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 The interpretation of history, 
 
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THE INTERPRETATION 
 OF HISTORY 
 
THE INTERPRETATION 
 OF HISTORY 
 
 By 
 
 MAX NORDAU 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY 
 M. A. HAMILTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 igii C 
 
Copyright, 1910, by 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 New York 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 -y 
 
 
 / 1 
 
 THE OUmN 4 lODEK CO. PM88 
 V HAHWAY.VI. J. 
 
 ''- '^'/.//, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. History and the Writing of History , . i 
 
 II. The Customary Philosophy of History . 47 
 
 III. The Anthropomorphic View of History . 88 
 
 IV. Man and Nature 133 
 
 V. Society and the Individual .... 159 
 
 VI. The Psychological Roots of Religion . 206 
 
 VII. The Psychological Premises of History . 251 
 
 VIII. The Question of Progress . . . .316 
 
 IX. Eschatology 362 
 
 X. The Meaning of History — Conclusion . 391 
 
THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 
 
 The confusion almost everywhere prevalent between 
 history and the writing of history will be firmly avoided 
 in the course of the subsequent inquiry. The philosophy 
 of history, even in the hands of its most distinguished 
 exponents, has tended far too much to identify the object 
 of description and the description itself. There is some- 
 thing almost ludicrous in the unconscious arrogance of 
 this. The lordly declaration of the historian, " History 
 is that portion of the world's story which is established 
 by tradition and recorded in written history," ^ is 
 prompted by the confident self-importance of the bureau- 
 crat, who cries, " quod non est in actis, non est in 
 mundo ! " 
 
 The ancients were wiser when they admitted that there 
 had been heroes before Agamemnon, although — 
 
 " illacrimabiles 
 Urgentur ignotique longa 
 Nocte, carent quia vate sacro " — 
 
 'Ferdinand Erhardt, "The Sphere of History: Problems of His- 
 torical Research," Berne, 1906, p. 4. Even so clear a thinker as P. 
 Lacombe (" De I'Histoire consideree comme Science,'' Paris, 1894) 
 gives this narrow definition: "History is all that lae knoio of the 
 doings of our ancestors" (italics are mine). 
 
2 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 eternal night holds them, unwept and unhonoured, be- 
 cause unsung by the bard; or, as Sadi in Gulistan de- 
 clares : 
 
 " Many a hero now forgotten sleepeth quiet underground, 
 And upon the earth no echoes of his glory ever sound." 
 
 Friedrich Schiller had none of the arrogance of his 
 followers, or of their desire for self-glorification. He 
 did not hold that nothing is history but what is repre- 
 sented by the historian. On the contrary, in his " What 
 is Universal History, and why should it be studied? " he 
 says : " The historian selects from this mass of occur- 
 rences those which have had a direct influence, and one 
 which can readily be traced, upon the present aspect of 
 the world and the condition of the generations living at 
 this day." This limitation, borrowed by Schiller from 
 Kant,^ appears at first sight to be illuminating, but 
 closer examination hardly justifies it. 
 
 Schiller himself recognizes that a " long series of 
 causally interconnected events can be traced from the 
 present moment to the origin of the human species." 
 How, then, can anyone presume to make an arbitrary 
 selection among these countless causes of which effects 
 continue to be operative in the most recent development? 
 Why should those occurrences only be selected which 
 
 "^Enunanuel Kant, collected works, edited by G. Hartenstein, 
 Leipzig, 1867, vol. iv., "Idea of a Universal History from the 
 International Point of View," p. 157: "They (our descendants) 
 will doubtless only value the history of ancient times, whose records 
 must have long since disappeared, in the light of what really in- 
 terests them — namely, the good or harm done by patioQ$ ^nd gov- 
 ernments from the international point of view." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 3 
 
 " have exercised an influence which can readily be 
 traced" upon the present aspect of the world and the 
 condition of the generations alive to-day? Is an influ- 
 ence less direct and important when it can be traced, 
 not with ease, but with great difliculty? A superficial 
 view of any human event will suggest visible causes 
 which are hardly ever the real ones.^ The forces which 
 determine events are often deeply hidden: the most 
 penetrating insight and laborious investigation is neces- 
 sary before they and their interrelation can be discov- 
 ered. Knowledge which stops short at " the occurrences 
 which have exercised an influence which can readily be 
 traced upon the present aspect of the world " may ac- 
 
 ' To avoid breaking the thread of my argument, I will give 
 some concrete examples in this note. Popular accounts of the 
 movement for North American independence place its beginning on 
 December 16, 1773, with the attack on the tea-ships in Boston harbour, 
 and describe it as being caused by the English stamp and Custom 
 dues. Edouard Laboulaye (" Histoire Politique des £tats Unis," 
 Paris, 1855) occupies nearly 200 pages (vol. ii., pp. 1-1S6) in showing 
 that the beginnings of the secession of the United States coincide 
 with the beginning of the English settlement itself. George Ban- 
 croft ("History of the United States," Boston, 1852) takes the 
 same view. Vols, iv.-vi. deal with "The American Revolution," 
 the beginning of which he puts as far back as 1748. Bancroft does 
 not reach the attack on the tea-ships till p. 487 of vol. vi. The 
 latest historian of the North American Revolution, Mary A. M. 
 Marks ("England and America, 1763-1783: the History of a Re- 
 action"), dates its beginning as 1763, finds its causes in the strife 
 of parties in England, and concludes: "The history of the loss of 
 America is the history of a Tory reaction." 
 
