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 maturity, somewhat disciplined and disillusioned, confirms the suspicion, which even youth entertains at times, that the world, while offering an opportunity, hedges the offer about with restrictions which must be understood and submitted to, if effort is to be crowned with success. The mature may thus become eager to understand life without ceasing to enjoy it. They may become philosophical and show their wisdom by a desire to sympathize with what men have done and to live rationally in the light of what is possible. They may study history, convinced that it enlarges their sympathies and promotes rational living.

We might, therefore, conclude that the prevailing interest in historical studies is a sign that the age is growing in maturity and is seeking an outlook upon life which is both sane and encouraging. This may well be true. But even if the study of history indicate a certain maturity of mind, it is not a guarantee that history will not be studied in the spirit of youth. History may do little more than afford a new world for wild adventure and undisciplined experience. Moreover, maturity is not necessarily wise. Disgust, revolt, and loss of sympathy are not always strangers to it. Historical studies may be pursued with little comprehension of their aim or meaning; and history may be taught with little reflection on its philosophical significance. It would appear, therefore, that the study of history itself affords an opportunity for philosophical inquiry, and may profitably stimulate questions about the character of those facts with which history is concerned.

In these lectures I intend to deal with the purpose of history. I would not, however, be misunderstood. My aim is not, by making another attempt to find the increasing purpose running through the ages, to win permanently the laurel which, hitherto, ambitious philosophers have worn only for a season. There is, no doubt, a kind of rapture in seeing history as St. Augustine saw it,—the progress of the City of God from earth to heaven; and there is a kind of pride not wholly ignoble, in seeing it as Hegel did,—the vibrating evolution from the brooding absolution of the East to the self-conscious freedom of one's own philosophy embraced and made universal by the civilizing energy of one's own state. My aim is more modest. It is not romantic, but technical. Metaphysics rather than poetry is to be my domain, although I cherish the hope that poetry may not, therefore, be misprized. If it may ultimately appear, not only as an ornament to living, but also as an exemplary method of living well, I may even now invoke the Muses to my aid, but Clio first, and, afterwards, Calliope. It is my aim, through an examination of what the historian himself proposes, to discover in what sense the idea of purpose in history is appropriate, and to what ideas we are led when we think of history as the record of human progress.

The conclusions I hope to clarify, I may here anticipate. There is discoverable in history no purpose, if we mean by purpose some future event towards which the whole creation moves and which past and present events portend; but there is purpose in history, if we mean that the past is utilized as material for the progressive realization, at least by man, of what we call spiritual ends. More generally, history is itself essentially the utilization of the past for ends, ends not necessarily foreseen, but ends to come, so that every historical thing, when we view it retrospectively, has the appearance of a result which has been selected, and to which its antecedents are exclusively appropriate. In that sense purpose is discoverable in history. But this purpose is not single. History is pluralistic and implies a pluralistic philosophy. There are many histories, but no one of them exists to the prejudice of any other. And, finally, progress is not aptly conceived as an evolution from the past into the future. Evolution is, rather, only a name for historical continuity, and this continuity itself is a fact to be investigated and not a theory which explains anything, or affords a standard of value. The past is not the cause or beginning of the present, but the effect and result of history; so that every historical thing leaves, as it were, its past behind it as the record of its life in time. Progress may mean material progress when we have in mind the improvement in efficiency of the instruments man uses to promote his well-being; it may mean rational progress when we have in mind the idealization of his natural impulses. Then he frames in his imagination ideal ends which he can intelligently pursue and which, through the attempt to realize them, justify his labors. Such are the conclusions I hope to clarify, and I shall begin by considering the purpose men entertain when they write histories.

It is natural to quote Herodotus. The Father of History seems to have been conscious of his purpose and to have expressed it. We are told that he gave his history to the world "in order that the things men have done might not in time be forgotten, and that the great and wonderful deeds of both Greeks and barbarians might not become unheard of,—this, and why they fought with one another." This statement seems to be, in principle, an adequate expression of the purpose of writing histories, even if Herodotus did not execute that purpose with fidelity. The limitations of its specific terms are obvious. One might expect that the great deeds were mainly exploits at arms, that the history would be military, and that the causes exposed would be causes of war. But the history itself deals with geography and climate, with manners, customs, traditions, and institutions, fully as much as with heroes and battles. Professor Gilbert Murray says of it: "His work is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually tremendous; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The world was at that time very interesting; and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human records. Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about him: he shares from the outset their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures; he catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great human influences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens; yet all the time shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and unconsciously convinced of the weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness of its apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the stamp of this character and this profession."[1]

The history of Herodotus would, then, preserve a record of the world of human affairs as he discovered it and an exposition of the causes and conditions which have influenced human action. He would record what men have done in order that their deeds might be remembered and in order that they might be understood. Like all other historians he had his individual limitations, but for all of them he seems to have expressed the purpose of their inquiries. That purpose may be worked out in many different fields. We may have military history, political history, industrial history, economic history, religious history, the history of civilization, of education, and of philosophy, the history, indeed, of any human enterprise whatever. But always the purpose is the same, to preserve a faithful record and to promote the understanding of what has happened in the affairs of men. I need hardly add that, for the present, I am restricting history to human history. Its wider signification will not be neglected, but I make the present limitation in order that through a consideration of the writing of human history, we may be led on to the conception of history in its more comprehensive form.

