Chapter XIV: Part II: Concerning the History of Historiography (5)

But without entering into a particular account of the assumptions made by the romantics and idealists in the construction of their 'philosophies of history,' it will be sufficient to observe the consequences, in order to point out the transcendental tendency of their constructions. These were such as to compromise romantic histories in the method and to damage them in the execution, though they were at first so vigorously conceived as a unity of philosophy and philology. One of the consequences was precisely the falling again into contempt of erudition among those very people who adopted and promoted it, and on other occasions a recommendation of it in words and a contempt of it in deeds. This contradictory attitude was troubled with an evil conscience, so much so that its recommendations sound but little sincere, the contempt timid, when it shows itself, though it is more often concealed. Nevertheless one discovers fleeting words of revelation among these tortuosities and pretences, such as that of an _a priori history_ (Fichte, Schelling, Krause, and, to a certain extent at least, Hegel), which should be true history, deduced from the pure concepts, or rendered divine in some vision of the seer of Patmos, a history which should be more or less different from the confusion of human events and facts, as philosophical history, leaving outside it as refuse a merely _narrative_ history, which should serve as raw material or as text for the sermons and precepts of the moralists and politicians. And we see rising from the bosom of a philosophy, which had tried to make history of itself, by making philosophy also history (proof that the design had not been really translated into act), the distinction between philosophy and history, between the historical and the philosophical way of thinking, and the mutual antipathy and mutual unfriendliness of the two orders of researchers. The 'professional' historians were obliged to defend themselves against their progenitors (the philosophers), and they ended by losing all pity for them, by denying that they were philosophers and treating them as intruders and charlatans.

Unpleasantness and ill-will were all the more inevitable in that the 'philosophers of history'--that is to say, the historians obsessed with transcendency--did not always remain content (nor could they do so, speaking strictly) with the distinction between philosophical and narrative history, and, as was natural, attempted to harmonize the two histories, to make the facts harmonize with the schemes which they had imagined or deduced. With this purpose in view, they found themselves led to use violence toward facts, in favour of their system, and this resulted in certain most important parts being cut out, in a Procrustean manner, and in others that were accepted being perverted to suit a meaning that was not genuine but imposed upon them. Even the chronological divisions, which formed a merely practical aid to narratives, were tortured (as was the custom in the Middle Ages) that they might be elevated to the rank of ideal divisions. And not only was the light of truth extinguished in the pursuit of these caprices, not only were individual sympathies and antipathies introduced (take as an instance typical of all of them the idealization of Hellas and of this or that one of the Hellenic races), but there appeared a thing yet more personally offensive to the victims--that is to say, there penetrated into history, under the guise of lofty philosophy, the personal loves and hates of the historian, in so far as he was a party man, a churchman, or belonged to this or that people, state, or race. This ended in the invention of Germanism, the crown and perfection of the human race, a Germanism which, claiming to be the purest expression of Arianism, would have restored the idea of the elect people, and have one day undertaken the journey to the East. Thus were in turn celebrated semi-absolute monarchy as the absolute form of states, speculative Lutheranism as the absolute form of religion, and other suchlike vainglorious vaunts, with which the pride of Germany oppressed the European peoples and indeed the whole world, and thus exacted payment in a certain way for the new philosophy with which Germany had endowed the world. But it must not be imagined that the pride of Germany was not combated with its own arms, for if the English speculated but little and the French were too firm in their belief in the _Gesta Dei per Francos_ (become the gestes of reason and civilization), yet the peoples who found themselves in less happy conditions, and felt more keenly the censure of inferiority or of senility thus inflicted upon them, reacted: Gioberti wrote a _Primato d'Italia,_ and Ciezkowski a _Paternostro,_ which foretold the future primacy of the Slavonic people and more especially of the Poles.

