Chapter III: History

[Sidenote: _History as individual judgment._]

Since all the characteristics assigned to Philosophy are verbal variants of its unique character, which is the pure concept, so all the characteristics of History can be reduced to the definition and identification of History with the individual judgment.

History, being the individual judgment, is the synthesis of subject and predicate, of representation and concept. The intuitive and the logical elements are both indispensable to it and both are bound together with an unseverable link.

[Sidenote: _The individual element and historical sources; relics and narratives._]

Owing to the necessity for the subject or intuitive element, history cannot be constructed by pure reason. The vision of the thing done is necessary and is the sole _source_ of history. In treatises upon historical method the sources are usually divided into _remains_ and _narratives,_ meaning by remains (_Ueberreste_) the things which remain as traces of an event (for example, a contract, a letter, a triumphal arch), and by narratives the accounts of the event as they have been communicated by those who were more or less eye-witnesses, or by those who have consulted the notes of eye-witnesses. But, in truth, narratives are valuable just in so far as it is presumed that they place us in direct contact with the thing that happened and make us live it again, drawing it forth from the obscure depth of the memories that the human race bears with it. Had they not this virtue, they would be altogether useless, as are the narratives to which for one reason or another credence is refused. A hundred or a thousand narratives lacking authenticity are not equal to the poorest authentic document. An authentic narrative is both a document and remains; it is the reality of the fact as it was _lived_ and as it vibrates in the spirit of him who took part in it. The search for veracity and the criticism of the value of sources are reducible in the ultimate analysis, to the isolation of this genuine resonance of fact, by its liberation from perturbing elements, such as the illusions, the false judgments, the preoccupations and passions of the witness. Only in so far as this can be successfully done, and in the measure in which it is successful, do we have the first condition of history as act of cognition--that something can be _intuited_ and thereby transformable into the _subject_ of the individual judgment, that is to say, into historical narrative.

[Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical research._·]

On this necessity is based the importance which in the examination of historians is attached to intuition, or touch, or scent, or whatever else it may be called, that is to say, to the capacity (derived in part from natural disposition and in part from practical exercise) of directly intuiting what has occurred, of passing beyond the obstacles of time and space and the alterations produced by chance or human passion. An historian without intuitive faculty, or more exactly (since no one is altogether without it), with but slender intuitive faculty, is condemned to barrenness, however learned and ingenious he may be in argument. He finds himself inferior to others, less learned and less logical than he, inferior even to the uncultured and to the illogical, when it is a question of feeling what lies beneath words and signs, or of reproducing in himself what actually happened. For the same reason, it sometimes happens that an expert in a given trade is astonished to hear the learned arm-chair historian describe certain orders of facts, of which he has no experience and of which he talks as a blind man talks of colours. A sergeant can intuite a march better than a Thiers, and laugh at the millions of men that Xerxes had led into Greece by simply enquiring how they were fed. A political schemer understands a court or ministerial intrigue far better than an honest man like Muratori. A craftsman can reconstruct the successive brush-strokes and the traces of change of mind in a picture better than the erudite and æsthetic historian of art. Historical works perhaps defective or even failures from other points of view, sometimes fascinate by the proof they give of freshness of impression: and this quality may serve to increase our knowledge of facts and to rectify the errors into which their authors have fallen in other respects. To a historian of the French Revolution we can pardon even the mistaking of one personage for another, of a river for a mountain, or the confusion of months and years, when on the whole he has lived again better than others the soul of the Jacobins, the spiritual conditions of the mob of Paris, the attitude of the peasants of Burgundy or of La Vendée. What is called an historical novel sometimes has in certain respects greater value than a history, if the novel is inspired by the spirit of the time and the history contains merely an inventory.

[Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical exposition. Similarity of history and art._]

The intuitive faculty, indispensable in research, is not less indispensable in historical exposition; since it is necessary to intuite the actual fact, not in a fugitive and sketchy manner, but so firmly as to be able to express it and to fix it in words, in such a way as to transmit its genuine life to others. Hence the specially artistic character that must be possessed by true historians. Here they resemble pure artists, painting pictures, as they do, composing poems and writing tragic dialogues. Certainly, every thought, even that of the most abstruse philosopher and mathematician, becomes concrete in artistic form. But the historian (in the somewhat empirical sense of the word) approximates much more nearly to those who express pure intuitions, since he gives literary preference to the subject over the predicate. This has been generally recognized both by historians, who have freely presented themselves as bards of their race invoking the Muse who represents History upon Parnassus, while there is there no representative of Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science; and by theorists, who have constantly debated the question as to _whether history is art._ It seems indeed to be art, when the predicate or logical element is so well concealed that hardly any attention is paid to it.

