Historical evolution

“ THE MATHEMATICS OF HISTORY
The universality of the law of History.
The law of History governs the process in all domains of human activity. Nations evolve, progress, decline and rise again, following some perfect cycles in the political, social, artistic, philosophical and scientific arenas. Nothing is the work of chance. The appearance and disappearance of great empires, the creation of architectural styles, the great discoveries, the great philosophical conceptions, obey a mechanism that is as precise as a clock. Up to now men have ignored it. ”

“ History is developed by the historical phases of each nation, its progress, its stability, difficulties and high points, it is not due to men in a particular or providential manner. Its historical process and socioeconomic development expresses the historical phase of the nation. ”

“ Our new historian goes still further in his readjustment of historical method. Every people has gone through a certain more or less well-defined series of stages of evolution, e. g., the Germans have passed through the following: symbolism, or the earlier and medieval history of the race; individualism, modern times to the French revolution; the age of the subjective soul-activity, or the nineteenth century to Wagner and Darwin, who introduce the present age of excitement and nervosity, if such a word may be used. ”

“ If history has failed to appear as a true evolution, and if, on the other hand, it reveals to us a great sum of different cumulations, some of very great importance, others of minor importance, what then remains of the importance of the single historical event in its very singleness? ”

“ From remote times, currents of culture are produced that are displaced over the surface of the earth, originating civilizations of diverse grades of advance, among others, some as advanced as the present ones and that, at the same time, develop great unification nuclei, empires or great nations. ”

“ Of late an improved philosophy of history assigns them their proper place and significance as an index of evolution, and gives us the hopeful sign that notwithstanding the occasional irruption of man's destructive faculties, his progress is principally due to the subordination of the militant spirit. ”

“ A contemporary German expert of distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem What is History? (Eng. trans. 1905) , lays it down that the main problem of every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles ”

“ The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases. ”

“ If for a ruthless, wasteful course of social evolution that would never reach any desirable goal we would realize one of steady, frictionless progress, with opportunities of fullest life open to all, we must make the Lewis and Clark Centennial fulfill its high mission. If the people of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest do not persist in their determination to make this concerted effort toward the inauguration of the highest policies of social progress here it is hard to see what occasion can bring them so near this mood again. ”

“ The rapid changes through which the institutions of the country are now passing, and the still more stupendous revolutions in the opinions of men, remind us that we stand to-day upon the outer verge of a great historic cycle, within which a completed past will shortly be enclosed. ”

“ History is but the transcript of the gradual transition from the animal life-conception of the individual to the social, and from the social to the divine. The history of the ancients for thousands of centuries, culminating in that of Rome, is the history of the evolution from the animal life-conception of the individual to that of society and the State. ”

“ Modern history may conveniently be defined as that part of history which deals with the origin and evolution of the great distinguishing characteristics of the present. No precise dates can be assigned to modern history as contrasted with what has commonly been called ancient or medieval. ”

“ All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historical spirit. ”

“ In the meantime it is well to bear in mind that there is one important department of history which has always been frankly and unhesitatingly accepted as history and yet which has no stronger foundation than tradition, and tradition of the most formal kind. I allude to the early laws of most of the peoples who have become possessed of an historic civilisation. ”

“ Certainly, thousands of years before our day there were empires and kingdoms and city-states, showing considerable advancement in those intellectual pursuits which we call civilization or culture,—that is, in religion, learning, literature, political organization, and business; and such basic institutions as the family, the state, and society go back even further, past our earliest records, until their origins are shrouded in deepest mystery. Despite its brevity, modern history is of supreme importance. ”

“ The evidence of historic events which enter into tradition relates principally to the earliest periods, but much of it relates to periods well within the domain of history and yet reveals facts which history has either hopelessly neglected or misinterpreted. ”

“ Vary the theme as you may in the countless histories of countless peoples; subdivide the course of its progress as you will, allowing for different local causes and different local phenomena, the true philosophy of history teaches that no real departure from this natural development is possible. But what if by the violent intervention of some new and entirely foreign force, another development and another life is given to the inanimate ashes of the old? ”

“ That these remarks are not merely speculative, that the progress of civilization has been continuous and connected, while the races which have been engaged in the formation of it, like individuals, have had their periods of birth, maturity, and decay, is sufficiently proved by history. ”

“ By a universal Modern History we mean something distinct from the combined History of all countries—in other words, we mean a narrative which is not a mere string of episodes, but displays a continuous development. ”

“ In studying the phenomena of knowledge and art, religion and mythology, law and custom, and the rest of the complex whole which we call Civilization, it is not enough to have in view the more advanced races, and to know their history so far as direct records have preserved it for us. ”