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 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] But in the romantic period the 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 new eras to those described. But this did not change anything in the general conception. 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. And both of these--that is to say, all the philosophies of history, in whatever way determined--lay in ambush to overwhelm the conceptions of development and the increase in historiographical value obtained through it by romanticism; and when this injury did not occur (as in several notable historians, who narrated history admirably, although they professed to obey the rules of the abstract philosophy of history, which they saluted from near or far, but took care not to introduce into their narratives), it was a proof that the contradiction had not been perceived, or at least perceived as we now perceive it, in its profound dissonance. It was a sign that romanticism too had problems upon which it laboured long and probed deeply, and others upon which it did not work at all or only worked a little and kept waiting, satisfying them more or less. History too, like the individual who works, does 'one thing at a time,' neglecting or allowing to run on with the help of slight provisional improvements the problems to which it cannot for the time being attend, but ready to direct full attention to them when its hands are free.

[1] The exposition and criticism of Vico's thought are copiously dealt with in the second volume of my _Saggi filosofici i La filosofia di Giambattista Vico_ (Bari, 1911).

VII

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM

The philosophies of history offended the historical consciousness in three points, as to which it has every right to be jealous: the integrity of historical events, the unity of the narration with the document, and the immanence of development. And the opposition to the 'philosophy of history,' and to the historiography of romanticism in general, broke out precisely at these three points, and was often violent. This opposition had at bottom a common motive, as has been shown clearly by the frequent sympathy and fraternizing among those who represent it, though dissensions as to details are common among them. It is, however, best to consider it in its triplicity for reasons of clearness, and to describe it as that of the _historians,_ the _philologists,_ and the _philosophers._

To the historians, by whom we mean those who had a special disposition for the investigation of particular facts rather than theories, and a greater acquaintance with and practice of historical than speculative literature, is due the saying that history _should be history and not philosophy._ Not that they ventured to deny philosophy, for on the contrary they protested their reverence for it and even for religion and theology, and condescended to make an occasional rapid and cautious excursion into those waters; but they generally desired to steer their way through the placid gulfs of historical truth, avoiding the tempestuous oceans of the other discipline: philosophy was relegated to the horizon of their works. Nor did they even contest, at least in principle, the right of existence of those grandiose constructions of 'universal history,' but they recommended and preferred national or otherwise monographical histories, which can be sufficiently studied in their particulars, substituting for universal histories collections of histories of states and of peoples. And since romanticism had introduced into those universal histories and into the national histories themselves its various practical tendencies (which the philosophy of history had then turned into dogmas), the historians placed abstention from national and party tendencies upon their programme, although they reserved the right of making felt their patriotic and political aspirations, but, as they said, without for that reason altering the narrative of the facts, which were supposed to move along independently of their opinions, or chime in with them spontaneously in the course of their natural development. And since passion and the philosophic judgment had been confused and mutually contaminated in romanticism, the abstention was extended also to the judgment as to the quality of the facts narrated; the _reality_ and not the value of the fact being held to be the province of the historian, appeal being made to what theorists and philosophers had thought about it, where a more profound consideration of the problem was demanded. History should not be either German or French, Catholic or Protestant, but it should also not pretend to apply a more ample conception to the solution of these or similar antitheses, as the philosophers of history had tried to do, but rather should neutralize them all in a wise scepticism or agnosticism, and attenuate them in a form of exposition conducted in the tone of a presidential summing-up, where careful attention is paid to the opinions of opposed parties and courtesy is observed toward all. There was diplomacy in this, and it is not astonishing that many diplomatists or disciples of diplomacy should collaborate in this form of history, and that the greatest of all the historians of this school, Leopold Ranke, in whom are to be found all the traits that we have described, should have had a special predilection for diplomatic sources. He always, indeed, combated philosophy, especially the Hegelian philosophy, and greatly contributed to discredit it with the historians, but he did this decorously, carefully avoiding the use of any word that might sound too rough or too strong, professing the firm conviction that the hand of God shows itself in history, a hand that we cannot grasp with ours, but which touches our face and informs us of its action. He completed his long and very fruitful labours in the form of monographs, avoiding universal constructions. When, at the end of his life, he set to work to compose a Weltgeschichte, he carefully separated it from the universe, declaring that it would have been "lost in phantasms and philosophemes" had he abandoned the safe ground of national histories and sought for any other sort of universality than that of nations, which "acting upon one another, appear one after the other and constitute a living whole." In his first book he protested with fine irony that he was not able to accept the grave charge of judging the past or of instructing the present as to the future, which had been assigned to history, but he felt himself capable only of showing "how things really had happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen) this was his object in all his work, and he held fast to it, thus culling laurels unobtainable by others, attaining even to the writing of the history of the popes of the period of the Counter-Reformation, although he was a Lutheran and remained so all his life. This history was received with favour in all Catholic countries. His greatest achievement was to write of French history in a manner that did not displease the French. A writer of the greatest elegance, he was able to steer between the rocks, without even letting appear his own religious or philosophical convictions, and without ever finding himself under the obligation of forming a definite resolution, and in any case never pressing too hard upon the conceptions themselves to which he had recourse, such as 'historical ideas,' the perpetual struggle between Church and State, and the conception of the State. Ranke was the ideal and the master to many historians within, and to some without, his own country. But even without his direct influence, the type of history that he represented germinated everywhere, a little earlier or later according to position and to the calming down of the great political passions and philosophical fervour in the different countries. This took place, for instance, in France earlier than in Italy, where the idealistic philosophy and the national movement made their strength felt in historiography after 1848, and even up to 1860. But the type of history which I should almost be disposed to baptize with the name of 'diplomatic,' taking seriously the designation that I had at first employed jocosely, still meets with success among the moderately disposed, who are lovers of culture, but do not wish to become infected with party passions or to rack their brains with philosophical speculations: but, as may be imagined, it is not always treated with the intelligence, the balance, and the finesse of a Leopold Ranke.