[Sidenote: _Difference between history and art. The predicate or logical element in history._]

I say _hardly_; because if no attention whatever be paid to it, if literary emphasis become logical mutilation, art will remain, but history will have gone. A book of history will no longer merely _resemble_ a poem or romance, but will _be_ a poem or a romance. What is it that, from the point of view of intuition, distinguishes an imaginative vision and an historical narrative? If we open the _Divine Comedy_ or the _Rime_ of Petrarch and read: "In the middle pathway of our life, I found myself in a dark forest ...," or, "I raised my thought to where she whom I seek was and find not upon earth ..."; and if we open Livy's _History,_ at the place where he recounts the battle of Cannae, and read: "_Consules satis exploratis itineribus sequentes Poenum, ut ventum ad Cannas est, ubi in conspecta Poenum habebant, bina, castra communiunt,"_ nothing at first seems changed; both are narratives. Yet everything is changed. If we read Livy as we read Dante or Petrarch, the battle of Cannae in the same way as the voyage of Dante to the Inferno, or the passage of the spirit of Petrarch to the third heaven, Livy is no longer Livy, but a story book. In like manner, if we read a book of stories, as, for example, the _Kings of France_ or the _Guerin Meschino,_ in the same way as they are read by the uneducated man of the people, who seeks history in them, the story book becomes transformed into a historical book, although of a kind that must be criticized and refuted when a higher degree of culture has been attained. This suffices to show the importance of that predicate, which is sometimes left to be understood in the words, but whose effective presence transforms the pure intuition into the individual judgment and makes _history_ of a _poem._

[Sidenote: _Vain attempts to eliminate it._]

The necessity of the logical element has been several times denied, and it has been affirmed that the historian must let things speak for themselves and put into them nothing of his own. This fine phrase may have some reference to a-certain truth, as we shall see. But if it is understood as the exclusion of the logical element in favour of pure intuition (and worse still, if it intends to exclude also the category of intuition, for in that case we have simple _muteness),_ it proclaims the death of history. Without the logical element it is not possible to say that even the smallest, the most ordinary fact, belonging to our individual and everyday life, has _occurred;_ as, for instance, that I rose this morning at eight o'clock and took luncheon at twelve. For (to give no other reasons) these historical propositions imply the concept of existence or actuality and the correlative concept of non-existence or possibility, since in affirming them I also deny that I only dreamed of rising at eight or of taking luncheon at twelve. All will agree that we cannot speak of a historical fact if we do not know that it is a fact, that is to say, something that has happened; even stories become the object of history, in so far as their existence as stories is attributed to them. A story, told without knowing or deciding whether it be or be not a story, is poetry; perceived and told as a story, it is mythography, that is to say, history; the author of the _Iliad_ or the author of the _Niebelungen_ is not Adalbert Kuhn, Jacob Grimm or Max Müller.

[Sidenote: _Extension of historical predicates beyond that of mere existence._]

But the criterion of existentiality does not itself suffice, as some believe, for the effectual constitution of historical narrative. For what sort of narrative should we have, if we merely said that something had happened, without saying _what_ had happened? That something has happened and does happen at every instant, is not, as we know, the content of historical narrative, because it is the affirmation that being is, or that becoming is. What has been said of the individual judgment, namely, that it is constituted by all the predicates together, that is, of the whole concept, and not by the predicate of existence alone, torn from the others, must also be said of historical narrative. It is truly complete and therefore realized, when the intuition, which supplied it with the rough material, is completely penetrated by the concept, in its universality, particularity and singularity. That the consuls, after having sufficiently explored the routes, followed the Carthaginian, entered Cannae, and seeing themselves face to face with the army of Hannibal, pitched and fortified their camp (as runs Livy's narrative), implies a crowd of concepts, equal in number to the historical affirmations collected in that sentence. No one ignorant as to what is man, war, army, pursuit, route, camp, fortification, dream, reality, love, hatred, fatherland, and so on, is capable of _thinking_ such a sentence as this. And the obscurity of one of those concepts is sufficient to make it impossible to form the narrative as a whole, just as any one who does not understand the meaning of the word _castra_ is not in a position to understand what forms the argument of Livy's narrative. If the sources are changed, the historical narrative changes; but this latter changes no less, if our convictions as to the concepts are changed. The same matter is differently arranged and gives rise to different histories, if it is narrated by a savage or a cultured European, by an anarchist or a conservative, by a protestant or a catholic, by the me of this moment or the same me of ten years hence. Given that all have the same documents before them, each one reads in them a different happening.