 Wolfgang Menzel (" The Last 120 Years of Universal History," 
 Stuttgart, i860, vol. ii., p. i) begins his account of the French 
 Revolution thus: "The greatest event of modern times, the French 
 Revolution, began on the day on which . . . the long-desired meet- 
 ing of the States-General was opened by Louis XVI." On the 
 other h^nd, Louis Blanc writes in his "Histoire de la Revolution 
 
4 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 count for such a view of history as Scribe expresses in 
 his " Verre d'Eau," or Pascal/ when he declares that the 
 history of the world would have been different had Cleo- 
 patra's nose been of a different shape. No doubt our 
 sympathy is principally, if not exclusively, aroused by 
 something whose relation to " the present aspect of the 
 world and the condition of the generation living at this 
 day " can be easily seen. But how nebulous is the con- 
 ception of history which this criterion affords us ! Ac- 
 cording to it, what was history for the past generation is 
 no longer so for us, and what is history for us will be so 
 no longer for the generation succeeding. What was 
 history to the Indians and Japanese has never existed for 
 
 Frangaise," Paris, 1847, vol. i., Preamble: "History begins and 
 ends nowhere. The facts -which compose a world process are so 
 confused and so obscurely connected that there is no event of which 
 the first cause or final result can be stated with certainty. . . . 
 How, then, can the real starting-point of the French Revolution be 
 established ? " He begins, therefore, with John Hus, and does 
 not reach until p. 258, vol. ii., the summoning of the States-General, 
 which Menzel regarded as the beginning of the Revolution. 
 
 Maxime du Camp (" Souvenirs de I'Armee," Paris, 1848, pp. 65 
 et seq.) ascribes the origin of the February revolution to the fact 
 that Sergeant Giacomoni, of the 14th Line Infantry Regiment, took 
 upon himself to have a man shot, apparently a painter's model, who 
 had tried to hit the captain of his battalion in the face with a 
 torch. 
 
 It is regarded as an irrefutable fact by many French publicists that 
 the war of 1870 was caused by the "forgery" introduced by Bis- 
 marck into King William's despatch regarding his interview with 
 Count Benedetti. 
 
 The sinking of the Maine in the harbour of Havana is cited as 
 the cause of the Spanish-American V^^ar, etc. 
 
 ' Blaise Pascal, " Lettres Provinciales et Pensees," new edition, 
 Paris, x%2x, vol. ii., p. 155: "If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, 
 the whole face of the earth would have been different." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 5 
 
 Europeans and Americans, and vice versa. History, 
 then, changes with place and time. The chapters that 
 are greeted with universal excitement to-day will be as 
 stale to-morrow as the novel which is read one day by 
 all the world, only to be cast into the waste-paper basket 
 on the next. It wanders through the darkness of the 
 past like a man with a lantern. There is a dim circle of 
 light around it, moving as it moves from place to place. 
 As it passes on, darkness falls upon the spot that was 
 brightly lit up yesterday, and what it now illumines will 
 to-morrow again be plunged in gloom. 
 
 Since the caprice, or call it personality, of the historian 
 will decide the manner in which he treats, limits, and 
 selects his material, and this according to the definition 
 laid down by historians in a body, is history itself, we 
 logically arrive at the droll conclusion that the writer 
 of history creates it ! The historian, and not heroes or 
 peoples, creates it ! What a great man is this historian ! 
 Those who toil at the loom of time sink into insig- 
 nificance in comparison with the man who stands behind, 
 looking on more or less attentively, and recording their 
 labours more or less correctly. History ceases to be a 
 series of objective events in regular progression, whether 
 that progression be intelligible and capable of a clear and 
 comprehensible description or not, and becomes depend- 
 ent on the cast of a mind of a particular human being 
 who selects from the mass of recorded material what 
 suits his interests, gratifies his feelings, and falls in with 
 his peculiar aspirations ; its arrangement depends on his 
 understanding, and its form on his artistic ability. In 
 one word, history has no longer an objective, but merely 
 a subjective existence ; and yet Ranke speaks of wishing 
 