The ambition of altogether rejecting the admission of thought into history, which has been lacking to the diplomatic historians (because they were without the necessary innocence for such an ambition), was, on the other hand, possessed by the philologists, a most innocent group. They were all the more disposed to abound in this sense, since their opinion of themselves, which had formerly been most modest, had been so notably increased, owing to the high degree of perfection attained by research into chronicles and documents and by the recent foundation (which indeed had not been a creation ex nihilo) of the critical or historical method, which was employed in a fine and close examination into the origin of sources and the reduction of these, and in the internal criticism of texts. This pride of the philologists prevailed, the method reaching its highest development in a country like Germany, where haughty pedantry flourishes better than elsewhere, and where, as a result of that most admirable thing, scientific seriousness, 'scientificism' is much idolized. This word was also ambitiously adopted for everything that concerns the surroundings and the instruments of true and proper science, such as is the case with the collection and criticism of narratives and documents. The old school of learned men, French and Italian, who did not effect less progress in 'method' than was attained during the nineteenth century in Germany, did not dream that they were thus producing 'science,' much less did they dream of vying with philosophy and theology, or that they could drive them from their positions and take their places with the documentary method. But in Germany every mean little copier of a text, or collector of variants, or examiner of the relations of texts and conjecturer as to the genuine text, raised himself to the level of a scientific man and critic, and not only dared to look upon himself as the equal of such men as Schelling, Hegel, Herder, or Schlegel, but did so with disdain and contempt, calling them 'anti-methodical.' This pseudo-scientific haughtiness diffused itself from Germany over the other European countries, and has now reached America, though in other countries than Germany it met more frequently with irreverent spirits, who laughed at it. Then for the first time there manifested itself that mode of historiography which I have termed 'philological' or 'erudite' history. That is to say, the more or less judicious compilations of sources which used to be called _Antiquitates, Annales, Penus, Thesauri,_ presented themselves disguised as histories, which alone were dignified and scientific. The faith of these historians was reposed in a narrative of which every word could be supported by a text, and there was nothing else whatever in their work, save what was contained in the texts, torn from their contexts and repeated without being thought by the philologist narrator. Their object was that their histories should reach the rank of comprehensive compilations, starting from those relating to particular times, regions, and events, and finally attaining to the arrangement of the whole of historical knowledge in great encyclopædias, out of which articles are to be supplied, systematic or definitional, put together by groups of specialists, directed by a specialist, for classical, romantic, Germanic, Indo-European, and Semitic philology. With a view to alleviating the aridity of their labours, the philologists sometimes allowed themselves a little ornament in the shape of emotional affections and ideal view-points. With this purpose, they had recourse to memories of their student days, to the philosophical catchwords which had been the fashion at the time, and to the ordinary sentiments of the day toward politics, art, and morality. But they did all this with great moderation, that they might not lose their reputation for scientific gravity, and that they might not fail in respect toward scientific philological history, which disdains the vain ornaments in which philosophers, dilettantes, and charlatans delight. They ended by tolerating historians of the type above described, but as a lesser evil, and as a general rule inclined to pardon the sins arising out of their commerce with 'ideas' in favour of the 'new documents' which they had discovered or employed, and which they could always dig out of their books as a useful residue, while purifying them from 'subjective' admixtures--that is to say, from the elaboration of them which had been attempted. Philosophy was known to them only as 'philosophy of history,' but even thus rather by reason of its terrible ill-fame than from direct acquaintance. They remembered and were ever ready to repeat five or six anecdotes concerning errors in names and dates into which celebrated philosophers had actually fallen, easily forgetful of the innumerable errors into which they fell themselves (being more liable as more exposed to danger); they almost persuaded themselves that philosophy had been invented to alter the names and confuse the dates which, had been confided to their amorous care, that it was the abyss opened by the fiend to lead to the perdition of serious 'documentary history.'

