History of ideas

“ But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. ”

“ Everywhere the tone of thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. ”

“ All that we can hope is, to ascertain, by psychological analysis, what are the fundamental ideas and laws of humanity; to grasp the exterior conditions which are, 18 on all hands, recognized as exerting a powerful influence upon national character; to watch, under these lights, the manifestations of human nature on the theatre of history, and then apply the principles of a sound historic criticism to the recorded opinions of contemporaneous historians and their immediate successors. In this manner we may expect, at least, to approximate to a true judgment of history. ”

“ For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions—art, philosophy, love, virtue—truth itself! ”

“ Nothing but dulness in the telling could mar the story, for in itself it is the record of the growth of those ideas that have made our race and its civilization what they are; of ideas instinct with human interest, vital with meaning for our race; fundamental in their influence on human development; part and parcel of the mechanism of human thought on the one hand, and of practical civilization on the other. ”

“ If we are to account mind not matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity, and grace, and intellectual value to history, and its action on the ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the universal by the national, and civilisation by custom. ”

“ Faithful to our own, we here place ourselves at the historical point of view. Convinced that ideas have a history, and are most clearly and surely defined by their very evolution, we shall confine ourselves to following and describing that evolution. ”

“ If we examine the history of ideas we shall find that they at first exist “in the air.” They float about, beautiful alluring visions, ready to be caught and made to serve mortal needs by the right man at p. ”

“ We know how arts, customs, and ideas are shaped among ourselves by the combined actions of many individuals, of which actions both motive and effect often come quite distinctly within our view. The history of an invention, an opinion, a ceremony, is a history of suggestion and modification, encouragement and opposition, personal gain and party prejudice, and the individuals concerned act each according to his own motives, as determined by his character and circumstances. ”

“ It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent that we find their documents in writers, is something always very instructive, and serving especially to add to our [Pg 161] critical knowledge of our concepts as of our ways of thinking. ”

“ The force, grandeur, and reality of these ideas are not a whit impaired in the abstract, nor indeed the truth of the concrete history (!) as their representation, even though mankind should have been placed upon the earth in many pairs at once, or in distinct centres of creation. ”

“ You shall have the simple, accurate presentation of facts from history—and plain reasoning upon these facts—and from Ancient History, rich as it is in proofs, I will draw nothing!—all shall be drawn from the history of modern States—the history of men living under the influence of great religious and political ideas which are active to-day—and among ourselves. ”

“ And many topics of quite primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human life, the elaboration of the ideas of money and credit, or the story of the origins and spread and influence of Christianity, which must be treated fragmentarily or by elaborate digressions in any partial history, arise and flow completely and naturally in one general record of the world in which we live. ”

“ Expansion and contraction, the study of mankind followed by the study of individual men and women; then a new series of generalizations followed by another series of concrete applications of ideas to life—that is the history of culture. ”

“ The ideas which have prevailed in the past, in regard to the nature of the ultimate particles of matter out of which worlds are formed, reveal the speculative tendency as well as the intellectual status of the human mind in different epochs of the history of civilization. ”

“ The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. ”

“ While history itself is to those who study it for sheer interest in the doings of mankind, an art, and one of the greatest;—to those who study it that they may 'learn its lessons', refute a political opponent, or pass a competitive examination, no more than a branch of useful knowledge. ”

“ There will come a time—I am sure of it—when it will be found that the same practical results, both in mental discipline, and in political philosophy, are to be attained by the accurate study of mediæval and modern as of ancient history ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ The most celebrated subjects of discussion, and those on which this class of reasoners were most divided, were the reality of universal ideas, considered as extrinsic to the human mind and the freedom of will. ”

“ History is thus interpreted as a series of intelligent events, a progressive eduction of the rationality of man in his institutions, in state, art, and religion. Wherever two or three are met together to consult about and devise a common good, and wherever this common good widens in extent and deepens in quality, there is seen the implicit spirit of rationality, outering itself. ”