6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 " to extinguish his Self," in order to display the naked 
 reality of things. Well might Georg Simmel ^ remark : 
 " The gratification of Ranke's wish to extinguish his Self 
 in order to see facts in themselves would destroy the 
 success which he imagined that he would gain by it. 
 Self once extinguished, there would be nothing left to 
 observe the Not-Self." I would add, that nothing 
 would be left to feel the sympathy with human beings 
 and their deeds which is the impulse to any description 
 of historical events. The personality of the historian 
 governs all historical narration, Ranke's included — 
 speaks in and through it in the effort to impress itself 
 upon the reader. Let us quote once more the settled 
 verdict of antiquity. The ancients felt, no doubt, that 
 the writing of history was an art, not a science, aiming 
 not at truth, but beauty, and assigned to it therefore an 
 aesthetic value only.^ 
 
 In its early Herodotean origins, history was a form of 
 story-telling, distinguished from Epos only, if at all, by 
 
 'Georg Simmel, "Problems of the Philosophy of History: a 
 Scientific Study,'' Leipzig, 1892, p. 18. 
 
 ' Aristotle, " Poetics," chap. ix. : " Poetry is more philosophical 
 and useful than history." Theodor Mommsen ("Roman History," 
 Berlin, 1885, p. s) admits that "fancy is the mother of history, 
 as of all poetry," and thereby recognizes the blood relationship 
 of the two — a remarkable admission on the part of an investigator 
 who was at such pains to present history to the world in the light 
 of a scientific activity. The admission has, however, become a 
 commonplace with historians, who constantly repeat it, as, to 
 take the most recent example, A. F. Pollard ("Factors in Modern 
 History," London, 1907, p. i ) : "I make no apology for placing 
 imagination in the forefront of all the qualifications indispensable 
 for the student and teacher of history. . . . Probably it includes 
 fact as well as fiction, and signifies the power of realizing things 
 unseen." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 7 
 
 its prose form ; "■ and to-day, despite all its claims to rank 
 among the sciences, despite its wordy, painful efforts to 
 pass as a child of truth, its real affinities are with the 
 novel. The only difference between <the historian and 
 the novelist is that the invention of the former is limited 
 in regard to the facts of which a recognized version is 
 current. He cannot arbitrarily contradict what is ac- 
 cepted by the majority as established : but the play of his 
 imagination is uncontrolled in all save the few directions 
 that are enclosed by indisputable records. There is no 
 exaggeration in saying that history as it is written is a 
 kind of roman a these novel,^ generally consciously, more 
 rarely unconsciously. To speak of a science of history 
 is to play with a term whose meaning cannot be arbitra- 
 rily altered. Science, in the most limited and only cor- 
 rect meaning of the word, is simply the knowledge of the 
 causal connection of phenomena, and of the universal 
 natural laws which they express. It is true that the 
 word is used in a wider sense to cover the descriptive 
 sciences, which confine themselves, in the lack of any 
 mental nexus between concrete facts, to observing them 
 
 ' E. Vacherot, "La Science et la Conscience," Paris, 1870, p. 94: 
 " In the hands of the ancient authors history is amusing and moral, 
 rather than historical." P. 96: "Livy's fabulous tales of the 
 origin of Rome only need the genius, language, and songs of an- 
 cient Greece to make them a real poem, like the 'Iliad.'" P. 100: 
 "Quintus Curtius has tried to make the history of Alexander a 
 heroic poem in soaring and flowery prose." P. 103: "Ancient his- 
 tory is always more or less epic and dramatic, an inexhaustible source 
 of pleasure and feeling," etc. Quintilian, " De Instit. Orat.," ii. 4, 
 says naively: " Graecis historis plerumque poetico similis esse 
 licentia." Not only " Graecis " ! 
 
 ' For more complete treatment and establishment of this idea, see 
 my " Contemporary Frenchmen," Berlin, 1901, pp. 19 et seq. 
 
8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 as exactly as possible, and arranging them according to 
 external resemblances for the sake of convenience. Yet 
 Herbert Spencer, for example, deprecated as untrust- 
 worthy the use of the word science for such a mere cata- 
 logue and arrangement of bare empiric facts. Now his- 
 tory is not a science in the strict sense. Success may for 
 the moment appear to crown the efforts of the philo- 
 sophic historian to trace a causal connection between 
 events, and lay down laws governing their progress; 
 but criticism makes short work of theories so hatched 
 and dogmatic assertions without any facts behind them. 
 Nor is it a descriptive science. The events it registers 
 are forever withdrawn from actual observation, exam- 
 ination, and experiment, and nothing can be re-estab- 
 lished from the traces and records that are left, or from 
 the testimony of human witnesses, except by the as- 
 sistance of the subjective factor in guessing at conclu- 
 sions, interpreting, and rounding off.^ 
 