[Sidenote: _Alleged insuperable variation in judging and presenting historical facts, and consequent claim for a history without judgments._]

But the fact here stated seems to lead straight to despair as to the fate of history, or at least as to its fate, so long as it is bound to the logical element, to convictions about the concepts. When it is observed that the same facts are narrated in the most different way; that what for some is the work of God is for others the work of the Devil; that what for some is the manifestation of spiritual forces is for others the product of material movements of the brain, according as it is well or ill-nourished; that to some the good of life lies in every explosion and revolt, while to others it lies only in regular work under the tutelage of laws rigorously observed and made to be observed,--we arrive at the conclusion of historical scepticism, namely, that history as usually narrated is nothing but a story woven from such a state of degeneration seems to be a return to the pure and simple reproduction of the document, or at least to the pure intuition, which introduces no element of _judgment,_ or of what is called _subjective._ But this salvation is only a figure of speech, for pure intuition is poetry and not history, and to return to it is equivalent to abolishing history. This, however, is clearly impossible, for the human race has always narrated its doings, and none of us can dispense with establishing at every instant how things have happened, what has really happened, and in what actual or historical conditions he finds himself.

[Sidenote: _Restriction of variations and exclusion of apparent variations._]

Historical scepticism is, however, as inexact and one-sided in the observation of fact as it is puerile in the suggestion of a remedy. Certainly, there are divergences between the various accounts of the same fact; but (setting aside _apparent_ divergences, derived from the different interest taken in a given fact, owing to which verbal prominence is given to one or to another aspect of it, and limiting ourselves here to _real_ differences) we must, for the sake of exactitude, take account of all the no less real agreements, to be found side by side with these divergences. In virtue of them, for instance, Protestant and Catholic are unanimous in recognizing that Luther and Leo X. existed, that the one produced a definite movement in Germany and that the other had recourse to certain definite prohibitions; and, finally, both Protestant and Catholic recognize (now at least) the corruption of the ecclesiastical orders at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the mundane and political interests of the German princes in the wars of religion. In like manner no one, however revolutionary or conservative he is, will question the bad condition of French finances at the eve of the Revolution; or that Louis XVI. convoked the States General; or that he attempted flight and was stopped at Varennes; or that he was guillotined on the 21st of January 1793; or that the French Revolution was an event which profoundly changed the social and moral life of the whole of Europe. Owing to this substantial agreement between two historians in very many points, and indeed in the greater part of the narrative, it happens that we can often read and advise others to read histories that are tainted with the passions of the partisan, while merely recommending the reader to make a mental allowance for these passions. In like manner, we can usefully employ a defective instrument of measurement, provided we include in the calculation the coefficient of aberration.

[Sidenote: _The overcoming of variations by means of deepening the concepts._]

