History leads to philosophy when it raises in a fundamental way the question of truth. As we have seen, the term "truth," when applied to history, has a double meaning. It may mean that the record of what has happened is correct, and it may mean that the understanding of what has happened is correct. If the record is correct, its truth seems to be something fixed once for all and unchanging. The perfect record may never be possessed, but it seems to be ideally possible, because the events which the record would keep in memory must have happened, and, therefore, might have been recorded if fortune had been favorable. If, however, the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth can not be something fixed once for all. It is fixed only from time to time. One correct understanding of what has happened does not displace another as truth might displace error, but one supplements and enlarges another. Histories which have gone before are not undone by those that follow after. They are incorporated into them in a very real way. Historical truth, therefore, when it does not mean simply the correctness of the records of history, is progressive. If the record of what has happened is correct, its truth is perpetual; if the understanding of what has happened is correct, its truth is contemporaneous. Now what does this distinction involve? Does it involve merely the recognition that facts may remain unchanged while our knowledge of them grows? A suspicion, at least, has been created that it involves something more, namely, the recognition that the facts themselves, being something "evolved and acted," are also progressive. Historical facts are careers in time. It is their occurrence which is recorded and it is their career which is understood. We may, therefore, undertake an inquiry into the nature of facts like these.

We may start from the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them, for it is clear that whatever the character of the facts may be, our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. The past is dead and gone. It is something over and done with, so that any change in it is forever impossible. We should then, if we would be precise, say, not that it is the past which grows and enlarges, but only our knowledge of it. We recover and conserve it in memory and imagination only, and as we recover it more and more completely and relate it more and more successfully, we know and understand it better. Plato is dead, and not one feature, circumstance, or action of his life can now be changed. He lives only in the memory of man; and because he lives there and stimulates the imagination, there is born a Plato of the imagination. There are thus two Platos, the one real and the other historical. The one lived and died long ago; the other still lives in human history. The real Plato has produced the historical Plato and affords a check upon historians in their representation of him. That representation may approach progressively nearer to what the real Plato was like, but it can never be the man who has passed away. History would be thus a branch of human knowledge, and grow with the growth of knowledge, while its objects remain unchanged. That is why history has constantly to be rewritten. Furthermore, in the rewriting, new types of history appear with new or altered emphases. The moral and religious type is supplemented by the political, and the political by the economic and social. For with the growth of knowledge the past looks different to us and we discover that what appeared once adequate has to be revised.

We may admit, therefore, that history, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a kind of human knowledge. Like all knowledge it leads us to recognize that there is a distinction between knowledge itself and its objects, and that the progressive character of knowledge indicates an approximation to an adequate representation of the objects and not changes in their own character. This distinction in its application to history is evidently not a distinction between literature and its subject-matter. For the past, if we now take the past to be the proper subject-matter of written history, appears to have a twofold character. It is all that has happened precisely as it happened, and it is all that is remembered and known, precisely as it is remembered and known. There are, we may say, a real past and an historical past. The latter never is the former, but always a progressively more adequate representation of the former.

Now this distinction between the real past and the historical past may be fruitful. It may also be treacherous, for the terms in which it is expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very easy to claim that the real past is after all only the historical past, because the past itself being dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved in history. Yet properly understood, the distinction is essential to any philosophical comprehension of what history is. It points out that history is not the past, but is its recovery and conservation. Events begin and end; men are born and die; events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. But it is not their disappearance which constitutes their existence in time a history. Their historical existence is a kind of continuing life. It may be that it continues only in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly illustrates the nature of history as a process in time. In other words the life of knowledge, of memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never to return in the precise and identical manner of their first existence, they are conserved, and continue the process of dying as occurrences in order to live as a history. Yesterday as yesterday is gone forever. Its opportunities are over and its incidents dead. As an historical yesterday it lives as material for to-day's employment. It becomes an experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy. History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying; whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed.