 Inaccuracy of description need only be mentioned, in 
 the second place, as a less essential objection. History 
 is never successful in conceiving events and setting them 
 down exactly as they took place. It is superfluous to 
 recall the innumerable hackneyed anecdotes of the im- 
 possibility of acquiring from the various accounts of 
 eye-witnesses an irrefutable picture of any event whatso- 
 ever. Possibly in the comparatively near future the 
 developed methods of observing and recording facts, 
 the increased use of the phonograph and the snapshot, 
 
 'H. V. Humboldt, "The Task of the Historian," Proceedings of 
 the Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, for the years 1820-21, Berlin, 
 1822, p. 305 : " Thus no more truth is to be ascribed to the facts of 
 history than to the results of tradition and investigation." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 9 
 
 may enable us to obtain an objective record of that 
 aspect of phenomena visible to the senses which will be 
 definite and incontrovertible. 
 
 But even so the gain will not be very great. The 
 aspect of history which is represented by concrete events 
 is far the least important. Thatjwhichjs_great and 
 yitalj^the drama^^e luiman soul, is completely hidden 
 from jdirect observation. The historian's task, accord-' 
 ing to Maurenbrecher, is to study the inner life of the 
 actors in events, and give an account of their motives 
 and aims. Let him devote himself to this task, by all 
 means ; but what likelihood is there that he will solve it 
 correctly ? Knowledge of what is in the heart of a man 
 is, according to the Bible, reserved to God alone. The 
 maxim of the ancients, " know thyself," is, in fact, the 
 recognition that to do so is difficult, wellnigh impossible. 
 The secret of a rnan's jjersonality^ is often hidden from 
 his own inward view, and impenetrable to that of an out- 
 sider. No one who has the least suspicion of the com- 
 plexity of a highly differentiated intellectual life will 
 attempt to penetrate the inner processes of thought, the 
 underlying motives of action, and lay bare the ramifica- 
 tions that interpenetrate the bedrock of character, tem- 
 perament, and the sUDConscious life of man, the alluvial 
 deposits of his life's experience, and the mysteries of 
 the attractions and repulsions that sway him. The his- 
 torian has to deal with psychology in the concrete, with 
 supposition and conjecture, not science : he is a creative 
 poet whose characterization may be illuminating and 
 convincing like that of the novelist or the plajrwright, 
 without any assurance that it thereby resembles the 
 truth. Every historian, even of the most moderate 
 
lo THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 gifts, tends to conceive the great figures of the past and 
 the present after a fashion of his own, different from 
 that of his fellows. Wallenstein is far from being a 
 unique instance of a character " whose portrait wavers " 
 (Schiller) in history. Seldom, indeed, save in the case 
 of persons wholly or semi fabulous, who are not really 
 known at all, or known only through a single author, 
 is there any unanimity of judgment or delineation. Con- 
 fusion comes as soon as the sources of information are 
 more abundant, until inaccuracies, contradictions, and 
 subjective interpolations hide the true physiognomy of 
 the person who is described, even from the sharpest 
 critic* 
 
 Anyone who has sufficiently emerged from obscurity 
 
 ^1 to arouse even the most transitory interest on the part 
 of his contemporaries will throw up his hands in amaze- 
 ment over the judjgjn«its_ passed upon him, his person- 
 ality and his influence, and over the personal im- 
 pressions he has made on different minds ; and the more 
 important the individual, the wider the circle of ob- 
 servations that he excites, and the greater the number 
 
 I of busybodies who feel called upon to express an opinion 
 about him, the more striking is the distortion which his 
 image undergoes. The i ncapacit y ,o,f.most peoj^e to see 
 others as they are, or to understand them, is only 
 equalled by the impudent assurance with which they give 
 utterance to their senseless and superficial judgments 
 upon them, judgments often hatefully stupid and unjust. 
 
 ' K. Lamprecht, " Old and New Tendencies in the Science of His- 
 tory," Berlin, 1896, p. i8 : " The history of persons is always romantic 
 in character, because the inner motives are beyond our knowledge" 
 — a remarkable admission from a historian, and one to be re- 
 membered. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY ii 
 
 Let a historian even venture to record the events of 
 the present or very recent past, and he finds himself 
 assailed by passionate objections, not all inspired by 
 party feelings, by a storm of justification not confined 
 to those concerned in their concealment of truths painful 
 to their vanity or interest. The excited opposition called 
 forth by the German histories of Tritetschke and Sybel, 
 Justin McCarthy's "History of Our Own Times," 
 Kinglake's "History of the Crimean War," Thiers' 
 "History of the Revolution and the Empire," Louis 
 Blanc's " History of the July Monarchy," and Gabriel 
 Hanotaux' " History of the Third Republic," may be 
 recalled/ What is depressing is that this arid con- 
 troversy seldom contributes to real enlightenment on 
 the points in dispute : it issues finally only in the setting 
 up of one assertion and one opinion against another. 
 Certainly no such storm was roused by Grote, Momm- 
 sen, or Maspero. At the most, some unexpected in- 
 scriptions will roguishly emerge and scatter to the winds 
 pages or even whole sections of their narrative. But 
 