The third band of those opposed to the philosophy of history was composed of philosophers or of historian--philosophers, but of those who rejected the name and selected another less open to suspicion, or tempered it with some adjective, or accepted it indeed, but with opportune explanations: they styled themselves positivists, naturalists, sociologists, empiricists, criticists, or something of that sort. Their purpose was to do something different from what the philosophers of history had done, and since these had worked with the conception of the _end,_ they all of them swore that they would work with the conception of the _cause;_ they would search out the cause of every fact, thus generalizing more and more widely the causes or the cause of the entire course of history: those others had attempted a _dynamic_ of history; they would work at a _mechanic_ of history, a social physics. A special science arose, opposed to the philosophy of history, in which that naturalistic and positivistic tendency became exalted in its own eyes: sociology. Sociology classified facts of human origin and determined the laws of mutual dependence which regulated them, furnishing the narratives of historians with the principles of explanation, by means of these laws. Historians, on the other hand, diligently collected facts and offered them to sociology, that it might press the juice out of them--that is to say, that it might classify and deduce the laws that governed them. History and sociology, then, stood to one another in the same relation as physiology and zoology, physics and mineralogy, or in another relation of the same sort; they differed from the physical and natural sciences only by their greater complexity. The introduction of mathematical calculation seemed to be the condition of progress for history as for all the sciences, physical and natural. A new 'science' came forward to support this notion, in the shape of that humble servant of practical administration and inspired creation of bureaucracy known as statistics. And since the whole of science was being modelled upon the idea of a factory of condensation, so were 'syntheses' invoked and outlined for history--that is to say, historical frameworks, in which the laws and facts chat dominate single histories should be resumed, as though in a sort of table or atlas, which should show at a glance causes and the facts which arose from them. Need we recall the names and supporters of this school--Comte, Buckle, Taine, and so on, until we come to those recent historians who follow them, such as Lamprecht and Breysig? Need we recall the most consequent and the most paradoxical programmes or the school, as, for instance, Buckle's introduction to his history of civilization or Bourdeau's book on the _Histoire des historiens?_ These and similar positivistic doctrines are present to the memory, either because they are nearest to us chronologically, or because the echo of the noise they made in the world has not yet ceased, and we see everywhere traces of their influence. Everywhere we see it, and above all in the prejudice which they have solidly established (and which we must patiently corrode and dissolve), that history, true history, is to be constructed by means of the _naturalistic_ method, and that _causal_ induction should be employed. Then there are the manifold naturalistic conceptions with which they have imbued modern thought: race, heredity, degeneration, imitation, influence, climate, historical factors, and so forth. And here, too, as in the case of the philosophies of history, since it suffices us to select only the essential in each fact, we shall not dwell upon the various particular forms of it--that is to say, upon the various modes in which historical causes were enunciated and enumerated, and upon the various claims that one or other of them was supreme: now the race, now the climate, now economy, now technique, and so forth. Here, too, the study of the particular forms would be of use to anyone who wished to develop in particular the dialectic and to trace the internal dissolution of that school, to demonstrate in its particular modes its intrinsic tendency to surpass itself, though it failed to do so by that path.