As to the remedy, it is clear that if the divergences as to the concepts arise from ignorance, prejudice, negligence, illegitimate private or national interests, and from other disturbing passions, that is to say, from _insufficient conceiving of the concepts,_ or from inexact thought, the remedy is certainly not to be sought in the abandonment of concepts and of thought, but in correcting the former and making perfect the latter. Abandonment would not only be cowardly, but impossible. Having left the Eden of pure intuition and entered the field of history, it is not given us to retrace our steps. There is no returning to blessed and ingenuous ignorance; innocence is lost for ever, and we must no longer aspire to it, but to virtue, which is neither innocent nor ingenuous. Why does what seems good to the Protestant seem bad to the Catholic? Evidently, owing to the different conception that each forms as to this world and the world above us, death and life, reason and revelation, criticism and authority, and so on. It is necessary, then, to open the discussion with the enquiry as to whether the truth is with the Protestants or with the Catholics, or whether it be not found rather in a third view, which goes beyond both. Once a definite result has been obtained, perplexity will be at an end (at least for him who has attained it), and the narrative can be constructed with as much security as the available historical sources permit. The way indicated will seem hard; but it is the only way. Whoever decides to retain his own opinions, received without criticism, will perhaps provide for his own convenience, but he will renounce history and truth. For the rest, we do not here draw up a programme for the future, but simply establish what history is in its true nature, and consequently how it is manifested and has _always_ been manifested. Men in every age have discussed the concepts with which historical reality has been interpreted and have agreed upon very many points, as to which there is no longer any discussion. Both Catholics and Protestants, Revolutionaries and conservatives are, as has been already remarked, more in agreement than they were formerly; because something has passed and penetrated from each to each, or rather the _humanity,_ which is in both, has become elevated. Scepticism accomplishes an easy task, but uses an illusory argument, in history as in philosophy, when it catalogues the points of disagreement. These are before the eyes of all, just because they represent the problems which it is important to solve. Would it not be worth while to keep in view as of equal importance the points already solved, and to say, for example, that historians are henceforth agreed that Anchises did not sleep with Aphrodite, that the wolf did not suckle Romulus and Remus, and that William Tell did not establish the liberty of the Swiss Cantons? In short, it would not be easy to find either those who support or those who deny Mary's immaculate conception. The Catholic writers who insist upon such disputes are rare, and those who deny are found only in little democratic journals of the inferior sort or of degraded taste.

[Sidenote: _Subjectivity and objectivity in history: their meaning._]

To drive _subjectivity_ out of history, in order to obtain _objectivity,_ cannot therefore mean to drive away thought to obtain intuition, or worse still, to obtain brute matter, which is altogether inexpressible; but to drive away false thought, or passion that usurps the place of truth, and to mount to true thought, rigorous and complete. If we attain to intuition, instead of saving ourselves from passion we shall burn in its flames. For intuition says nothing but what we as individuals experience, suffer, and desire. It is just intuition which, when unduly introduced into history, becomes subjectivity _sensu deteriori;_ whereas thought is _true subjectivity,_ that of the universal, which is at the same time _true objectivity._

[Sidenote: _Historical judgments of value, and normal or neutral values. Critique._]

We have thus also solved the question (so much discussed in our day) as to the _criterion of value_ in history, and whether judgments of values, as well as judgments of fact belong to the province of the historian. It is solved, because true judgments of fact, individual judgments, are precisely judgments of value, or determinations of the proper quality, and therefore of the meaning and value of the fact. We admit no other criterion of value than the concept itself. For this reason, we must also reject the distinction of the _history_ of fact and the _criticism_ (or valuation) of it. Every history is also criticism, and every criticism is also history; to say that a thing is the fact which we call the _Divine Comedy_ is to say what its value is, and so to criticize it. To think _normal_ or _neutral_ values, as to which (according to the most modern historical theories) men of different points of view should agree, seems at the most a mere _symbol_ of that agreement which men are constantly seeking and realizing in the subjectivity objectivity of thought. This will never be a _fact_ completely agreed upon, because it is a perpetual _fieri._ It cannot be expected of the future, because it will belong to the future, as it belongs and has belonged to the present and to the past.

[Sidenote: _Various legitimate meanings of the protests against historical subjectivity._]