 ' Apart from polemical articles in newspapers and magazines, 
 see, among others: against Thiers' character of Napoleon, Barni, 
 " Napoleon i*' et son Historien, M. Thiers," Paris, 1869, also 
 Lanfrey and Taine: against Sybel's account of the effect of Sadowa 
 on the French Government, Emile Ollivier, "L'Empire Liberal," vol. 
 vjii., " L'Annee Fatale," Paris, 1906. 
 
 It may be noted, by way of example, that Livy's patriotism pre- 
 vented him from mentioning the conquest of Rome by Porsenna, 
 with which he was familiar; and that Grote, in his "History of 
 Greece," vol. ii., pp. zi6, 217, relates that the early English his- 
 torians, from Hardyng and Monmouth to Holinshed and Milton, 
 recorded the descent of the English Kings from Brutus and Julius 
 Cxsar, and that, when later students suppressed this account as 
 fabulous, they were accused on that ground of want of patriotism^ — 
 even of crime. 
 
12 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Alcibiades and Themistocles, Marius and Sulla, 
 R^meses and Psammetichus, hold their peace whatever 
 is said of them. They are wise. Could they express 
 an opinion, they would, like the living, utterly fail to 
 recognize themselves in the pictures drawn by their his- 
 torians. 
 
 Objective truth is as inaccessible to the writers of 
 history as is Kant's " Thing in Itself " to human knowl- 
 edge. For the events of the past he has to rely upon 
 official records, which even the most cautious and well- 
 informed criticism cannot wholly clear of the colouring 
 given them by the desire to conceal unpleasing facts, or 
 upon the circumstantial evidence and the testimony of 
 eye-witnesses whose unreliability is the only certain 
 thing about them. At the best, his representation of 
 character is an embodiment of psychological guesses that 
 may or may not be fortunate. The attempt to discern 
 the causal connection of events and the laws that reg- 
 ulate them is often merely arbitrary, and frequently 
 quite capricious. Written history can never compass 
 the actual event. It is not science, but literature: a 
 branch of fiction, good, bad, or indifferent ; a supposition 
 as to the way in which things might have happened ; an 
 attempt to show the way in which they ought to have 
 happened, or to prove that they did, as a matter of fact, 
 happen in this or that way; a subjective intuition on the 
 part of men who have to depend on vague, uncertain, or 
 even inadequate information; who are, consciously or 
 unconsciously, influenced by certain tendencies, and led 
 away by their own feelings, prejudices, sympathies, and 
 antipathies, even where they are honest, which is not 
 always the case. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 13 
 
 Carlyle was a historian, but he did not hesitate to 
 describe his own profession in the most contemptuous 
 terms : ^ " 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 . . . and over your Historical Library it is as 
 if all the Titans had written for themselves : ' Dry rub- 
 bish shot here ' ! " 
 
 It is as superficial, as unreasonable to identify history 
 as it is and history as it is written as to confound the 
 processes of Nature with the delusions of the human 
 senses. 
 
 History has its own existence, different, apart from, 
 and transcending written history, before which it was, 
 which it called into being, and which awkwardly tries to 
 follow it. History in the widest sense is the sum of the 
 episodes of the human struggle for existence. The 
 definition hardly needs explanation. History, it implies, 
 is the record of all, great and small, that man has done 
 and suffered, all that he has thought, imagined, and 
 achieved within the limits of that natural and artificial 
 environment into which he was born, in which he has 
 to live, and by which any satisfaction of his needs and 
 impulses is conditioned. Between the dreary existence 
 of the most obscure and miserable creature upon earth 
 and the triumphal progress of a world conqueror there 
 is no essential difference. In each the same psycho- 
 physical forces are at work; each is determined by the 
 same natural laws. The fate of the one is of interest to 
 no one in the wide world save himself; his departure is 
 
 'Carlyle, "Past and Present," London (Ward, Lock and Co.), no 
 date, p. 36. 
 