But the conservation of what happens is obviously not a perpetuation. History is not the staying of events, for time forbids that they stay. The conservation is rather a utilization, a kind of employment or working over of material. Through it discriminations and selections are made and connections discovered; the moving panorama is converted into an order of events which can be understood, because consequences are seen in the light of their antecedents and antecedents are seen in the light of the consequences to which they lead. There is thus a genuine incorporation of what has happened into what does happen, of yesterday into to-day, so that yesterday becomes a vital part of to-day and finds its enlargement and fulfilment there. We can thus write our own biographies. It is possible for us to discover what mistakes we have made and what ends we have attained. Our history appears thus to be a utilization of material, a realization of ends, a movement with purpose in it. Selection is characteristic of it very profoundly. Other histories, of other men, of times, of peoples, of institutions, we write in the same way because in the same way we discover and understand what has happened in their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utilizing, selective, and purposeful movement in time, history appears to be when we restrict it to the domain of human knowledge.

It seems, however, idle so to restrict it. For other things besides our knowledge grow—animals and plants, and the stars even. They, too, have a history, and it may be that their history, being also an affair in time, is not unlike in character to our own growth in knowledge. Or perhaps it were even better to say that both they and our knowledge illustrate equally what history is, discovering time itself to be the great historian. All time-processes, that is, appear to be, when we attentively consider them, processes which supplement, complete, or transform what has gone before. They are active conservations and utilizations of the past as material. They save what has happened from being utterly destroyed, and, in saving it, complete and develop it. Time is, thus, constantly rounding out things, so to speak, or bringing them to some end or fulfilment. That is why we call its movement purposeful.

Yet there have been philosophies which have tried to make of time a magical device by which man might represent to himself in succession that which in itself is never in succession. They picture his journey through life as a journey through space where all that he sees, one thing after another, comes successively into view like the houses on a street along which he may walk. But as the houses do not exist in succession, neither do the facts he discovers. They, too, come into view as he moves along. These philosophies, consequently, would have us think of a world in itself, absolute and complete, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be subtracted. It is somehow fixed and finished now; but our human experience, being incomplete and unfinished, gives to it the appearance of a process in time and discloses to us what it would be like if all its factors and the laws which hold them in perfect equilibrium were experienced in succession. History would thus be a kind of temporal revelation of the absolute and we should read it as we read a book, from cover to cover, discovering page by page a story which is itself finished when we begin.

Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the world to be thus finished and complete in itself and only appearing to us as a temporal revelation, has often thought of movements in time as only the results of preceding movements. Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the effect of what has already happened, rather than the active conservation and working over of what has already happened. The past is made the cause and producer of the present, so that the state of the world at any moment is only the result or outcome of what it was in the preceding moment. To-day is thought to be the effect of yesterday and the cause of to-morrow, and is thus but a transition from one day to another. Time-processes are thus robbed of any genuine activity or productivity, and time itself is made to be nothing but the sequential order in which events occur. Purpose, conservation, utilization, and all that active supplementing and working over of the past on which we have dwelt, become illusions when applied to the world at large. They represent our way of conceiving things, but not nature's way of doing things.

But these philosophies, as Professor Bergson especially among recent philosophers has pointed out,[4] gain whatever force they have principally from the fact that they think of time in terms of space. They picture it as a line already drawn, when they should picture it as a line in the process of being drawn. As already drawn, the line has a beginning, an end, and consequently, a middle point. Let us call the middle point the present. All the line to the left of that point we will call the past and all to the right of it the future. We thus behold time spatially with all its parts coexistent as the points on the line. Events are then conceived to move from the past through the present into the future, just as a pencil point may pass from the beginning of the line through its middle point to the end. But, unlike the pencil point, they can not go backward. This fact gives us a characteristic by which we may distinguish time from space even if we have represented time spatially. The spatial order is reversible, the temporal is not. Time is like a line on which you can go forward, but on which you can not go backward. But you can go forward. Everything goes from the past to the future. The present is but the transition point of their going.

There are, undoubtedly, advantages in thinking of time in this spatial way. Thereby we are able to make calendars and have a science of mechanics. It affords a basis for many successful predictions. But, quite evidently, time is neither such a line nor anything like it. Nothing whatever goes from the past through the present into the future. We can not make such a statement intelligible. For "to go" from the past to the future is not like going from New York to Boston. Boston is already there to go to, but the future is not anywhere to go to. And New York is there to leave, but the past is not anywhere to leave. What then is this mysterious "going" if its starting-point and its end are both non-existent now? Clearly it is a "going" only in a metaphorical sense. We call it a "going" because we can so represent it by dates and places. We can say that here we have been going from Friday through Saturday to Sunday. But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past nor future, that it is neither yesterday nor to-morrow, and that if we go anywhere we must start to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday will be yesterday. But note now the strange situation into which we have fallen—only in the future is this day ever in the past! And that is true of every day in the world's history. It becomes a past day only in its own future.

