretation itself: in other words, if the theory of the historian of philosophy is at war with the theories of which he claims to expound the history, his theory must be false, just because it does not avail to justify the history of the theories. But this exception does not annul the distinction in other fields; indeed, it confirms it, and is not an exception in the empirical sense, as it appears to be: thought distinguishes and is distinguished from sentiment and will, but it is not distinguished from itself, precisely because it is the principle of distinction. A methodological corollary of this distinction between history of historiography and history of practical tendencies is that the introduction into the first of considerations belonging to the second is to be held erroneous. Here I think Fueter has sinned to some extent in the book to which I have already referred, where he divides his material into humanistic, political, party, imperial, particularist, Protestant, Catholic, Jesuitic, illuministic, romanticist, erudite, lirico-subjective, national, statolatral, historiographical, and the like. Only some of the above divisions belong to, or can properly be reduced to, historiographical concepts, while the majority refer to social and political life. Hence the lack of sound organization that we observe in this book, which is yet so lively and ingenious: its divisions follow one another without sufficient logicality, continuity, and necessity,[Pg 171] and are not the result of a single thought which posits them and develops itself through them. If, on the other hand, the genuinely historiographical portions, which have become mingled with it, should be eliminated, what remained could certainly be organized, but as social and political history, no longer as historiography, because the works of historians would be consulted only as documents showing the tendencies of the times in which they were written. Machiavelli, for instance, (to use the same example) would there figure as an Italian patriot and defender of absolute power, while Vico (a much greater historian than Machiavelli) would not be able to appear at all, or hardly at all, because his relation with the political life of his time was remote and general.

What I have been expounding may be resumed by saying that the history of historiography is neither literary history nor the history of cultural, social, political, moral doings, which are of a practical nature, but that it is certainly all these things, by reason of the unbreakable unity of history, though with it the accent does not fall upon practical facts, but rather upon historiographical thought, which is its proper subject The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879..

 

(I mean by this he who 'continues to think,' or, as is generally said, to draw the consequences) cannot avoid this inquiry, nor does he ever avoid it, in whatever manner he conceive his new inquiry. This he cannot even do, when he tries, by declaring that the end or 'ultimate cause' is unknowable, because (as elsewhere remarked) an unknowable affirmed is an unknowable in some way known. Naturalism is[Pg 68] always crowned with a philosophy of history, whatever its mode of formulation: whether it explain the universe as composed of atoms that strike one another and produce history by means of their various shocks and gyrations, to which they can also put an end by returning to their primitive state of dispersion, whether the hidden God be termed Matter or the Unconscious or something else, or whether, finally,

He be conceived as an Intelligence which avails itself of the chain of causes in order to actualize His counsels. And every philosopher of history is on the other hand a naturalist, because he is a dualist and conceives a God and a world, an idea and a fact in addition to or beneath the Idea, a kingdom of ends and a kingdom or sub-kingdom of causes, a celestial city and one that is more or less diabolical or terrene. Take any deterministic historical work and you will find or discover in it, explicit or understood, transcendency (in Taine, for example, it goes by the name of 'race' or of 'siècle,' which are true and proper deities); take any work of 'philosophy of history' and dualism and naturalism will be found there (in Hegel, for example, when he admits rebellious and impotent facts which resist or are unworthy the dominion of the idea). And we shall see more and more clearly how from the entrails of naturalism comes inevitably forth the 'philosophy of history　The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879..'
II

But the 'philosophy of history' is just as contradictory as the deterministic conception from which it arises and to which it is opposed. Having both accepted and superseded the method of linking brute facts together, it no longer finds facts to link (for these have[Pg 69] already been linked together, as well as might be, by means of the category of cause), but brute facts, on which it must confer rather a 'meaning' than a linking, representing them as aspects of a transcendental process, a theophany. Now those facts, in so far as they are brute facts, are mute, and the transcendency of the process requires an organ, not that of thought that thinks or produces facts, but an extra-logical organ, in order to be conceived and represented (such, for example, as thought which proceeds abstractly a priori, in the manner of Fichte), and this is not to be found in the spirit, save as a negative moment, as the void of effective logical thought. The void of logical thought is immediately filled with praxis, or what is called sentiment, which then appears as poetry, by theoretical refraction. There is an evident poetical character running through all 'philosophies of history.' Those of antiquity represented historical events as strife between the gods of certain peoples or of certain races or protectors of certain individuals, or between the god of light and truth and the powers of darkness and lies.