If the protest against the intrusion of subjectivity into history cannot logically be said to have any legitimate meaning save that of a polemic against false subjectivity in favour of true subjectivity, it may also imply, on the literary side, a question of expediency, namely, that in the historical work of art greater importance should be given to the representation of facts than to the theoretical discussion of concepts. A historical should not be transformed into a philosophical work. But this is a question that must be studied case by case; for what harm could it do, if a historian, beginning by writing a history, were to end by writing a philosophic treatise? Certainly, it would not be a greater evil than if a philosopher, becoming passionate about the facts he gives as instances, were gradually to abandon his first plan and produce a history in place of a system. At bottom it would do no harm, or very little, provided that such philosophy or such historical representation were good; and this is precisely what must be examined case by case. A more appropriate meaning of the polemic against the subjectivity of history is the recommendation that in narrating history, _emphatic, negative,_ and _desiderative_ forms should accompany logical judgments which, as such, are judgments of value, as little as possible. These forms, it is argued, are justifiable in relation to the present or immediate past, because they indicate the direction of the future, but in relation to the remote past they are usually empty and superfluous. Indeed, to rage against Marius or Sulla, Cæsar or Pompey, Frederick Barbarossa or the burgesses of Lombardy, is somewhat vain, because those historical personages have, in general, no near or practical interest. But, on the other hand, it is also true that these characters always have some near and practical interest, and in that measure we cannot prevent history, even of the remote past, being here and there revived with the accents of our present and of our future. Still more legitimate is the significance of that polemic when the intention is to blame the habit of those who assume the functions of praise or blame, in relation not only to men, but to historical events. They applaud paganism, abuse Christianity, weep over the fall of the Roman Empire, deplore the formation of Islamism, regret that Buddhism should not have been disseminated in Europe, sympathize with the Reformation, or disapprove of Catholicism after the Council of Trent. To them was addressed the saying that history is not to be judged but to be narrated. But it would be more accurate to say that history is not to be judged by the categories by which we judge the actions of individuals, which are subject to the dialectic of good and evil, because the action of an individual differs from the historical event, which transcends individual wills. But the definition of individuality and of event goes outside the gnoseology of history, and more properly belongs to the Philosophy of the Practical.[1]

[Sidenote: _The demand for a theory of historical facts._]

The conviction that has been gained as to the necessity of the logical element, of concepts, criteria, or values, for the formation of narrative, has induced some to demand, not only that the historian should continually have clearly and firmly in mind the concepts that he employs and his intention in employing them, but that a _theory of historical factors_ or, as others call it, a _table of values,_ should be constructed, which should serve as foundation for historical narrative in general. The demand is exactly similar to that of the man who, observing that electricians or metal-founders employ physical forces, demands the construction of a physical theory to serve as the basis of industry; as if Physics did not exist and supply the basis for industry; or as if the sciences changed their nature, according to the men who employ them. The theory of historical factors, or the table of values, exists, and is called _Philosophy,_ whose precise business it is to define _universals,_ which are _factors_ and not facts, and to give the table of _values,_ which are _categories._ At the most this demand might be taken to suggest the recommendation of a popular philosophy, for the use of professional historians; but this too exists and is natural _good sense. A_ historian who entertains doubts as to the deliverances of good sense begins to philosophize (in the restricted and professional sense of the word), and once he has done this, what is called popular philosophy no longer suffices him, or serves only to make his mental condition worse, with its insufficient nourishment. Books on the teaching of history which abound in our literature of to-day are proof of this. Disquisitions as to the _predominance_ or the _fundamental_ character of this or that historical factor belong to this popular and more or less dilettante literature. In strict philosophy, such problems do not arise, or are promptly dissolved, because it is known that, since every fact of reality depends upon another fact, so also every factor, or every constitutive element of the spirit and of reality, is such only in union with other factors and elements. None of them predominates, because measures of greater or less are not used in philosophy, and none is fundamental, because all are fundamental.

[Sidenote: _Impossibility of dividing history according to its intuitive and reflective elements._]

The representative and conceptual elements in historical judgment are not separable or even, strictly, distinguishable unless it is intended to dissolve the historical narrative in order to return to pure intuition. This too is a corollary of what has been said on the individual judgment. For this reason, every division of history, based upon the presence or absence of one or other of these elements, must be held to be without truth. Of this kind is the once popular division into _picturesque_ and _reflective_ or _thinking_ history. But this division designates not two kinds of history, but rather, on the one hand, the return to indiscriminate intuition, and on the other, true history, which is intuition thought or reflected. The same false division is sometimes expressed in the terms _chronicle_ and _history,_ or _narrative_ and _philosophic_ history.