Clearly then time is not like a line already drawn. It is more like a line in the drawing. You take the pencil and the line is left behind it as the pencil moves. New points are being constantly added to what has gone before. The line is being manufactured. Let us call so much of it as has now been drawn the past and that which has not yet been drawn the future. It is clear then that the present is not the middle point of the line nor any point whatever upon it, for all of the line that has been drawn belongs to the past and all the rest of it to the future. Its past has already been done; its future is not yet done, but only possible. Furthermore, it is clear that no point moves from the past into the future. Such a movement is unintelligible. If there is any movement of points at all, it is a movement into the past. That is, the line, instead of growing into the future, grows into the past—continually more and more of it is drawn. For remember that the future of the line is not the place on the paper or in the air which by and by the line may occupy. Its future is a genuine future, a possibility as yet nowhere realized. It is the part of the line which always will be, but never is; or, better, it is that part of the line which will have a place and a date if the line continues to be drawn. The movement of time is thus not a movement from the past to the future, but from the possible to the actual, from what may be to what has been. The present is not the vanishing point between past and future; it is not, so to speak, in the same line or dimension with them. It is something quite different. It is all that we mean by activity or eventuality. It is the concrete, definite, and effective transforming of the possible into the actual. It is the drawing of the line, but in no sense is it a part or point of the line itself.

There are, doubtless, difficulties in thinking of time in this way, for it is not entirely free from spatial reminiscences. But it serves to point out that past, present, and future are not like parts of a whole into which an absolute or complete time is divided. They are more like derivatives of the time process itself in the concrete instances of its activity. They are what every growing or changing thing involves, whether it be the knowledge of man or the crust of the earth, for everything that grows or changes manufactures a past by realizing a future. It leaves behind it the record of what it has done conserved by memory or by nature, and in leaving that record behind constantly enlarges or transforms it. The growth moves in a manner and an order which when once performed are unalterable, but there is growth none the less. Since time is like this, it seems evidently unintelligible to restrict it and history to human experience and make the world in itself absolute. It would be better to say that it is history in the large sense applicable to the world itself that makes human experience possible. Yet it would be more advisable not to make such a distinction at all, but to recognize that human experience is one kind of history, namely, history conscious of itself, the time process deliberately at work.

Now it is evident that history in this latter sense is purposive and selective. That which has happened is not remembered as a whole or understood as a whole. Not only are details forgotten or neglected, but things and events otherwise important are omitted for the sake of securing emphasis and distinction among the things remembered. Herodotus spoke of "wonderful deeds" and others following this example have regarded history as concerned only with great men and great events. It is true that the little men and the little events tend to disappear, but we should remember that it is the selective character of history which makes them little. Speaking absolutely, we may say that no item, however apparently insignificant, is really insignificant in the historical development of any people or any institution, for in some measure every item is material to that development. But all are not equally material. The absence of any one of them might undoubtedly have changed the whole history, but given the presence of them all, some are of greater significance than others.

The history of the English people may be regarded as a development of personal liberty. It is doubtless more than that, but it is that. As such a development, it is evident that there are many things which an historian of personal liberty will disregard in order that the particular movement he is studying may be emphasized and distinguished. It will be that particular movement which will determine for him what is great and what little. So it comes about that histories are diversified even when they are histories of the same thing. There are many histories of England which differ from one another not only in accuracy, philosophical grasp, and brilliancy, but also in the purpose they discover England to be fulfilling. By purpose here is not meant a predestined end which England is bound to reach, but the fact that her history can be construed as a development of a specific kind. In other words her past can be understood only when it is seen to be relevant to some particular career which has its termination in her existing institutions. Her past has contributed through time to definite results which are now apparent. The things that have happened have not all contributed to these results in the same measure. Some have contributed more, some less. What is true in this illustration appears to be true generally. Every history is a particular career in the development of which some facts, persons, and events have been more significant than others, so that the termination of the career at any time is like an end that has been reached or a consequence to which its antecedents are peculiarly appropriate. That is the sense in which history is purposeful and selective.