To conceive the purpose of writing history adequately is not the same thing as to execute that purpose faithfully. If Herodotus may be cited in illustration of the adequate conception, he will hardly be cited by historians in illustration of its faithful execution. They have complained of him from time to time ever since Thucydides first accused him of caring more about pleasing his readers than about telling the truth. He is blamed principally for his credulity and for his lack of criticism. Credulous he was and less critical than one could wish, but it is well to remember, in any just estimate of him, that he was much less credulous and much more critical than we should naturally expect a man of his time to be. He wrote in an age when men generally believed spontaneously things which we, since we reflect, can not believe, and when it was more congenial to listen to a story than to indulge in the criticism of it. He frequently expresses disbelief of what he has been told and is often at great pains to verify what he has heard. With all his faults he remains among the extraordinary men.

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. The questions we ask of the dead, only we ourselves can answer. Herodotus wrote with these practical and moral difficulties at a maximum. We have learned systematically to combat them. There has grown up for our benefit an abundant literature which would instruct the historian how best to proceed. The methods of historians, their failures and successes, have been carefully studied with the result that we have an elaborate science of writing history which we call historiography. Therein one may learn how to estimate sources, deal with documents, weigh evidence, detect causes, and be warned against the errors to which one is liable. Moreover, anthropology, archÆology, and psychology have come to the historian's aid to help him in keeping his path as clear and unobstructed as possible. In other words, history has become more easy and more difficult to write than it was in the days of Herodotus. The better understanding of its difficulties and of the ways to meet them has made it more easy; but the widening of its scope has made it more difficult. We still face the contrast between the adequate conception of the purpose of writing history and the faithful execution of that purpose. But it would seem that only practical and moral difficulties stand in the way of successful performance. Ideally, at least, a perfect history seems to be conceivable.

It is, indeed, conceivable that with adequate data, with a wise and unbiased mind, and with a moderate supply of genius, an historian might faithfully record the events with which he deals, and make us understand how they happened. It is conceivable because it has in many cases been so closely approximated. Our standards of judgment and appraisement here are doubtless open to question by a skeptical mind. We may lack the evidence which would make our estimate conclusive. But what I mean is this: histories have been written which satisfy to a remarkable degree the spirit of inquiry. They present that finality and inevitability which mark the master mind. There are, in other words, authorities which few of us ever question. They have so succeeded, within their limitations, in producing the sense of adequacy, that their reputation seems to be secure. Their limitations have been physical, rather than moral or intellectual, so that the defects which mar their work are less their own than those of circumstance. They thus appear to be substantial witnesses that the only difficulties in the way of faithfully executing the purpose of writing history are practical and moral—to get the adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate supply of genius. There are no other difficulties.

Yet when we say that there are no other difficulties we may profitably bear in mind that Herodotus has been charged not only with being credulous and uncritical, but also with not telling the truth. At first this might not appear to indicate a new difficulty. For if Herodotus lied, his difficulty was moral. But it is not meant that Herodotus lied. It is meant rather that within his own limitations he did not, and possibly could not, give us the true picture of the times which he recorded. He saw things too near at hand to paint them in that perspective which truthfully reveals their proportions. His emphases, his lights and shadows, are such as an enlightened man of his time might display, but they are not the emphases, the lights and shadows which, as subsequent historians have proved, give us ancient Greece with its true shading. We understand his own age much better than he did because Grote and other moderns have revealed to us what Greece really was. But what, we may ask, was the real Greece? Who has written and who can write its true history? Grote's reputation as an historian is secure, but his history has already been superseded in many important respects. We are told that, since its publication, "a great change has come over our knowledge of Greek civilization." What then shall we say if neither Herodotus, who saw that civilization largely face to face, nor Grote, who portrays it after an exceptionally patient and thorough study of its records, supplemented by what he calls scientific criticism and a positive philosophy, has given us the real Greece? Clearly it looks as if the perfect history is yet to be written, and as if every attempt to write it pushes it forward into the future. And clearly we face, if not a new difficulty, a fact at least which is of fundamental importance in the attempt to understand what history itself is.