[Sidenote: _Empirical nature of the division of the historical process into four stages._]

Outside the individual judgment, there is neither subject nor predicate. Outside the narrative, which synthesizes representation and concept, and by representing gives existence and judgment, there is no history. Technical manuals usually divide the process of historical composition into four stages. The first is _heuristic,_ consisting of the collection of historical material; the second _criticism_ or _separation_ of it; the third is _interpretation_ or _comprehension,_ the fourth _exposition_ or _narrative._ These distinctions portray the professional historian's method of work. _First,_ he examines archives and libraries, _then_ he verifies the authenticity of the documents found, _then_ he seeks to understand them, and _finally_ he puts his thoughts on paper and pays attention to the beauty of form of the exposition. These are doubtless useful didactic distinctions. But it must be observed that so long as we do not have a historical source before us (the first stage) the very condition of the birth of history is wanting. Hence the first stage does not belong to historical work, but to the practical stage of him who goes in search of a material object. The second stage is already a complete historical work in itself, since it consists in establishing, whether a given fact, called sincere evidence, has really taken place. The third coincides logically with the second, since it is the same thing to ascertain the value of a piece of evidence and to pronounce on the reality and quality of the facts to which it witnesses. The fourth coincides with the second and third, because it is impossible to think a narrative without speaking it, that is, without giving to it expressive or verbal form.

[Sidenote: _Divisions founded upon the historical object._]

If history be not divisible on the basis of the presence or absence of the reflective or representative element, it may well be divided by taking as basis, either the concept that determines the particular historical composition, or the representative material that enters into it.

[Sidenote: _Logical division according to the forms of the spirit._]

The first mode of distinction is rigorous, because founded upon the character of unity-in-distinction, proper to the pure concept. Thus, the human mind cannot think history as a whole, save by distinguishing it at the same time into the history of doing and the history of knowing, into the history of the practical activity and the history of æsthetic production, of philosophic thought, and so on. In like manner, it cannot think any one of these distinctions, save by placing it in relation with the others, or with the whole, and thinking it in complete history. Naturally, this intimate, logical unity and distinction has nothing to do with the _books_ which are called histories of the practical, philosophic, artistic activities, and the like. There the correspondence with the division of which we speak is only approximate, owing to the operation of what we called practical or economic motives. But every historical proposition, like every individual judgment, qualifies the real according to one aspect of the concept, and excludes another, or it qualifies it indeed according to all its aspects, but distinguishes them, and therefore prevents the one from intruding upon the other. The literary division of books into books of practical, philosophic, and artistic history, and so on, gets its importance from this fundamental distinction, according to which are also divided the different points of view of historians and the various interests of their readers.

[Sidenote: _Empirical division of representative material._]

The second mode is, of necessity, empirical, and cannot be carried out without the introduction of empirical concepts. For otherwise it would not be possible to keep the representations of reality separate, since they constitute a continuous and compact series. By means of empirical concepts, history is divided into the history of the State, of the Church, of society, of the family, of religion (as distinct from philosophy), or of philosophy (as distinct from religion). Or, as the history of philosophy, it is divided into the history of idealism, of materialism, of scepticism; or as the history of art, into the history of painting, of poetry, of the drama, of fiction. Or again, as the history of civilization, it is divided into oriental history--history of Greece, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, and so on. Even these last mentioned criteria (Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, etc.) are empirical concepts and not representations, because, as we know,[2] the representation is individual, and when it is made constant and general it is changed into a concept of the individual, the summary and symbol of several representations, in fact, the empirical concept. Each one of these divisions is valid in so far as it is useful; and equally valid, under a like condition, are all the divisions that have been conceived, and the infinite number that are conceivable.

[Sidenote: _Empirical concepts in history and the false theory as to the function that they have there._]

But the failure to understand that the true function of the introduction of empirical concepts is to divide the mass of historical facts and to regroup them conveniently for mnemonic purposes, has greatly interfered with the ideas of logicians as to the writing of history. Just as the individual judgment presupposes neither the empirical concept, nor the judgment of classification, nor the abstract concept, nor the judgment of enumeration, whereas all these forms presuppose just the individual judgment; so history does not presuppose classifications conducted from the practical point of view, or enumerations and statistics, whereas on the other hand all of these do presuppose history, and without it could not appear. We should not be deceived by finding them fused in historical works (which continually have recourse to such aids to memory), nor allow ourselves to forget that their function is _subservient,_ not _constitutive._ There can be no abstract idea of the Greek, unless we have first known the individual life of the men called Pericles and Alcibiades. Nor can there be any enumeration of the Three Hundred of Thermopylæ or of the Three Hundred of Cremera, except in so far as each was known in his individual features, and then classified as a citizen of Sparta or a Roman of the Fabian _gens._ To avail oneself of these simplifications is not to narrate history, which is already present to the spirit, but to fix it in the memory and to communicate it to others in an easier way. Those others, if they have not the capacity to recover the individual fact beneath those concepts of class and of number, will understand nothing of history, thus simplified and reduced to a skeleton for the purposes of communication.