The selection is twofold. First, there is selection of the type of career, and secondly, there is selection of the items especially relevant to its progress. We may have the military, the political, the social, the industrial, the economic, or the religious history of England, for instance, and although these histories will overlap and involve one another, each of them will exhibit a career which is peculiar and distinct from its fellows. When reading the industrial history we shall not be reading the religious history. In the one we shall find circumstances and events recorded which we do not find in the other, because all circumstances and events do not have significance equally for the development of industry and religion. Historical selection is, therefore, twofold,—the selection of a career to be depicted and of events and circumstances peculiarly relevant to that career.

Is this selection, we may ask, only a device on the historian's part to facilitate our comprehension, or is it a genuine characteristic of the time process itself? Does the historian read purpose into history or does he find it there? It may assist in answering such questions to observe that if selection is a device of the historian, it is one to which he is compelled. Without it history is unintelligible. Unless we understand events and circumstances as contributing to a definite result and contributing in different measures, we do not understand them at all. The Magna Charta, the British Constitution, the Tower of London, the River Thames, the mines of Wales, the plays of Shakespeare—all these things and things like them are for us quite unintelligible if they illuminate no career or illustrate no specific movements to which they have particularly contributed. Selection is, consequently, not a device which the historian has invented; it is imposed upon him by his own purpose to preserve the memory and promote the understanding of what has happened. The procedure of the historian is not arbitrary, but necessary. It is imposed upon him by the character of the facts with which he deals. These facts are movements from the possible to the actual and are helped and hindered by other such movements. An historical fact is not only spread out in space and exists equally with all its contemporaries at an assignable place in reference to them, it also persists in time, comes before and after other persisting facts, and persists along with others in a continuance equal to, or more or less than, theirs. In a figure we may say, facts march on in time, but not all at the same speed or with the same endurance; they help or impede one another's movement; they do not all reach the goal; some of them turn out to be leaders, others followers; their careers overlap and interfere; so that the result is a failure for some and a success for others. The march is their history.

This is figure, but it looks like the fact. Simple illustrations may enforce it. The seeds which we buy and sow in the spring are not simply so many ounces of chemical substances. They are also so many possible histories or careers in time, so many days of growth, so much promise of fruit or flower. Each seed has its own peculiar history with its own peculiar career. The seeds are planted. Then in the course of time, soil and moisture and atmosphere and food operate in unequal ways in the development of each career. Each is furthered or hindered as events fall out. Some careers are cut short, others prosper. Everywhere there is selection. Everywhere there is adaptation of means to ends. The history of the garden can be written because there is a history there to write.

Such an illustration can be generalized. Our world is indubitably a world in time. That means much more than the fact that its events can be placed in accordance with a map or dated in accordance with a calendar. It means that they are events in genuine careers, each with its own particular character and its own possibility of a future, like the seeds in the garden. Things with histories have not only structures in space and are, accordingly, related geometrically to one another; they have not only chemical structures and are thus analyzable into component parts; they have also structures in time. They are not now what they will be, but what they will be is always continuous with what they are, so that we must think of them stretched out, so to speak, in time as well as in space, or as being so many moments as well as so much volume. What they become, however, depends not only on their own time structures, but also on their interplay with one another. They are helped and hindered in their development. The results reached at any time are such as complete those which have gone before, for each career is the producer, but not the product of its past.