We have already mentioned that the three classes of opponents of the 'philosophies of history' and the three methods by which they proposed to supplant it--diplomatic, philological, and positivistic history--showed that they disagreed among themselves. Confirmation of this may now be found in the contempt of the diplomatic historians for mere erudition and in their diffidence for the constructions of positivism, the erudite, for their part, being fearful of perversions of names and dates and shaking their heads at diplomatic histories and the careless style of the men of the world who composed them. Finally, the positivists looked upon the latter as people who did not go to the bottom of things, to their general or natural causes, and reproved the erudite with their incapacity for rising to the level of laws and to the establishment of facts in accordance with these laws, sociological, physiological, or pathological. But there is further confirmation of what has been noted in respect to the common conception that animated them all and of their substantial affinity, because when the erudite wished to cloak themselves in a philosophy of some sort, they very readily strutted about draped in some shreds of positivistic thought or phraseology. They also participated in the reserve and in the agnosticism of the positivists and the diplomatic historians toward speculative problems, and in like manner it was impossible not to recognize the justice of their claim that evidence should be reliable and documents authentic. The diplomatic historians agreed with them in the formula that history should not be philosophy and that research should dispense with finality and follow the line of causality. In fact, all three sorts of opponents, at one with the transcendency of the philosophy of history, negated the unity of history with philosophy, but in various degrees and with various particular meanings, with various preliminary studies and in various ways. And although these schools were in agreement as to what they negated, all three of them become for us exposed to a criticism which unites them beneath a single negation. For not even do the ability and the intelligence of a Ranke avail to give vigour to the moderatism and to maintain firmly the eclecticism of diplomatic history, and the transaction breaks down before the failure on the part of those who attempted it, owing to its being contrary to their own powers and intrinsically impossible. The idea of an agnostic history turns out to be fallacious--that is to say, of a history that is not philosophical but does not deny philosophy, that is not theological but is not anti-theological, limiting itself to nations and to their reciprocal influence upon one another, because Ranke himself was obliged to recognize powers or ideals that are superior to nations and that as such require to be speculatively justified in a philosophy or in a theology. In this way he laid himself open to the accusations of the positivists, who discredited his ideas as 'mystical.' For the same reason others were proceeding to reduce them little by little from the position of ideals or movements of the spirit to natural and physiological products, as was attempted by Lorenz, an ardent follower of Ranke, who, with his doctrine of generation and of heredity, fell into that physiologism and naturalism from which the master had preserved himself. And when this passage from spirituality to nature was accomplished, the dividing line between history and pre-history, between history of civilization and history of nature, was also not respected. On the other hand, a return was made to the 'philosophies of history,' when ideas were interpreted as transcendental and as answering to the designs of the divine will, which governs the world according to a law and conducts it according to a plan of travel. The boasted impartiality and objectivity, which was based upon a literary device of half-words, of innuendoes, of prudent silences, was also equally illusory, and the Jesuit who objected to Ranke and his history of the popes will always prevail from the point of view of rigorous criticism--either the Papacy is always and everywhere what it affirms itself to be, an institution of the Son of God made man, or it is a lie. Respect and caution are out of place here. _Tertium non datur._ Indeed, it was not possible to escape from taking sides by adopting that point of view; at the most a third party was thus formed, consisting of the tolerant, the tepid, and the indifferent. The slight coherence of Ranke's principles can be observed in that part of his _Universal History_ where, when speaking of Tacitus he touches upon his own experience as a teacher of history, he declares that "it is impossible to speak of a tranquil and uniform progressive development of historiography either among the ancients or the moderns, because the object itself is formed in the course of time and is always different, and conceptions depend upon the circumstances among which the author lives and writes." He thus comes to perform an act of resignation before blind contingentism, and the present historical sketch shows how unjust this is, for it has traced the organic and progressive development of historical thought from the Greeks to modern times. And the whole of the _Universal History_ is there to prove, on the other hand, that his slight coherence of ideas, or web of ideas that he left intentionally vague, made it difficult for him to give life to a vast historical narrative, so lacking in connexion, so heavy, and sometimes even issuing in extraneous reflections, such, for example, as those in the first pages of the first volume, where there is a comparison of Saul and Samuel with the emperors at strife with the popes, and of the policy of Rehoboam and Jeroboam with the political strife between the centralizing states and the centrifugal regions of modern times. We find in general in Ranke an inevitable tendency to subside into the pragmatic method. And what has been said of Ranke is to be repeated of his disciples and of those who cultivated the same conciliatory type of history. As for philological history, the description that has been given of the programme makes clear its nullity, for it leads by a most direct route to a double absurdity. When the most rigorous methods of examining witnesses is really applied, there is no witness that cannot be suspected and questioned, and philological history leads to the negation of the truth of that history which it wishes to construct. And if value be attributed to certain evidence arbitrarily and for external reasons, there is no extravagance that may not be accepted, because there is no extravagance that may not have honest, candid, and intelligent men on its side. It is not possible to reject even miracles by the philological method, since these repose upon the same attestations which make certain a war or a peace treaty, as Lorenz has shown by examining the miracles of St Bernard in the light of the severest philological criticism. In order to save himself from the admission of the inconceivable and of the nullification of history, which follows the nullification of witnesses, there remains nothing but appeal to thought, which reconstitutes history from the inside, and is evidence to itself, and denies what is unthinkable for the very reason that it is not to be thought. This appeal is the declaration of bankruptcy for philological history. We may certainly say that this form of history more or less sustains itself as history, to the extent that it has recourse to all the aids furnished by history proper, and contradicts itself; or it contradicts itself and yet does not sustain itself, or only for a little while and in appearance, by again adopting the methods of pragmaticism, of transcendency, and of positivism. And the last of these in its turn encounters the same experiences in a different order, because its principle of history that explains facts causally presupposes the facts, which as such are thought and therefore are in a way already explained. Hence a vicious circle, evident in the connexion between history and sociology, each one of which is to be based upon and at the same time to afford a base for the other, much in the same way as a column which should support a capital and at the same time spring from it. But if, with a view to breaking the circle, history be taken as the base and sociology as its fulfilment, then the latter will no longer be the explanation of the former, which will find its explanation elsewhere. And this will be, according to taste, either an unknown principle or some form of thought that acts in the same way as God, and in both cases a transcendental principle. Hence we have the fact of positivism leading to philosophies of history, as exemplified in the Apocalypses and the Gospels of Comte, of Buckle, and of others of like sort: they are all most reverent theologians, but chaotic, falling back into those fallacious conceptions which had been refuted by romantic historiography.