They thus expressed the aspirations of peoples, groups, or individuals toward hegemony, or of man toward goodness and truth. The most modern of modern forms is that inspired by various national and ethical feelings (the Italian, the Germanic, the Slav, etc.), or which represents the course of history as leading to the kingdom of liberty, or as the passage from the Eden of primitive communism, through the Middle Ages of slavery, servitude, and wages, toward the restoration of communism, which shall no longer be unconscious but conscious, no longer Edenic but human. In poetry, facts are no longer facts but words, not reality but images, and so there would be no occasion to censure them, if it remained pure poetry.[Pg 70] But it does not so remain, because those images and words are placed there as ideas and facts—that is to say, as myths: progress, liberty, economy, technique, science are myths, in so far as they are looked upon as agents external to the facts. They are myths no less than God and the Devil, Mars and Venus, Jove and Baal, or any other cruder forms of divinity. And this is the reason why the deterministic conception, after it has produced the 'philosophy of history,' which opposes it, is obliged to oppose its own daughter in its turn, and to appeal from the realm of ends to that of causal connexions, from imagination to observation, from myths to facts.
 

From this table we are to understand that out of one hundred thousand married persons (including widowers) from 20 to 25 years old, 626 die in the course of each year; while out of a similar number of unmarried persons, between the same ages, no less than 1,231 die in each year. And in like manner all the other lines of the table are to be interpreted.

supplied by the above figures, Dr. Stark stated that ‘bachelorhood is more destructive to life than the most unwholesome trades, or than residence in an unwholesome house or district, where there has never been the most distant attempt at sanitary improvement of any kind.’ And this view has been very generally accepted, not only by the public, but by professed statisticians. Yet, as a matter of fact, I believe that no such inferences can legitimately be240 drawn from the above table. Dr. Stark appears to me to have fallen into the mistake, which M. Quetelet tells us is so common, of trying to make his statistics carry more weight than they are capable of bearing. It is important that the matter should be put in a just light, for the Royal Commission on the Law of Marriage has revealed no more striking fact than that of the prevalence of immature marriages, and such reasoning as Dr. Stark’s certainly cannot tend to discourage these unwise alliances. If death strikes down in five years only half as many of those who are married as of those who are unmarried between the ages of 20 and 25 (as appears from the above table), and if the proportion of deaths between the two classes goes on continually diminishing in each successive lustre (as is also shown by the above table), it seems reasonable to infer that the death-rate would be even more strikingly disproportionate for persons between the ages of fifteen and twenty than for persons between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. I believe, indeed, that if Dr. Stark had extended his table to include the former ages, the result would have been such as I have indicated. Yet few will suppose that very youthful marriages can exercise so singularly beneficial an effect Two considerationsmust havecaused Scheerthe gravestpossible anxiety..

To many Dr. Stark’s conclusion may appear to be a natural and obvious sequitur from the evidence upon which it is founded. Admitting the facts—and I see no reason for doubting them—it may appear at first sight that we are bound to accept the conclusion that241 matrimony is favourable to longevity. Yet the consideration of a few parallel cases will suffice to show how small a foundation the figures I have quoted supply for such a conclusion. What would be thought, for example, of any of the following inferences?—Among hot-house plants there is observed a greater variety and brilliance of colour than among those which are kept in the open air; therefore the housing of plants conduces to the splendour of their colouring. Or again: The average height of Life Guardsmen is greater than that of the rest of the male population; therefore to be a Life Guardsman conduces to tallness of stature. Or to take an example still more closely illustrative of Dr. Stark’s reasoning: The average longevity of noblemen exceeds that of untitled persons; therefore to have a title is conducive to longevity; or borrowing his words, to remain without a title ‘is more destructive to life than the most unwholesome trades, or than residence in an unwholesome house or district, where there has never been the most distant attempt at sanitary improvement of any kind.’
 