It seems clear, therefore, that there is purpose in history. But "purpose" is a troublesome word. It connotes design, intention, foresight, as well as the converging of means upon a specific end. Only in the latter sense is it here used, but with this addition: the end is to be conceived not in terms of any goal ultimately reached, but in terms of the career of which it is the termination; and in this career, the present is continually adding to and completing the past. The growing seeds end each in its own specific flower or fruit. They are each of its own kind and named accordingly. It is only because each of them has its specific structure in time that their growth presents that convergence of means toward an end by which we distinguish them and for which we value them. In purpose construed in this way there is evidently no need of design or intention or foresight. In making a garden there is such need. The purposes of nature may be deliberately employed to attain the purposes of men. But apart from beings who foresee and plan there appears to be no evidence of intention in the world. When we speak of nature's designs, we speak figuratively, and impute to her rational and deliberate powers. But we can not clearly affirm that the rain falls in order that the garden may be watered, or that the eye was framed in order that we might see. The evidence for design of that character has been proved inadequate again and again with every careful examination of it. To say, therefore, that nature is full of purpose does not mean that nature has been framed in accordance with some preconceived plan, but rather that nature is discovered to be an historical process, the conversion of the possible into the actual in such a way that there is conserved a progressive record of that conversion.

From the selective character of history it follows that a single complete history of anything is impossible—certainly a single complete history of the world at large. History is pluralistic. This conclusion might be reached as others have already been reached by pointing out how it follows from the purpose of writing history, and how this purpose indicates the character of movements in time. Indeed this has already been done in pointing out that the history of England is its many histories and the history of a garden the history of its many seeds. Always there is a particular career and particular incidents appropriate to it. Any career may be as comprehensive as desired, but the more inclusive it is the more restricted it becomes. The history of Milton contains details which the history of English literature will omit; and the history of the cosmos shrinks to nothing when we try to write it. The only universal history is the exposition of what history itself is, the time process stripped of all its variety and specific interests. Consequently, a single purpose is not discoverable; there are many purposes. When we try to reduce them all to some show of singleness we again do no more than try to tell what a temporal order is like. It is metaphysics and not history we are writing.

To affirm that history is pluralistic is, however, only to reaffirm the selective character of history generally. A history of the world in order to be single, definite, and coherent, must exhibit a single, definite, and coherent purpose or time process. That means, of course, that it is distinguished from other purposes equally single, definite, and coherent. There are thus many histories of the world distinguished from one another by the incidence of choice or emphasis. The flower in the crannied wall with its history fully recorded and understood would, consequently, illustrate the universe. All that has ever happened might be interpreted in illumination of its career. Yet it would be absurd to maintain that either nature or Tennyson intended that the little flower should be exclusively illustrative. The wall would do as well, or its crannies, or the poet. Nature exhibits no preference either in the choice of a history or in the extent of its comprehensiveness. Man may be thought to be, and man is, an incident in the universe, and the universe may be thought to be, and the universe is, the theater of man's career.

The same principle may be illustrated from human history exclusively. We who are of European ancestry and largely Anglo-Saxon by inheritance are pleased to write history as the development of our own civilization with its institutions, customs, and laws; and we regard China and Japan, for example, as incidental and contributory to our own continuation in time. Because our heritage is Christian we date all events from the birth of Christ. Yet we gain some wisdom by pausing to reflect how our procedure might impress an enlightened historian from China or Japan. Would he begin with the cradle of European civilization, pass through Greece and Rome, and then from Europe to America, remarking that in 1852 A.D. Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world? Surely he would begin otherwise, and not unlike ourselves would construe the history of the world in a manner relevant to the progress of his own civilization. Europe and America and Christianity would contribute to that development, but would not constitute its essential or distinctively significant factors. The historian is himself an historical fact indicating a selection, a distinction, and an emphasis in the course of time. His history is naturally colored by that fact. Other histories he can write only with an effort at detachment from his own career. He must forget himself if he would understand others; but he must understand himself first, if he is successfully to forget what he is. He must know what history is, recognize its pluralistic character, and try to do it justice.

To do justice to the pluralistic character of history is not, however, simply to write other histories than one's own with commendable impartiality. It is also to be keenly alive to the philosophical implications of this pluralism. The most significant of them is doubtless this: since philosophically considered history is a thing not written, but evolved and acted, to no one history can absolute superiority or preference be assigned. Absolutely considered the history of man can not claim preËminence over the history of the stars. He is no more the darling of the universe than is the remotest nebula. It is just as intelligible and just as true to say that man exists as an illustration of stellar evolution as to say that the sun exists to divide light from darkness for the good of man. Absolutely considered the cosmos is impartial to its many histories. But even that is not well said, for it implies that the cosmos might be partial if it chose. We should rather say that there is no considering of history absolutely at all. For history is just the denial of absolute considerations. It is the affirmation of relative considerations, of considerations which are relative to a selected career. There is no other kind of history possible.