[Sidenote: _Hence comes also the claim to reduce history to a natural science;_]

The positivist fiction that _history can be reduced to a science_ (natural science is of course meant) arises from the false interpretation of the subsidiary character of the pseudoconcepts in history and from making them a constitutive part of it. History, on this view, would be rendered a perfect example of what it has hitherto been only in imperfect outline, a classification and statistical table of reality. The many practical attempts at such a reduction have damaged contemporary historical writing not a little, by substituting colourless formulæ and empty abstractions which are applicable to several epochs at once or to all times, for the narration of individual reality. The same tendency appears in what is called _sociologism,_ and in its polemic against what it calls _psychological_ or _individual_ history, and in favour of _institutional_ or _social_ history. Against these materialistic reductions of history, the doctrines of _accident_ or of _little causes_ which upset the effects of _great_ causes, are efficacious and valuable, for these and suchlike absurdities have the merit of reducing that false reduction to absurdity.

[Sidenote: _and the thesis of the practical character of history._]

By reason of the same erroneous interpretation there has come from philosophers who are not positivists, the theory that history is rendered possible only by the intervention of _the practical_ spirit. On this view, the practical spirit, after establishing practical values, arranges beneath them the formless material and shapes it into historical narrative. But the practical spirit is impotent to produce anything in the field of knowledge; it can act only as the custodian and administrator of what has already been produced. For this reason, the theory here referred to, by appealing to the practical spirit, resolves itself into a complete negation of the value of history as knowledge. And this negation, though it was certainly not foreseen or desired by those who maintain the theory, yet is unavoidable.

[Sidenote: _Distinction between historical facts and facts that are not historical, and its empirical value._]

In this connection, there has also been maintained the importance of the distinction between historical events and events not worthy of history, between historical and non-historical, or between teleological and ateleological personages. Such a distinction, it has been affirmed, is afforded by the practical spirit. This is true, but for the reason already given, it amounts to removing all theoretical importance from the distinction, by emptying it of all cognitive content. In reality, for the practical economy of social work, for selecting subjects for books, or for being easily understood in our own speech, it is necessary to speak of a definite event or of a definite individual as a thing and person altogether common and unworthy of history. But it asks the brain of a pedant to imagine that the individual or the event has thereby been suppressed, we do not say from the field of reality (which would be too manifestly absurd), but from that of the _narrative of reality,_ or from history. What is understood forms part of what is said; and if we did not always imply a mental reference to the men we call commonplace, and to insignificant facts, which are more or less excluded from our words, great men and significant events would also lose all meaning. Such implications are so little eliminated or eliminable, that they break out and are even verbally expressed, according to the various interests that determine books on history at various times. Thus we have seen domestic and social life, neglected by the old historians, not only gradually assume importance, but throw wars and diplomatic negotiations into the shade. We have seen the so-called masses, neglected in favour of the individual genius, in their turn conquer, and almost eclipse, the heroes (which does not mean that these latter will not have their revenge). We have seen names, once hardly mentioned, become attractive and popular, and others, at one time celebrated, lose their colour and disappear from view. Even Italian histories of the most recent events afford instances of such fluctuations. For instance, in the period of the Risorgimento, the prevailing interest regarded as supremely important and historical, the formation of Italian nationality, the constitution of the middle class and of the commune, and popular rebellions against foreigners or against tyrants. Now it is the social problem and the socialist movement that dominate, and preference is given to histories of economic facts, of class struggles and of movements of the proletariat.

[Sidenote: _Professional prejudice and the theory of the practical character of history._]

Practical preoccupations are so strong with any one engaged in a given trade, even though it is that of a maker of books of history, as to suggest almost inevitably the strange doctrine of the _practical_ character of history, or the non-theoretic character of that form, which is the crowning result of the theoretic spirit, and which alone gives full truth--if truth is the Knowledge of Reality, and if Reality is history.

[Footnote 1: See on this point my _Philosophy of the Practical,_ part i. sect. ii. chaps, v.-vi.]

[Footnote 2: See above, Part I. Sect. I. Chap. IV.]