So Herodotus becomes again illustrative. His history once written and given to the world becomes itself an item in the history of Greece, making it necessary that the story be retold. In the face of a fact, at once so simple and so profound, how idle is the boast of the publisher who could say of the author of a recent life of Christ[2] that she "has reproduced the time of Christ, not as we would understand it, but as He himself saw it. She has told what He believed and did, rather than what He is reported to have said. She has stripped Him of tradition and shown Him as He was; she has given to literature an imperishable figure, not of the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, but of the towering figure of all history." How idle, I repeat, is such a boast of finality when we know that this new history of Christ, instead of ending the matter, may cause another history to be written by some student who comes to the old record with a new insight and a new inspiration. It is possible, we may say, to portray the Christ of His own day, or the wan Galilean of the Middle Ages, or the figure which commands the attention of the twentieth century, but the real Christ, the towering figure of all history,—who will portray that? It is yet to be done and done again. 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.

It is well-nigh impossible to avoid the suspicion of paradox in such statements as these. Yet I feel confident that every historical student keenly alive to his task is abundantly sensible of this truth. Where will he end the history of Greece or of Rome? What will be the final chapter of the French Revolution? No: there is no paradox here, but there is an ambiguity. For history is not only a record written to preserve memory and promote understanding, it is also a process in time. "With us," Professor Flint writes, "the word 'history,' like its equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such composition—either a narrative of events, or events which may be narrated. It is impossible to free the term of this doubleness and ambiguity of meaning. Nor is it, on the whole, to be desired. The advantages of having one term which may, with ordinary caution, be innocuously applied to two things so related, more than counterbalance the dangers involved in two things so distinct having the same name. The history of England which actually happened can not easily be confounded with the history of England written by Mr. Green; while by the latter being termed history as well as the former, we are reminded that it is an attempt to reproduce or represent the course of the former. Occasionally, however, the ambiguity of the word gives rise to great confusion of thought and gross inaccuracy of speech. And this occurs most frequently, if not exclusively, just when men are trying and professing to think and speak with especial clearness and exactness regarding the signification of history—i.e., when they are labouring to define it. Since the word history has two very different meanings, it obviously can not have merely one definition. To define an order of facts and a form of literature in the same terms—to suppose that when either of them is defined the other is defined—is so absurd that one would probably not believe it could be seriously done were it not so often done. But to do so has been the rule rather than the exception. The majority of so-called definitions of history are definitions only of the records of history. They relate to history as narrated and written, not to history as evolved and acted; in other words, although given as the only definitions of history needed, they do not apply to history itself, but merely to accounts of history. They may tell us what constitutes a book of history, but they can not tell us what the history is with which all books of history are occupied. It is, however, with history in this latter sense that a student of the science or philosophy of history is mainly concerned."[3]

It is because history is not only something "narrated and written," but also something "evolved and acted" that we are led to say that the history of nothing is complete. The narrative may begin and end where we please; and might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. But the beginning and the end of the action are so interwoven with the whole time process that adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the fundamental reason why Grote's history surpasses that of Herodotus in what we call historical truth. For the truth of history is a progressive truth to which the ages as they continue contribute. The truth for one time is not the truth for another, so that historical truth is something which lives and grows rather than something fixed to be ascertained once for all. To remember what has happened, and to understand it, carries us thus to the recognition that the writing of history is itself an historical process. It, too, is something "evolved and acted." It is perennially fresh even if the events with which it deals are long since past and gone. The record may be final, but our understanding of what has been recorded can make no such claim. The accuracy of the record is not the truth of history. We are well assured, for instance, that the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. The record on that point is not seriously questionable, although we have to rely on documents which have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to our own day, we can have little doubt that the record of this greater Marathon of Europe will surpass all others in fulness and accuracy. There are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, difficulties in the way of exactness even when we are dealing with contemporaneous events. "Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differently as their memories or their sympathies vary." Such difficulties we have learned how to check until our records closely approach truth of fact. Consequently the records of what men have done, or may be doing, may be relatively unimpeachable. But it is quite a different matter to understand what they have done and are doing. Without that understanding, history is no better than a chronicle, a table of events, but not that "thing to possess and keep always" after which the historian aspires.

To understand is not simply difficult, it is also endless. But this fact does not make it hopeless. The understanding of history grows by what it feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, constantly reveals more to be understood. Our illustrations may serve us again. From the accessible records of the battle of Marathon we can understand with tolerable success the immediate antecedents and consequents of that great event. But in calling the event great we do not simply eulogize its participants. We indicate, rather, that its antecedents and consequents have been far-reaching and momentous. Greece, we say, was saved. But what are we to understand by that salvation? 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. And more than this: with every rewriting we understand better what went before and what followed after until the battle itself becomes but the symptom of deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's present struggle. Already its history has begun with many volumes. Following the example of Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are writing it contemporaneously by summers and winters. The consequences they can only guess at, but they have done much with the antecedents, so much that the last fifty years of Europe are better understood than they were a year ago. The record of them has changed little; our understanding of them has changed much. It has changed so much that they have already become a different half-century from what they were. The truth about them last year is not the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence what will the truth about them be?