But while we may thus look somewhat confidently forward, as I judge, to the future of our country, serious questions are suggested as to the future of the human race. The period during which a nation flourishes, long as it seems by comparison with the life of man, yet sinks into insignificance when compared with the period during which civilised men will bear sway upon the earth. The thousands of years during which the coal stores of the earth may be expected to last will pass away, and then the descendants of those now living on the earth will have to trust to other force-supplies than those which we are now using so lavishly. It may seem fanciful to look so far forward, and yet by comparison with the periods which the astronomer deals with in considering the future of our earth, thousands of years are as nothing. As I have said elsewhere, ‘those thousands of years will pass as surely as the thousands which have already passed, and the wants entailed by wastefulness in our day will then be felt, and none the less that for so many years there had been no failure in the supplies contained within the great subterranean storehouse.’ It behoves us to consider thoughtfully the wants even of those distant eras. If the greatest good for the greatest number is to be regarded as the true rule for the conduct of intelligent beings, then unquestionably mere distance in point of time should not prevent us from an96ticipating the requirements of those remote descendants of ours. We should regard the consciousness of this duty and its performance as signs by which the superiority of our own over less civilised times is partly manifested. As man is in dignity higher than non-intelligent animals, in that he alone provides of his own forethought for the wants of his children, so our generation would be raised in dignity above preceding generations if it took intelligent charge of the wants of its remote descendants. We ourselves are now employing stores of force laid up for us by the unconscious processes of Nature in long past ages.

has finely said, we are utilising the Sun of the Carboniferous Epoch. The light ‘which streamed earthwards from the sun’ was stored up for us by the unconscious activity of ‘organisms which living took into them the solar light, and by the consumption of its energy incessantly generated chemical forces.’ The vegetable world of that old epoch ‘constituted the reservoir in which the fugitive solar rays were fixed, suitably deposited, and rendered ready for useful application.’ What the vegetable world did for us unconsciously during the Carboniferous Epoch, the scientific world of our epoch must do for our remote descendants. While we are consuming the stores of force laid up in past ages for our benefit, we must invent the means for obtaining directly from the solar rays fresh and inexhaustible supplies of motive energy　Two considerations must have caused Scheer the gravest possible anxiety..

(From the St. Paul’s Magazine, November 1871.)
THE SECRET OF THE NORTH POLE.
If an astronomer upon some distant planet has ever thought the tiny orb we inhabit worthy of telescopic study, there can be little doubt that the snowy regions which surround the arctic and antarctic poles must have attracted a large share of his attention. Waxing and waning with the passing seasons, those two white patches afford significant information respecting the circumstances of our planet’s constitution. They mark the direction of the imaginary axial line upon which the planet rotates; so that we can imagine that an astronomer on Mars or Venus would judge from their position how it fares with terrestrial creatures. There may, indeed, be Martial Whewells who laugh to scorn the notion that a globe so inconveniently circumstanced as ours can be inhabited, and are ready to show that, if there were living beings here, they must be quickly destroyed by excessive heat. On the other hand, there are possibly sceptics on Venus also who smile at the vanity of those who can conceive a frozen world, such as this our outer planet, to be inhabited by any sort of living creature. But we doubt not that the more advanced thinkers both in Mars and Venus are ready to admit that, though we must necessarily be far inferior beings to themselves, we yet manage to ‘live and move and have our being’ on this ill-conditioned globe of98 ours. And these, observing the earth’s polar snow-caps, must be led to several important conclusions respecting physical relations here.