Various

“ The office of the historian as judge of the dead is quite differently constituted. Every age must be judged in accordance with the relation which it bears to the totality of development; and every historical personage is to be looked upon as a bearer of the spirit of his day, as a servant of the ideas of his time. Thus it is quite as wrong to pronounce moral censure on the men of history, as it is wrong to judge an era merely according to its good or evil characteristics. A period must be estimated according to what it has either directly or indirectly accomplished for mankind. ”

“ All the more wonderful does the savage of the European Drift Period appear to us, “for we see that he belongs to the first who exercised the human mind in the hard battle of life, and thereby laid the foundation of all later developments in the sense of progress in culture.” And yet, in the midst of this poor life, a sense of the little pleasures and refinements of existence already began to develop, as proved by the elegantly carved and decorated weapons and implements, and there were even growing a sense of the beauty of Nature and the power of copying it. ”

“ Development of nations as well as of individuals leads either to progress or to decay. No people may hope to live eternally; and how many acquisitions already gained will be lost in the future it is impossible to say. If a nation declines, it either becomes extinct or is annihilated by another state; it becomes identified with the newer nation, and disappears with its own character; thus its civilisation may also disappear. This is a serious possibility. It is the Medusa head of the world’s history which we must face—and without stiffening to stone. ”

“ In a nation, people and soil are organically united into one, and area and population are the measure of this union. A state cannot exchange or alter its area without suffering a complete transformation itself. What wonder, then, that wars between nations are struggles for territory? Even in war the object is to limit the opponent’s sphere of action; how much more does the whole history of nations consist in a winning and losing of territory. ”

“ How many of us are able to decide, on grounds of fact, not of fiction, whether the Roman Empire perished because the Romans, becoming luxurious, sinned against our moral code, as ecclesiastic historians would have us believe, or because a disease of intolerance and stupidity clouded the clear Roman brain and enfeebled the strong Roman hand, as Gibbon would have us think? But the natural history of man deals, without obscurity and without uncertainty, with greater matters. ”

“ Even the neighbourhood of the ocean is characterised by its vast natural features; rivers broaden as they approach the sea, great bays lie within the coasts, and, though the latter may be flat, the horizon lines of their low dune landscapes are broad. The horizons of maritime races are also broad. Whether it be the hope of profit from commerce or of gain from piracy that lures men forth, many a ship has returned to port bearing with it inestimable benefits to mankind; for the greatest maritime discoveries have not been mere explorations of new seas, but of new lands and peoples. ”

“ Hence the indulgence with which political assassination is still regarded by the masses in Japan. As the brutal instincts, inherited from primeval ancestors, often become manifest in an English-speaking crowd watching a football match or a boxing contest, so, in Japan, the old savagery reveals itself, time and again, at fencing bouts, the excited cries of the combatants recalling the bad, wild days of yore. ”

“ Then there came the time when this belief would have been an all-important link, without which the chain of evolution could not be completed, a link without which we were left to contemplate a perfect chain of inorganic evolution—the history of the earth before life—and a perfect chain of organic evolution—the history of life upon the earth, with an abyss between the two that could not be bridged, for how came life where there was no life? ”

“ Of living beings man is by far the most helpless at birth. He cannot even seek the breast. In him instinct is at its minimum. For him more than any other animal prolonged and elaborate tuition is necessary; but so vast is his memory, and so great his power of utilising its stored experience, that in later life he is beyond comparison the most capable of the inhabitants of the earth. Compare what even a dull man knows, including the words of a language and its inflections and articulations, with what is acquired by the cleverest dog, and the immensity of the difference is at once apparent. ”

“ The study of history does not consist in an examination of the past projected, as it were, into the present; it is the study of the past considered as a part of the constant coming and going of men. And in order to become qualified as historians we must first of all attain a point of view from which we may, independently of time, behold history with all its great events file by; as though we were men who had ascended to some elevation in the universe from which they could look down upon the whole earth lying as a unity before them. ”

“ Area and population represent to us the two chief characteristics of a state; and to know them is the simplest means—often too simple—for obtaining a conception of the size and power of a nation. We cannot conceive of any man, much less a human community, without thinking of surface or ground at the same time. Political science may, through a number of clever conclusions, reduce the area of a state to a mere national possession; but we all know that territory is too tightly bound up with the very life of a state for it to assume a position of so little importance. ”

“ The chief qualities of the Japanese race are patriotism—which is, with them, synonymous with loyalty—courage, filial piety, and cleanliness. In love of country, in self-sacrifice for the common weal, in loyalty to the sovereign—with them a cult—in reckless gallantry, and in bodily cleanliness, the Japanese surpass all other nations of our time. ”

“ Often enough growth that originates under such favourable conditions leads to ruin. A young nation deems itself possessed of all so long as it has the isolation that ensures independence; it sees too late that the latter has been purchased at the price of a suffocating lack of space; and it dies of a hypertrophy of development—a death common to minor states. This was the cause of the swift rise and decline of Athens and of Venice, and of all powers that restricted themselves to islands and to narrow strips of coast. ”

“ Universal Transmission of Culture
The vision of no man may pierce through to the ultimate end of the processes of history, and to advance hypotheses is a vain endeavour—quite as vain as it would be to expect Plato to have foretold the life of modern civilisation or the imperial idea of mediæval times, or Dante to have foreseen modern industrialism or the character of industrial peoples. To-day we are more certain than ever that no process of development, however simple it may have been, has ever taken place according to a fixed model ”