I venture another illustration, one from the history of philosophy. I choose Plato. He is such a commanding figure that the desire to understand him is exceptionally keen. The record of his life and of his conscious aims and purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no assured authorities on these points. That is greatly to be regretted, because a correct record is naturally the best of aids towards a correct understanding. But the unsatisfactory record is not very material to the illustration in hand. The record might be correct, but Plato would, even so, remain an historical figure to be understood. He would continue to be the producer of what we call Platonism, and we should have to understand him as that producer. In that case, evidently, the details of his life, his span of years, his immediate aims and activities would involve but the beginning of an inquiry which would last as long as Plato is studied by those who would understand him. Who, then, would be the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle wrote, or the man about whom Professor Paul Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is the man about whom they both write, but that can mean only that he is the man about whom writers can write so diversely. He is not the same man to Professor Shorey that he was to Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a nice question which of the two disciples has given us the correct estimate of their master. Who was the real Plato? And that question could still be asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its record, what it is not, a continuous and uniformly accepted tradition. For it is quite evident that the Platonic tradition has grown from age to age as students of Plato have tried to understand him and to understand also what other students have understood about him. The true Plato is still the quest of Platonists.

It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, if we do not mean by that simply the truth of the records with which we deal, is something which can not be ascertained once for all. It is a living and dynamic truth. It is genuinely progressive. We may say that it is like something being worked out in the course of time, and something which the sequence of events progressively exposes or makes clear. If, therefore, we declare that Herodotus, or any other historian, has not told the truth, and do not mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we mean only that the truth has grown beyond him and his time. For his time it might well be that he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may then have been precisely what he said it was. To blame him for not telling us what ancient Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In the light of historical truth, the Father of History and all his children have been, not simply historians of times old and new, but also contributors to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If they have been faithful to their professed purpose of preserving the memory of what has happened and in making what has happened understood, they are not rivals in the possession of truth. They have all been associated in a common enterprise, that of conserving the history of man in order that what that history is and what it implies may be progressively better known.

History is therefore not simply the telling of what has happened; it is also and more profoundly the conserving of what has happened in order that its meaning may be grasped. A book of history differs radically from a museum of antiquities. In the museum, the past is preserved, but it is a dead past, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of time. 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. That is why no historical item can be so placed and dated that the full truth of it is definitely prescribed and limited to that place and date. Conformably with the calendar and with geography we may be able to affirm that a given event was or is taking place, but to tell what that event is in a manner which ensures understanding of it, is to write the history of its career in time as comprehensively as it can be written. It is to conserve that event, not as an isolated and detached specimen of historical fact, but as something alive which, as it continues to live, reveals more and more its connections in the ceaseless flow of history itself.

The writer of history may, consequently, attain his purpose within the limits of the practical and moral difficulties which beset it in either of two ways. He may give us the contemporaneous understanding of what has happened in terms of the outlook and perspective of his own day, giving us a vision of what has gone before as an enlightened mind of his time might see it. His history might then be that of ancient peoples beheld in the new perspective into which they have now been placed. Could he, by miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they would doubtless fail to recognize their own history, truthful as it might be. But comprehension might dawn upon them as they read, and they might exclaim: "These were the things we were really doing, but we did not know it at the time; we have discovered what we were; our history has revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, by the restrained exercise of his imagination, may give us what has happened in the perspective of the time in which it happened, or in a perspective anterior to his own day. He may seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination to days no longer ours and to ways of feeling and acting no longer presently familiar. Such a history would be less comprehensive and complete than the former. It would also be more difficult to write, because historical imagination of this kind is rare and also because it is not easy to divest the past of its present estimate. Yet the imagination has that power and enables us to live again in retrospect what others have lived before us. But in both cases the history would be an active conservation of events in time; it would reveal their truth, their meaning, and their purpose.

If now we ask what may be this truth and meaning, or in what sense may we appropriately speak of a purpose in history, we pass from history to philosophy. No longer shall we be concerned with the purpose of writing history, but rather with the character of the facts which stimulate that purpose and assist in its attainment. From history as the attempt to preserve memory and promote understanding we pass to history as a characteristic of natural processes. We shall try to analyze what the career of things in time involves; but we shall keep this career in mind in those aspects of it which bear most significantly upon the history of man.