Philosophy of history

“ Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses also a certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed. ”

“ The philosophy of history at large, explaining the past and predicting the future phenomena of man’s life in the world by reference to general laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the present state of knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but hardly able to cope. ”

“ Alas, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and Philosophy of History; ”

“ Thus at all times historians, so far as they have aimed at being more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show not merely succession, but connexion, among the events upon their record. Moreover, they have striven to elicit general principles of human action, and by these to explain particular events, stating expressly or taking tacitly for granted the existence of a philosophy of history. ”

“ The philosophy of historical sciences deals with the presuppositions by which historical teleological knowledge becomes logically possible. The philosophy of history seeks a theory which connects the special historical acts into a unity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And we rely on these laws of history because they are the embodiment of ages of human experience.
Whatever be our system of philosophy we all practically rely on past experience and observation. Fire burns and water drowns. ”

“ This idea of divine justice, and of God’s judgments on the world exemplified in history, belongs undoubtedly to the province of historical philosophy; and, as man’s resemblance to his Maker constitutes the first foundation-stone of history, this more practical principle, relating as it does, to real life and all its mighty phenomena, forms the second. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. ”

“ History is said to be philosophy teaching by example, and one great historian has said that no one event in itself is any more important than another, except from what it teaches posterity by its example. ”

“ For although this great edifice of universal history, where the conclusion at least is still wanting, is in this respect incomplete, and appears but a mighty fragment of which even particular parts are less known to us than others;—yet is this edifice sufficiently advanced, and many of its great wings and members are sufficiently unfolded to our view, to enable us, by a lucid arrangement of the different periods of history, to gain a clear insight into the general plan of the whole. ”

“ All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.—Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The history of philosophy must be rational and philosophic. It must be philosophy itself, with all its elements, in all their relations, and under all their laws represented in striking characters by the hands of time and of history, in the manifested progress of the human mind.—Sir William Hamilton, Edin. ”

“ That is to say, history itself and the real objects of history are not the main purpose of the historian, whose interest is rather concentrated either on giving the government in vogue a lesson or teaching others how they ought to detest it. ”

“ This much, however, follows from what has now been said:—History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise from such facts to Primeval History, or to argue how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,—is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics. ”

“ Human history is something more than the lives of great men, the rise and fall of states, the growth of institutions and customs, the vagaries of religion and philosophy, or the controlling influence of economic forces. It is also a rational enterprise. Expressed in naturalistic terms it is history conscious of what history is. To remember and to understand what has happened is not, therefore, simply an interesting and profitable study ”

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

“ The influence of geography, of nations, and of great men, in history, is then stated with great eloquence, force, and subtle complication of truth and paradox. Some vigorous sketches of the historians of humanity and philosophy, in which their merits are luminously exhibited and their defects acutely analyzed, are followed by a view of the philosophy of the 19th century. ”

“ The historical or comparative method has revolutionized not only the sciences of law, mythology, and language, of anthropology and sociology, but it has forced its way even into the domain of philosophy and natural science. For what is the theory of evolution itself, with all its far-reaching consequences, but the achievement of the historical method?—Prothero, Inaugural. ”

“ Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed, though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it. ”

“ But the important thing is to comprehend that progress, our notion of which is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced and thus limited, is not suspended over the course of human events like a destiny or a fate, nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine cannot serve to represent the whole history of the human race in a unified perspective which repeats, mutatis mutandis, the historic philosophy from thesis to conclusion, from St. ”

“ This is how history can serve life. Every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, according to his objects, powers, and necessities. ”

“ Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a 68critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science,—to see the object as in itself it really is. ”

“ History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy. ”

“ In the first place it must be remembered that History itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of facts. Of course, I am aware that the ideal of the Historian is Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination, but, as with all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised, and there is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration to which I just now alluded. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be. ”

“ Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call “the history of the world”? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? ”

“ The task of the historian, as here explained, is not merely to tell us the story of the past, and thus gratify our curiosity, but, pursuing a practical object, to seek to modify our views of the present and help us in our forecasts of the future, and this the historian is to do, not unconsciously and incidentally, but deliberately and of set purpose. One can well understand how history, so written, will usually begin with a maxim, and invariably end with a moral. ”

“ But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be—with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line. ”

“ Each human soul in which this power of life is has “its secrets and histories and marvels of destiny, heaven's splendors are over its dead, hell's terrors are under its feet, tragedies and poetries are in it, and a history for eternity.” Every social organism, every grand national aggregation of lives but generalizes the history of the individual, and thus the history of all life and of all living, whether in individuals, families, societies or nations, is one history, and that history the record of its conflicts, its defeats, its victories. ”

“ The merely empirical Historian has to collect faithfully all these elements just as he finds them, and to place them in order beside each other: the Philosopher who uses History for the purpose which we have here in view, has only to do with the latter element,—the actually living and progressive movement of Culture,—laying aside all the rest ”

“ But quite certainly he had something of genius for the exact study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here too again,—the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it makes its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of history to put one in living [17] contact with that. ”

“ But just as the value of history consists in extracting wisdom for the future from the experience of the past, because the record of social life to have value must be continuous, and because even the remote past has its bearing on the present, so it is quite necessary, if we are to have any reality in our interpretation of the past, to project ourselves into it, and strive with all our powers, original or borrowed, to realize what the past was. ”

“ Furthermore, the way was cleared for the philosophical position that history is not, as was once thought, the expression of a predetermined plan whose purpose is that of a divine education, but that it is the result of laws immanent in historical life itself. ”

“ If classical history has been found to be, is now, and shall continue toe, the concomitant of free institutions and of popular eloquence, what a field is opening to us for another Herodotus, another Thucydides, and another Livy! ”

“ We must live by our historic sense, by some ideal of a future for our nation; the people must have some vision of a glorious future, and not be expected to see only an unending vista of problems and labors, but this history must be understood and taught intimately and appreciatively and not merely objectively and logically. ”

“ World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations, whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action. ”

“ If onto the fringe of the main thought hangs much of history, it is history inseparable from it, for history of nations gives the history of great men, and these regulate the doings of all the lesser ones below them. ”

“ 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. ”