14 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 as unnoticed as his entrance : the other is a ruler of men, 
 whose thoughts and actions dominate the lives of thou- 
 sands — ^nay, millions — of his fellow-creatures. Yet the 
 difference between them is quantitative, not qualitative. 
 Mankind is instinctively aware of this essential equality 
 of all human individualities and their destinies, whether 
 they be such as enter into the purview of the historian, 
 or such as for him possess no significance, or, it may be, 
 are merely creatures of the imagination. Any char- 
 acter, whether real or imaginary, great or small, that is 
 so described that we feel the impress of his reality, can 
 enter into the circumstances of his life, share intimately 
 in his thoughts and feelings, joys and sorrows, fills as 
 important a place in our minds and memories as any 
 hero of world-wide renown. Alexander the Great is 
 perhaps no better known and no more admired than 
 Robinson Crusoe; many a mighty general or statesman 
 might envy the fame of the wandering scholar Thomas 
 Platter, or Knight Hans von Schweinichen. The immor- 
 tality of Samuel Johnson does not rest on his works, in 
 which the present generation finds small pleasure, but 
 on the insight into every detail of the man and his daily 
 existence given us by the faithful Boswell. Julie, 
 Ophelia, Jane Eyre, Virginia, Manon Lescaut are nearer 
 to the mind and heart of posterity than Cleopatra, 
 Agrippina, or Queen Anne. A creation like Goethe's 
 Wilhelm Meister, or Gottfried Keller's Poor Henry, 
 which the seeing eye of genius has lent the vivid touch 
 of individuality, and placed before us as a man, is as 
 unforgettable as any historical character whatsoever. 
 Across the memory of the human race past events flit 
 like shadows; no fixed boundaries separate the real from 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 15 
 
 the imaginary. Howsoever powerful a great man's 
 influence may have been on his contemporaries and im- 
 mediate successors, it seldom lasts a hundred, never a 
 thousand, years, and for posterity he is but one among 
 the myriad causes, near and remote, that have each 
 played their indistinguishable part in creation, without 
 possessing any immediate significance in themselves. 
 With the loss of their direct influence, there passes even 
 from the men who have really lived and have made 
 history that which distinguishes them alike from the 
 great mass of average mankind, who live unknown, and 
 leave no mark behind them, and from the creations of 
 the poetic imagination, than whom they become not 
 more interesting but less, if their human personality 
 have not been made real to us by the artistic methods 
 with which history proper has nothing to do.^ 
 
 I have defined history as yi^sum^f_the_episodes_that 
 make up man's strug gle jfQr.existence. In it, therefore, 
 is included not only the combatant man, but the foes 
 with which he has unceasingly to struggle — that is, not 
 only his human competitors for the conditions of ex- 
 istence, but Nature herself. The play of the world 
 forces, whether regular, as they normally are, or con- 
 vulsive, as upon occasion, are as much a part of history 
 as the course of man's efforts to assert and maintain 
 himself against all other powers. 
 
 There is a rece_nt historical scho ol that concerns itself 
 solely_with spiritual an d moral forces in h istory, and 
 
 ' P. Lacombe, " De I'Histoire consideree comme Science," Paris, 
 1894, Introduction, p. cxii: "The artistic historian has, as his first 
 aim, to stir the feelings, even if his method be that of actuality. . . . 
 My objection to him is that he brings in narratives and considerations 
 that have, or pretend to have, a scientific character." 
 
i6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 conceives it as the conflict, triumph, defeat, and mutual 
 adjustment of human wills, leaving altogether on one 
 side, as unimportant and worthy only of a casual notice, 
 any events that have not been completed in human 
 thought or feeling before being translated into act. It 
 tends to despise the old chroniclers,^ who faithfully de- , 
 vote the same space to recording dearths, earthquakes, 
 and floods, hail-storms, unusual cold in winter or heat 
 in summer, and the appearances of comets, that they 
 gave to wars, coronations, and the deaths of princes, 
 thus assigning the same importance to events resulting 
 from the operation of human will and those originating 
 in the blind chance over which man has no control. 
 This contempt is misplaced. The modesty of the 
 honest old chroniclers is more consonant with the true 
 function of the historian than the lofty confidence of 
 those modern adepts who arrogate to themselves the 
 decision as to what is and what is not important on the 
 wide stream of the processes of the universe, of nature, 
 and of human life. 
 
 The purely natural events that are entirely outside the 
 action of the human will have had a greater influence on 
 the destiny, not only of individuals, groups, or nations, 
 but of human existence as a whole, than the whole range 
 of what is assumed by historians to be essential and im- 
 portant — ^than the foundation of states, the establish- 
 ment of religions, the rise and development of social 
 institutions, the conceptions of law and property, con- 
 
 ' All the Renaissance historians modestly call their histories 
 " Chronica "—e.g., to name only those of the sixteenth century, Cario, 
 Cluverius, Gamerus, Genebrard, Kupferschmied, Macker, and Ne- 
 ander. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 17 
 
 stitutional and metaphysical ideas. An ice age of some v 
 thousand years' duration, following upon a considerable K 
 period of temperate warmth, will more completely trans- X 
 form all human conditions than any possible action of X 
 a man or a people. Even a local disturbance may 
 cause changes within a limited area of time and space 
 at least as great as any efforts of human will and energy. 
 If the disappearance of Atlantis be no fiction, but a fact, 
 is it not a fact far more significant for humanity than 
 any State formation to which history devotes volumes 
 — nay, libraries? Has not the separation of England 
 from the mainland, established by geology, had far 
 greater political consequences than the Norman Inva- 
 sion under William the Conqueror — consequences that 
 at the close of thousands of years are far from being 
 exhausted? The Great Flood recorded in the history 
 of nearly every people, the earthquakes that destroyed 
 Lisbon in 1755, San Francisco in 1903, the fires that 
 laid London in ashes in 1666, Chicago in 1874, have 
 been far more destructive of human life than most of 
 the sieges, battles, and campaigns described at such 
 length in history. 
 