Truly, when faced with such histories as these, superficial or unintelligent or rude and fantastic, romanticism, conscious of the altitude to which it had elevated the study of the development of human affairs, might have exclaimed (and indeed it did exclaim by the mouth of its epigoni) to its adversaries and successors, in imitation of the tone of Bonaparte on the 18th of Brumaire: "What have you done with the history which I left to you so brilliant? Were these the new methods, by means of which you promised to solve the problems which I had not been able to solve? I see nothing in them but _revers et misère!_" But we who have never met with absolute regressions during the secular development of historiography shall not allow ourselves to be carried away upon the polemical waves now beating against the positivistic and naturalistic school which is our present or recent adversary, to the point of losing sight of what it possessed that was substantially its own, and owing to which it really did represent progress. We shall also refrain from drawing comparisons between romanticism and positivism, by measuring the merits of both, and concluding with the assertion of the superiority of the former; because it is well known that such examinations of degrees of merit, the field of professors, are not permissible in history, where what follows ideally after is virtually superior to that from which it is derived, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary. And in the first place, it would be erroneous, strictly speaking, to believe that what had been won by romanticism had been lost in positivism, because when the histories of this period are looked upon from other points of view and with greater attention, we see how they were all preserved. Romanticism had abolished historical dualism, for which there existed in reality positive and negative, elect and outcast, facts. Positivism repeated that all facts are facts and all have an equal right to enter history. Romanticism had substituted the conception of development for the abysses and the chasms that previous historiography had introduced into the course of events, and positivism repeated that conception, calling it _evolution._ Romanticism had established periods in development, either in the form of a cycle of phases, like Vico, or as phases without a circle and in linear order, like the German romantics, and had exemplified the various phases as a series of the forms of the spirit or of psychological forms, and positivism renewed these conceptions (although owing to the lack of culture usual with its adherents it often believed that it had made discoveries never made before), as can be proved by a long series of examples. These range from the _three ages_ of mental development of Comte to the _eight phases_ of social development or _four political periods_ which are respectively the 'novelties' of the contemporaries Lamprecht and Breysig. Romanticism, judging that the explanation of events by means of the caprices, the calculations, and the designs of individuals taken atomistically was frivolous, took as the subject of history the universals, the Idea, ideas, the spirit, nations and liberty and positivism; it also rejected individualistic atomicism, talking of _masses, races, societies, technique, economy, science, social tendencies_; of everything, in fact, with the exception that the caprice of Tizius and Caius was now no longer admitted. Romanticism had now not only reinforced the histories of ideal values, but had conceived them as in organic connexion; positivism in its turn insisted upon the _interdependence of social factors_ and upon the unity of the real, and attempted to fill up the interstices of the various special histories by means of the history of _civilization_ and of _culture,_ and so-called _social_ history, containing in itself politics, literature, philosophy, religion, and every other class of facts. Romanticism had overthrown heteronomous, instructive, moralizing, serviceable history, and positivism in its turn boasted that its history was a _science,_ an end in itself, like every other science, although like every science it afforded the basis for practice, and was therefore capable of application. Romanticism had enhanced the esteem for erudition, and had given an impetus to intercourse between it and history. But whence did the erudition and philology of the positivistic period derive that pride which made them believe that they were themselves history, save from the consciousness that they had inherited from romanticism, which they had preserved and exaggerated? Whence did they inherit the substance of their method save (as Fueter well notes) from the romantic search for the primitive, the genuine, the ingenuous, which manifested itself in Wolf, who inaugurated the method? It is well to remember that Wolf was a pre-romantic, an admirer of Ossian and of popular poetry. And, finally, what is the meaning of the efforts of positivism to seek out the _causes_ of