Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

“ No historical fact can ever have its history fully written: and this, not because the adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of genius are lacking, but because it is itself the producer of new history the more it is historically understood. It grows, it changes, it expands the more adequately we apparently grasp it. We seem never to be at the end of its career and we must stop abruptly with its history still unfinished. Others may take up our task, but they will end as we have ended. The history of nothing is complete. ”

“ In other words the life of knowledge, of memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. ”

“ The serious study of history is characteristic of a certain maturity of mind. For the intellectually young, the world is too new and attractive to arouse in them a very absorbing interest in its past. Life is for them an adventure, and the world is a place for excursions and experiences. They care little about what men have done, but much about what they might do. History, to interest them, must be written as a romance which will fire their imagination, rather than as a philosophy which might make them wise. ”

“ But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past nor future, that it is neither yesterday nor to-morrow, and that if we go anywhere we must start to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday will be yesterday. But note now the strange situation into which we have fallen—only in the future is this day ever in the past! And that is true of every day in the world's history. It becomes a past day only in its own future. ”

“ In a figure we may say, facts march on in time, but not all at the same speed or with the same endurance; they help or impede one another's movement; they do not all reach the goal; some of them turn out to be leaders, others followers; their careers overlap and interfere; so that the result is a failure for some and a success for others. The march is their history. ”

“ It becomes an experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy. History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying; whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed. ”

“ It is possible for us to discover what mistakes we have made and what ends we have attained. Our history appears thus to be a utilization of material, a realization of ends, a movement with purpose in it. Selection is characteristic of it very profoundly. Other histories, of other men, of times, of peoples, of institutions, we write in the same way because in the same way we discover and understand what has happened in their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utilizing, selective, and purposeful movement in time, history appears to be when we restrict it to the domain of human knowledge. ”

“ Human history is human history only. The hopes and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more satisfying to understand. ”

“ It is this fact which we denote when we speak of the continuity of history. We indicate that every action of time, every conversion of the possible into the actual, is intimately woven into the order of events and finds there a definite place and definite connections. Consequently it becomes easy to represent the movement of history as a kind of progress from earlier to later things, from ancestors to descendants, or from the original or primitive to the derived. ”

“ Nature exhibits no preference either in the choice of a history or in the extent of its comprehensiveness. Man may be thought to be, and man is, an incident in the universe, and the universe may be thought to be, and the universe is, the theater of man's career.
The same principle may be illustrated from human history exclusively. We who are of European ancestry and largely Anglo-Saxon by inheritance are pleased to write history as the development of our own civilization with its institutions, customs, and laws ”

“ Conservatism and radicalism are, as already indicated, temperamental affections which a too exclusive and irrational contemplation of our ancestry may produce in us. They are born of fear or impatience, and are not the legitimate offspring of history. For historical continuity, just because it does not of itself reveal the experimental origin of any belief or institution, does not of itself disclose progress or any standard by which progress may be estimated. ”

“ Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God, but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to [Pg 55] worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found that the stars have a different history from his own. ”

“ To answer we must write and rewrite her own history, the history of what she has been and is; and with every fresh writing the battle of Marathon becomes better understood. It becomes a different battle with a different truth. ”

“ It may afford material for history, and then it is quickened into life. In a book of history, the past lives. It is in a very genuine sense progressive. It grows and expands with every fresh study of it, because every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a more comprehensive, and a new perspective, and makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome of reflections like these is that history is constantly revealing something like an order or purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they are subject and which they express. History is, therefore, a career in time. ”

“ Relieved of the necessity of explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. ”

“ That is what history is like. It is an activity which transforms the materials of the world without destroying them, and transforms them subject to laws of their own. The world is thus ever new, but never lawless. It is always fresh [Pg 83] and always old. The present is, as Francis Bacon said, its real antiquity. Time is thus the arch-conservative and the arch-radical. Forever it revises its inheritance, but it is never quit of it.
Man's inheritance comprises both what he has derived from his ancestors, and also the world bequeathed to him from day to day. ”

“ It is an obvious consequence of the nature of time, for every present has a past and a future, and a first or last present is, consequently, quite unintelligible. The historian, least of all, should be bewildered. If he has recognized that history is pluralistic, he will recognize also that beginnings and ends are, in any intelligible sense, the termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute first or last in history taken as a whole, for, as we have seen, the attempt to take history as a whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the attempt to define history. ”

“ The most significant of them is doubtless this: since philosophically considered history is a thing not written, but evolved and acted, to no one history can absolute superiority or preference be assigned. Absolutely considered the history of man can not claim preëminence over the history of the stars. He is no more the darling of the universe than is the remotest nebula. It is just as intelligible and just as true to say that man exists as an illustration of stellar evolution as to say that the sun exists to divide light from darkness for the good of man. ”

“ The history of the garden can be written because there is a history there to write.
Such an illustration can be generalized. Our world is indubitably a world in time. That means much more than the fact that its events can be placed in accordance with a map or dated in accordance with a calendar. It means that they are events in genuine careers, each with its own particular character and its own possibility of a future, like the seeds in the garden. Things with histories have not only structures in space and are, accordingly, related geometrically to one another ”

“ The movement of time is thus not a movement from the past to the future, but from the possible to the actual, from what may be to what has been. The present is not the vanishing point between past and future ”

“ Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress. ”

“ Man makes progress because he can conceive what progress is, and use that conception as a standard of selection and as a goal to be reached. He participates in his own history consciously, and that means that he participates in it morally, with a sense of obligation to his career. For to be conscious implies the anticipation in imagination of results which are not yet attained, but which might be attained if appropriate means were found. Conceiving thus what he might be, man always has some standard and measure of what he is. ”

“ They may have to unlearn many established lessons and renounce many cherished hopes. They may have to emancipate themselves continually from their past; but note that it is from their past that they would be emancipated and that it is freedom that they seek. It is not a new form of slavery. Into what greater slavery could they fall than into that implied by the squandering of their inheritance or by blaming their ancestors for preceding them? ”

“ These faults, when they are sympathetically examined, indicate far less blemishes in the character of Herodotus than they do the practical and moral difficulties which beset the faithful writing of all history. That is why he is so illustrative for our purpose. A faithful and true record is the first thing the historian desires, but it is a very difficult thing to obtain. Human testimony even in the presence of searching cross-examination is notoriously fallible, and the dumb records of the past, with all their variations and contradictions, present a stolid indifference to our curiosity. ”

“ History is continuous, and, therefore, there is no point, no date, no occurrence, no incident, no origin, no belief, and no institution, which can claim preëminence simply on account of its position. If men were once superstitious because of their place in history and are now scientific for precisely the same reason, we can not therefore conclude, with any intelligent or rational certainty, that evolution has progressed from superstition to science, or that science is better than superstition. Values are otherwise determined. The continuity of history levels them all. ”

“ A suspicion, at least, has been created that it involves something more, namely, the recognition that the facts themselves, being something "evolved and acted," are also progressive. Historical facts are careers in time. It is their occurrence which is recorded and it is their career which is understood. We may, therefore, undertake an inquiry into the nature of facts like these.
We may start from the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them, for it is clear that whatever the character of the facts may be, our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. The past is dead and gone. ”

“ Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the world to be thus finished and complete in itself and only appearing to us as a temporal revelation, has often thought of movements in time as only the results of preceding movements. Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the effect of what has already happened, rather than the active conservation and working over of what has already happened. The past is made the cause and producer of the present, so that the state of the world at any moment is only the result or outcome of what it was in the preceding moment. ”