“ Under these two different forms, therefore doth Tradition reveal to us the primitive world, or in other words, these are the two grand conditions of humanity which fill the records of primitive history. ”

“ I find in it an agreement with my doctrine partly gratifying and partly saddening, since I can hardly understand how an author of so much insight should not long ago have felt the scales drop from his eyes. "Wherever our glance falls," he says, "nothing strikes us but ideas, laws, institutions, that existed a century ago, and yet have been set aside for ten years past or more, by the course of culture and increasing insight. ”

“ Pragmatic reflections, however abstract they be, are thus in reality the present, and vivify the tales of the past with the life of to-day.—Here too a word should specially be given to the moralising and the moral instructions to be gained through history,—for which it was often studied.... Rulers, statesmen, nations, are especially bidden learn from the experience of history. ”

“ Historical particulars can only serve to characterize the inward motives, the prevailing opinions, the decisive moments, the critical points in the progress of human society; and thus place more vividly before our eyes the peculiar character of every age—each step of mankind in intellectual refinement and moral improvement. ”

“ We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? ”

“ All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.—Mill, Inaugural Address, 51. ”

“ These, by whatever name we like to call them, are facts and not fancies, and facts which enter largely into all questions, whether of science, philosophy, religion, or practical policy. Every one who wishes to keep at all abreast with modern culture, ought to have some general knowledge of the ideas and principles which underlie them and which are embraced in the comprehensive word “polarity.” ”

“ Eschewing all expressions of opinion on controverted points of science, philosophy, religion, and politics, it aims at an accurate representation of facts and institutions, of the results of physical research, of the prominent events in the history of the world, of the most significant productions of literature and art, and of the celebrated individuals whose names have become associated with the conspicuous phenomena of their age—doing justice to all men, all creeds, all sections. ”

“ In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such a study is in harmony with the best intellectual tendencies of our age, which is, more than anything else, characterised by the universal supremacy of the historical spirit. To such a degree has this spirit permeated all our modes of thinking, that with respect to every branch of knowledge, no less than with respect to every institution and every form of human activity, we almost instinctively ask, not merely what is its existing condition, but what were its earliest discoverable germs, and what has been the course of its development.—INGRAM, History of Political Economy, 2. ”

“ In order to deal effectually with the history of philosophy, in order to derive any benefit from it as students, and in order to confer any benefit on it as historians, we must, first of all, be philosophers ourselves. ”

“ Acceptance of these ideas—the ideas upon which rest art, science, the polity of nations and religion—and self-renunciation for them, are the only sources of truly noble action. “Everything great and good upon which our present existence rests, from which it has proceeded, exists only because noble and powerful men have resigned all the enjoyments of life for the sake of ideas.” ”

“ Examples of the empirical laws from which this method begins abound in histories, newspapers, and political discussions, and are of all shades of truth or half-truth: as that 'History consists in the biographies of great men'; in other words, that the movements of society are due to exceptional personal powers, not to general causes ”

“ This intellectual life, like some gift from heaven, hovers over the stir and movement of the world; or it is, as it were, a sweet-scented air developed out of the ferment itself—the real life of mankind, dominated by will; and side by side with the history of nations, the history of philosophy, science and art takes its innocent and bloodless way. ”

“ If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess." ”

“ From our present position we look back over the blood-blotted pages of history, back to the ages before men began to write their history and their thoughts, through the centuries of which there is only faint tradition ”

“ But to understand them, one must do much more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain anything like complete results. ”

“ Moreover, from the social point of view the hierarchical value of an idea, its intrinsic worth, is without importance. The necessary point to consider is the effects it produces. The Christian ideas of the Middle Ages, the democratic ideas of the last century, or the social ideas of to-day are assuredly not very elevated. ”

“ We may readily grant that it is, in one sense or another, a doctrine for chosen spirits, but if history makes anything clear it is that chosen spirits are the necessary instruments of all progress and therefore the chief hope of society. ”