“ These are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story. We will not be confined by historical, even geological periods which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human affairs. ”

“ This confusion between the contemporaneous stage of development and the historic rôle of certain qualities, is intensified by our custom of referring to social evolution as if it were a force and not a process. ”

“ For instance, when undertaking a survey of the causes of the French Revolution, we could, in amassing our material, include not only the history of medieval France but also that of Rome and Greece, which certainly would not be "necessary for our purpose," since we can comprehend the historical genesis of the Revolution from much more limited material. ”

“ But the record of history also shows that men have repeatedly interfered and intervened in the historical process by discovery and invention. The historical record is subject to change. Man is not entirely free. Neither is he helplessly bound on the wheel of necessity, presently known as civilization. ”

“ In this way a process which on the surface was nationalistic became fundamentally a part of the organic evolution of civilization, which redirected the cultural processes of a nation and eventually of what was, then, the modern world. ”

“ Altogether, the evidence of ancient monuments, geography and history, goes to prove that the great race-divisions of mankind are of no recent growth, but were already settled before the beginning of the historical period. ”

“ If we treat History as a progressive science, and lean specially on that side of it, the question will arise, how we justify our departure from ancient ways, and how we satisfy the world that there is reason and method in our innovations. ”

“ Nevertheless, enough is already known to justify an attempt to create a synthetical work, the aim of which shall be to portray in each successive stage and to trace the evolution of the culture—nay, in some sort even to construct a history—of prehistoric Britain, and to rewrite the history of the period which is illustrated by contemporary records. ”

“ Modern principles, that mark a new departure in human progress and in its evidence, Civilisation, took their rise during this epoch of transition, and their development underlies the history of the period, and gives the key to its meaning. ”

“ Historical research, however, has but recently begun to concern itself with the natural causes of the development of civilization, and many an important aspect of this subject is still entirely overlooked. ”

“ Of this there are many proofs in the traditions of ancient peoples, in the intellectual life of modern savages, and in that of the civilized nations to which we ourselves belong. The historic development does not always follow the regular course we have just described, although these are, in a strictly logical sense, the necessary stages of intellectual evolution. ”

“ On the one hand I have reviewed briefly and as accurately as possible some outstanding experiments with civilization, including our own western variant. (Part I. The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization.) In Part II I have undertaken a social analysis of civilization as a past and present life style. In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of present day historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an attempt to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently available to civilized man. ”

“ Historians are in quest of laws of development and of generalisations that shall unravel the complexity of human culture, as physicalvii and biological generalisations have put into order our knowledge of the phenomena of nature. ”

“ Then, as we pass beyond the merely monumental stage, we find threads of historical evidence connecting the different branches of this race, increasing in their complexity and strengthening in their cumulative force as we go on, until at last we are brought to the history of the age in which we live ”

“ But the error was not in seeking to find the origin of civilization or to compare the course of its development with the point of its beginning. Our latest science has to continue that effort; the origin of civilization has all the interest to us which belongs to the germs or beginnings of all great movements which we want to study. The wider the range of development which we can study, the more correct the knowledge which we obtain of it; modern scholars have therefore devoted the most eager study to the facts of primitive society and the origin of civilization. ”

“ If the accretion of myth around the lives of great historic personages, and the persistence of tradition in historic localities, may be accepted as one phase of the necessary relationship of tradition to history, we may proceed to inquire how far the unattached traditions, the folk-tales pure and simple, contain or are based upon historic details. ”

“ A third approach would regard civilization as an evolving life style, conceived before the earliest days of recorded human history and matured through the series of experiments marking the development of civilization as we have known it during the five centuries from 1450 to 1975. ”

“ History and tradition are in accord, not in conflict; the gaps of history are filled by tradition—that tradition which was suitable and worthy of so great a hero, namely the ancient tradition told of all heroes. ”

“ But history is not only philosophy, teaching by example; its true purpose is, also, to illustrate the general progress of society in knowledge and the arts, and the changes of manners and pursuits of men.
There is an imperfection, both in ancient and modern histories, and those of the best masters, in this respect. While they recite public transactions, they omit, to a great degree, what belongs to the civil, social, and domestic progress of men and nations. ”

“ Under proper limitations the principles of both theories are conformable to historical knowledge, which shows us, on the one hand, that the state of the higher nations was reached by progression from a lower state, and, on the other hand, that culture gained by progression may be lost by degradation. If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the dark, at any rate we need not begin there. History, taken as our guide in explaining the different stages of civilization, offers a theory based on actual experience. ”

“ These landmarks probably indicate molecular changes in the structure of society scarcely less important than those political and intellectual revolutions which are usually taken as the turning-points of ancient, medieval, and modern history. ”