 There is no historical justification for any such an- 
 tithesis of intellectual and natural forces, of human will 
 and chance. Any line of distinction must be arbitrary, 
 any separation artificial. The boundary between his- 
 tory and the philosophy of history is crossed when any 
 attempt is made to select among the forces which have 
 determined, and do still determine, human destiny, one 
 which is regarded as essential, and to neglect the rest. 
 History aims at the description of events ; the philosophy 
 of history claims to understand their causal connection 
 
i8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 and their meaning. No sound conclusions can be 
 reached by a dualistic philosophy of history which re- 
 fuses to recognize the same natural forces^ and laws a't 
 work everywhere, causing islands and whole continents 
 to disappear beneath or rise above the ocean, and calling 
 forth individual men to be conquerors and lawgivers, 
 to mould and model nations, or which turns away its 
 gaze from the irrational accidents of lifeless matter and 
 closes its eyes to all but spiritual forces.^ Who can say 
 what would have happened if the Armada had con- 
 quered England? Europe, at any rate, would not have 
 been what it is to-day; and the cause of the difference 
 between what it is to-day and what it might have been 
 is surely the st^rm that destroyed the Armada — a mere 
 f^ accident, a blind natural force that could by no stretch 
 A of language be described as spiritual or moral. How 
 would history have developed supposing that Grouchy 
 had marched on Waterloo, and so decided the battle, 
 which after midday stood even, in Napoleon's favour? 
 Was it blind chance or Grouchy's will that decided it 
 otherwise ? 
 
 It is impossible, when looking at the course of his- 
 tory, to distinguish what is due to the influence of 
 natural events and what to that of human will, unless we 
 wilfully and without any rational justification leave 
 aside or neglect one whole aspect of things. The naive 
 chronicler may be open to the charge of artlessly string- 
 
 ^ Georg Simmel, " Problems of the Philosophy of History," Leip- 
 zig, 1892, p. I : " If history is to be more than a puppet-show, it 
 must record psychic processes." Yes, but does Simmel prove that we 
 are not the puppets of _the_forces__at work^ in nature ? He assumes 
 
 k' that which has to be proved — namely, that man makes his history, 
 
 y. instead of its being made by nature through him. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 19 
 
 ing together, after the manner of a gossiping village 
 barber, odd fragments of information that mean nothing 
 to the reader of another age or place. At the same time 
 it must not be forgotten that the pretentious historian, 
 who presents the results of his critical research as a con- 
 tribution to science, and considers his style like an artist, 
 does, by the very fact of selection, introduce into his mat- 
 ter a philosophical tendency which belongs to him, and 
 not to it. The objection to Zola's theory of naturalism 
 in fiction is valid against the writer who selects the 
 human will as the only motive-power of importance in 
 Jh|story. Zola claimed to give a complete representation 
 of actual life as it is. It was pointed out that, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, he selected by subjective inclination, with 
 reference to an end subjectively conceived, a few aspects 
 of actuality, which he then linked together as it suited 
 him, and interpreted in accordance with his own idea. 
 Thus, history at the moment when it thinks itself most 
 objective is merely naturalistic fiction, merely " history 
 through the medium of a temperament,"^ with the hand- 
 icap that the action of temperament in altering and 
 blurring lines is far more fatal on the complicated and 
 
 ' This passage had long been written when the same idea was 
 expressed, almost in the same words, by Professor Gabriel Monod, 
 in an address which he gave on the occasion of his forty years' 
 jubilee as teacher of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in 
 Paris, May 26, 1907. " Zola," he said, " has defined Art as Nature 
 throug h_ the_mediu m of a tem perament. . . . We see historical actu- 
 ality through a temperament also. We study it as history. But if we 
 wish to re-animate it, a personal creative effort is necessary in the 
 representation, and the reinforcement of science by art. Historical 
 actuality is never known to us in all the complexity of its exact and 
 unconditional truth. ... It is a dream-face." The correspondence 
 is so remarkable as to be worth noting. 
 
20 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 crowded canvas of history than in the simple portraiture 
 of the novelist. 
 