history, the series of historical facts, the _unity_ of the factors and their dependence upon a _supreme cause,_ save the speculations of the romantics themselves upon the manner, the end, and the value of development? Whoever pays attention to all these and other resemblances which we could enumerate must conclude that positivism is to romanticism as was the enlightenment to the Renaissance--that is to say, it is not so much its antithesis as it is the logical prosecution and the exaggeration of its presuppositions. Even its final conversion into theology corresponds to that of romanticism. This is for the rest an obvious matter, for transcendency is always transcendency, whether it be thought of as that of a God or of reason, of nature or of matter. But thinking of it as Matter or Nature, this naturalistic and materialistic travesty, which at first seems odious or ridiculous, of the problems and conceptions of romanticism, of the idea into cause, of development into evolution, of the spirit into mass and the like, to which one would at first be inclined to attribute the inferiority of positivistic historiography, is, on the contrary, for the close observer the progress made by it upon romanticism. That travesty contains the energetic negation of history as moved by extramundane forces, by external finalities, by transcendental laws, just both in its motive and in its general tendency, and the correlative affirmation that its law must be sought in reality, which is one and is called 'nature.' The positivism, which on no account wished to hear anything of 'metaphysic,' had in mind the dogmatic and transcendental metaphysic, which had filtered into the thought of Kant and of his successors; and the target of its contempt was a good one, although it ended by confusing metaphysic with philosophy in general, or dogmatic with critical metaphysic, the metaphysic of being with that of the mind, and was not itself altogether free from that which it undertook to combat. But this does not prevent its repugnance to 'metaphysic' and, restricting ourselves to what is our more immediate interest, to the 'philosophy of history' from having produced durable results. Thanks to positivism historical works became less naïve and richer in facts, especially in that class of facts which romanticism had neglected, such as the dispositions that are called natural, the processes that are called degenerative or pathological, the spiritual complications that are called psychological illusions, the interests that are called material, the production and the distribution of wealth, or economic activity, the facts of force and violence, or of political and revolutionary power. Positivism, intent upon the negation of transcendency and upon the observation of what appertained to it, felt itself to be, and was in that respect, in the right. And each one of us who pays due attention to that order of things and renews that negation is gathering the fruit of positivism, and in that respect is a positivist. Its very contradictions had the merit of making more evident the contradictions latent in romantic historiography. This merit must be admitted to the most extravagant doctrines of the positivists, such as that of Taine, that knowledge is a true hallucination and that human wisdom is an accident (_une rencontre_), which presumed irrationality to be the normal condition, much as Lombroso believed that genius is madness. Another instance of this is the attempt to discover in what way heterogeneity and historical diversity come into existence, if homogeneity is posited; and again the methodical canon that the explanation of history is to be found in causality, but is to stop at genius and virtue, which are without it, because they refuse to accept of causal explanation, or the frightful Unknowable, which was placed at the head of histories of the real, after so great a fuss being made about that Titan science which was ready to scale the skies. But since romanticism had left spirit and nature without fusion, the one facing the other, it was just that if in the first place spirit swallowed up nature without being able to digest it (because, as had been laid down, it was indigestible), now nature was engaged in doing the same thing to spirit, and with the same result. So just and logical was this that not a few of the old idealists went over to the crassest materialism and positivism, and that confession of not being able to see their way in the confusion was at once instructive and suggestive, as was also the perplexity decorated with the name of 'agnosticism.' And as the precise affirmation of the positivity of history represented an advance in thought, so the antithesis of materialism, pushed to an extreme, was an advance in the preparation of the new problem and in the new way of solving the relation between spirit and nature. _Oportet ut scandala, eveniant,_ and this means that even scandal, the scandal of the absurd, and of offensive false criticisms of human conscience, is an advance.