“ Together with this progress there have been countless expansions of economic and political horizons, of commercial routes, of the territories of races and of nations—an extraordinarily manifold growth that is continually advancing. Increase of population and of the nearness of approach of peoples to one another goes hand in hand with progressing space. Mankind cannot become diffused uniformly over new areas without becoming more and more familiar with the old. New qualities of the soil and new treasures have been discovered, and thus the human race has constantly been made richer. ”

“ The decay of nations is not destruction; it is a remodelling, a transformation. A great political institution dies out; smaller institutions arise in its place. Decay is a life necessity. Nothing could be more incorrect than the idea that the growth of nations would come to an end were one state to embrace the whole earth. ”

“ It is inadmissible to speak of races as supporting themselves solely by hunting and fishing, for the very same peoples feed on products of the soil wherever they are found and recognised as means of subsistence. They live, it is true, upon flesh and fish, but also upon roots and the fruit of wild trees. While in this state of civilisation, man avails himself only of that which Nature places before him; he neither adapts Nature to his desire, to his needs, or to his manner of living, nor understands how to do it. ”

“ This is rendered possible through the power of abstraction gained from a study of history; it enables us, on the one hand, to adapt ourselves to strange times and beliefs, and, on the other, to look upon our own day—all time to its contemporary men—objectively, as a mere hour of the ages of human development. We must learn to escape from the present, to withdraw ourselves from that which we may call the tyranny of our own time. ”

“ The more compact, better organised and armed state intrudes on weaker nations, and forces its organisation upon them. A nation left to itself has a tendency to split up into small groups, each of which seeks to support its own life upon its own soil, heedless of the others; and as such groups increase, they always reproduce in their own images: families families, and tribes tribes. We find all sorts of measures taken by some nations to limit an increase in growth that would carry them beyond their old boundaries and place them under new conditions of life. ”

“ The mere political results of man’s evolution against disease are of almost incalculable magnitude. The human races of one half of the world are dying, and are being replaced by races from the other half. Not all the wars of all time taken together constitute so great a tragedy. A quite disproportionate part in this great movement has been borne by our own race. It has seized on the larger part of those regions in which the aborigines were incapable of civilisation, because incapable of resisting consumption, and were undefended by malaria. ”

“ The habit of magnifying a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided, destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the life-blood of history. ”

“ But the influences which belong to the sphere of creative intelligence—that is to say, of literature, philosophy, religion and art—are just those which it is peculiarly the function of a History of the World to disengage and follow out in their far-reaching consequence. They pass beyond the limits of the country where they arose. They survive, it may be, the race that gave birth to them. ”

“ Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts, or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered, not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before. ”

“ He can make no further use of Nature than to acquire a knowledge of the sources of supply, of how to seize time and opportunity, and to overcome the obstacles of life in his own territory. He ascertains the haunts of game, discovers how to obtain fish, explores for wild honey or edible roots, learns to climb the tallest trees and to let himself down into the deepest caves; but he lacks the ability to cultivate Nature, to cause her to produce according to his will. ”

“ Perhaps it would be well, for the elucidation of the question of development, were geography to designate as progress only that which from sufficient data may be established as such beyond all doubt. Thus, to begin with, we have learned to know of a progress in space—man’s diffusion over the earth—which proceeds in two directions. The expansion of the human race signifies not only an extension of the boundaries of inhabited land far into the Polar regions, but also the growth of an intellectual conception of the whole world. ”

“ Let any man study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate. Or let any one—for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult, method of getting at the roots of this complexity—study thoroughly and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. ”

“ How Man Learns by Experience
At a certain stage in his development the caterpillar builds himself a cocoon. His dwelling is a wonderful structure, but from our human point of view the remarkable thing is that he does not learn to build it. He may never have seen a cocoon before, and he constructs only one in his life. Yet his work is perfect, or at least very excellent, and it is as good in its beginnings as in its endings. Evidently he owes nothing to experience, but is impelled and guided throughout by a faculty which we term instinct. ”

“ By this it is not meant that every history must be founded on a cosmological basis, that it must begin with the creation, or, at least, with the destruction of Troy, as was once thought necessary; but it is certainly safe to say that a philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and then descend to the earth, filled with the conviction that all existence is fundamentally one—an indivisible conception founded from beginning to end on an identical law. ”

“ There is no country whose soil bestows wondrous strength upon man or an exuberance of fruitfulness upon woman. In India precious stones are as little apt to grow out of the cliffs as silver and gold are likely to exude from fissures in the earth. Nor is there any basis for the slighter differences between the Old World and the New which the philosophers of history of the eighteenth century believed they had discovered. The opinion that the New World produces smaller plants, less powerful animals, and finally a feebler humanity, was not unconditionally rejected by even Alexander von Humboldt. ”

“ The accumulation of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge applied to the exploitation of the resources of Nature, means the accumulation of wealth—that is to say, of all the things which men need or use. The total wealth of the world must have at least quadrupled or quintupled within the last hundred years. Nearly all of it is in the hands or under the control of the civilised nations of European stock, among whom the United States stands foremost, both in rate of economic growth and in the absolute quantity of values possessed. ”