The recognition of this fact does not, however, imply the futility of all history. It does not imply that any history is good enough for men since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. So to conclude is to disregard completely the implications of pluralism. If no history can claim absolute distinction, all histories are distinguished, nevertheless, from one another. If no history can claim preËminence over any other, it is true also that none can be robbed by any other of its own distinction and character. The fact that the morning stars do not sing together is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. The fact that the rain falls equally upon the just and the unjust is evidence neither of the impartial dispensations of deity nor of the equal issue of vice and virtue. Each event in its own history and illustrative of its own career is the law.

Yet men have been prone to write their own history as if it were something else than a human enterprise, as if it were something else than the history of humanity. Those who seek to read their destiny from the constellations ascendant at their birth are generally called superstitious; but those who seek to read it from the constitution of matter, or from the mechanism of the physical world, or from the composition of chemical substances, although no less superstitious, are too frequently called scientists. But "dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return" is an essential truth only about the history of dust; it is only an incidental truth about the history of man. One learns nothing peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. It affords no measure of the appreciation of poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the passion for happiness. Human history is human history only. The hopes and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more satisfying to understand.

Yet some there are who stop worshipping the stars when they discover that the stars neither ask for worship nor respond to it, and who dismiss reverence and piety when they discover that a god did not create the world. Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God, but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found that the stars have a different history from his own.

The inevitable failure of astronomy and geology to afford man gods suitable for his worship is not a recommendation that he should vigorously embrace the superstitions of his ancestors. To counsel that would be an infamy equal to that which has just been condemned. The counsel is rather that what is not human should not be taken as the standard and measure of what is human. Human history can not be wholly resolved into physical processes nor the enterprises of men be construed solely as the by-product of material forces. Such resolution of it appears to be unwarranted in view of the conclusions to which a consideration of what history is, leads. The obverse error has long since been sufficiently condemned. We have been warned often enough that water does not seek its own level or nature abhor a vacuum. Even literary criticism warns us against the pathetic fallacy. But in refusing to anthropomorphize matter, we ought not to be led to materialize man. We should rather be led to recognize that the reasons which condemn anthropomorphic science are precisely the reasons which commend humanistic philosophy. It is just because history is pluralistic that it is unpardonable to confound different histories with one another. So we may conclude that the pluralism of history which makes all histories, when absolutely considered, of equal rank and of indifferent importance, does not rob them, therefore, of their specific characters, nor make human history a presumptuous enterprise for them that write it not in the language of nature, but in the language of man.

This conclusion needs greater refinement of statement if it is to be freed from ambiguity. For the distinction between nature and man is an artifice. It is not a distinction which philosophy can ultimately justify. Undoubtedly man is a part or instance of nature, governed by nature's laws and intimately involved in her processes. But he is so governed and involved not as matter without imagination, but as a being whose distinction is the historical exercise of his intelligence. Nature is not what she would be without him and that is why his history can never be remembered or understood if he is forgotten. He can not be taken out of nature and nature be then called upon to explain him. As a part or instance of nature man is to be remembered and understood, but as the part or instance which he himself is, and not another. His history, consequently, can never be adequately written solely in terms of physics or chemistry, or even of biology; it must be written also in terms of aspiration.

All time processes are histories, but man only is the writer of them, so that historical comprehension becomes the significant trait of human history. To live in the light of a past remembered and understood is to live, not the life of instinct and emotion, but the life of intelligence. It is to see how means converge upon ends, and so to discover means for the attainment of ends desired. Human history becomes thus the record of human progress. From it we may learn how that progress is to be defined and so discover the purpose of man in history. For him the study of his own history is his congenial task to which all his knowledge of other histories is contributory; and for him the conscious, reflective, and intelligent living of his own history is his congenial purpose.

[4] See especially his "DonnÉes immÉdiates de la conscience," 1888. (Eng. tr. "Time and Free Will," by F. L. Pogson. The Macmillan Company, 1912.) "L'Évolution crÉatrice," 1908. (Eng. tr. "Creative Evolution," by Arthur Mitchell. Henry Holt and Company, 1913.)