VIII

THE NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY CONCLUSION

The romantic current not only maintained itself in its excesses during the dominion of positivism, and, as we have shown, insinuated itself even into its naturalistic antithesis, but it also persisted in its genuine form. And although we have not spoken of pedantic imitators and conservatives--whose significance is slight in the history of thought, that is to say, confined to the narrow sphere in which they were compelled to think for themselves--we have nevertheless recorded the preservation of romanticism in the eclecticism of Ranke, who adhered to the theories of Humboldt (another 'diplomatist'). Idealistic and romantic motives continued to illuminate the intellect and soul among the philosophers, from Humboldt to Lotze and from Hartmann to Wundt and those who corresponded to them in other countries. The like occurred in historiography properly so called, and could not but happen, because, if the formulas of agnosticism and of positivism had been followed to the letter, all light of thought would have been extinguished in blind mechanicism--that is to say, in nothing--and no historical representation would have been possible. Thus political, social, philosophical, literary, and artistic history continued to make acquisitions, if not equally important with those of the romantic period (the surroundings were far more favourable to the natural sciences and to mathematics than to history), yet noteworthy. This is set forth in a copious volume upon historiography (I refer to the work of Fueter already several times mentioned in this connexion). There due honour will be found accorded to the great work accomplished by Ranke, which the rapidity of my course of exposition has induced me to illustrate rather in its negative aspects, causing me, for instance, to allude solely to the contradictions in the _History of the Popes,_ which is notwithstanding a masterpiece. The cogent quality of the romantic spirit at its best is revealed in the typical instance of Taine, who is so ingenuously naturalistic in his propositions and in the directive principles of his work, yet so unrestrainedly romantic in particular instances, as, for example, in his characterization of the French poets or of the Dutch and Italian painters. All this led to his ending in the exaggerated anti-Jacobin romanticism of his _Origines de la France contemporaine,_ in the same way that Zola and the other verists, those verbal enemies of romanticism, were lyrical in all their fiction, and the leader of the school was induced to conclude his works with the abstract lyricism of the _Quatre évangiles._ What has been observed of Taine is to be applied to Buckle and to the other naturalists and positivists, obliged to be historical against their will, and to the positivists who became followers of historical materialism, and found the dialectic established in their house without being able to explain what it was or whence it came. Not all theorists of historiography showed themselves to be so resolutely and madly naturalistic as Bourdeau and one or two others; indeed these were few in number and of inferior reputation. Eclecticism prevailed among the majority of them, a combination of necessity and of liberty, of masses and individuals, of cause and end, of nature and spirit: even the philosophy of history was admitted, if in no other form, then as a _desideratum_ or a problem to be discussed at a convenient time (even though that were the Greek Kalends). Eclecticism, too, presented the greatest variety, from the low level of a trivial arranging of concepts in an artificial manner to the lofty heights of interior labour, from which it seemed at every moment that a new gospel, no longer eclectic, must issue.