 History is not a descriptive science, because it has no 
 means by which phenomena can be immediately per- 
 ceived or objectively determined. Far less, when it is 
 absolutely impossible for it to foretell a single event with 
 even approximate certainty, can it be called an exact 
 science, of which the distinguishing mark is precisely 
 this power to determine beforehand what under certain 
 conditions must happen. It Is driven on to seek to know 
 the laws of which phenomena are the manifestation — ■ 
 immutable laws, the same to-day, to-morrow, yesterday.^ 
 Froude" held that history cannot foretell events that 
 depend upon the will of man, because that will is free. 
 But tl^s,.freedom^of jthewill is a dogma incapable of 
 proof. The law of causality which governs our thought 
 admits of no metaphysical vagueness. It compels us to 
 j assume that the will, a force that initiates movement, is, 
 j like every other force, subject to that law. Its apparent 
 
 ' Hume (sect. 2, part ii.) demands an eschatology of all sciences. 
 St. Simon also remarks that it is the task of all sciences " to see 
 in order to foresee" {'voir, pour prevoir), and Condorcet felt this so 
 strongly that, in the last book of his " Esquisse d'un Tableau His- 
 torique du Progres de I'Esprit Humain," he boldly attempts to fore- 
 cast future history, declaring: "If man can almost confidently fore- 
 tell natural phenomena, as soon as he knows their laws . . . why 
 should it appear chimerical to represent the probable destiny of 
 the human race side by side with historical results?" P. S. L. 
 Buchez (" Introduction a la Science de I'Histoire," second edition, 
 Paris, i8i2, book i., chap, ii.) maintains with Condorcet that history 
 can foresee and foretell, and is thus a science. What a pity that 
 he was so modest as to refrain from foreseeing and foretelling a 
 single event! 
 
 " James Anthony Froude, " Short Studies on Great Subjects," Lon- 
 don, 1867, vol. i., p. n. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 21 
 
 freedom is an illusion , due to the fact that the mind does 
 not perceive the relation between the stimulus to an act 
 of will and the resultant operation of the will. Each act_ 
 of ^will is the onejj ossible respon se of a given organism 
 to a given stim ulus under g iven conditions. A difference 
 in one element in the system, a different constitution of 
 the organism, a different kind of strength of stimulus, or 
 its application under different circumstances, will cause 
 the response of the will to be different, but nothing else 
 can alter it. Conversely, the elements are not the result 
 of chance or arbitrary attraction; they are links in the 
 iron chain of cause and effect that extends into infinity, 
 above and below the limits of our knowledge. Deny 
 this, and you deny causality, and declare that the planets 
 are not strictly determined in their course by mechanical 
 necessity, but can move at will in or out of their ap- 
 pointed track. The tho ughts and actio ns o^ men are 
 regulated by the same com pulsion that keeps, the stars in 
 their course, and were history_a_scienceJike astronomy, 
 even though the behaviour of the elements might re- 
 main hidden, it would at least be able to foretell the 
 actions of men and that part of history which depends 
 upon the operation of human will, just as astronomy is 
 able to foretell the movements of the heavenly bodies. 
 
 An historian who confines himself to the sober speech 
 of fact, and restrains his " seething brain " and his " eye 
 in a fine frenzy rolling," can only venture upon prophe- 
 cies so general and so much of the nature of platitudes 
 that they rouse no interest at all. It is safe to foretell 
 that no human institution can last for ever, that every 
 State, every society, every law, every custom, must in 
 time alter or disappear. We all know or guess so much. 
 
22 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 History cannot give us even the smallest reliable indica- 
 tion as to the things about which we should really like to 
 know — ^namely, when and how the existing order is to 
 terminate, and what is to take its place. Any would-be 
 astrologer or cheiromant who had nothing more to tell 
 those who came to him to have the veil of the future 
 withdrawn than that they must one day die, would soon 
 be labelled ass or knave by the most credulous of his 
 clients. In one word, nothing can be foretojd of the 
 course of human life, whether of individuals, groups, or 
 communities, beyond the universal law of elementary 
 biological necessity, to which no exception is known^ — ^the 
 law which is itself only a particular instance of the com- 
 plex interrelation and interaction of biological and cos- 
 mic laws whose concrete operations we are completely 
 unable to forecast, ignorant as we are of the extent and 
 action of the forces at work in human life. The his- 
 torian has been paradoxically described as the prophet of 
 the past. It is one of those phrases that suggest meaning 
 without really conveying any. If it does mean anything, 
 it can only be this: the historian is no man of science, 
 but a seer who guesses or divines, not the future, but the 
 past, and if you don't believe him, down with your shil- 
 ling. 
 
 History may have no scientific value, though it is said 
 to be a means of education: historia magistra vita. 
 Even this claim cannot be substantiated. Written his- 
 tory does not touch the realities of history; it hardly 
 even skims over its extreme surface. It can only search, 
 guess, surmise. But without accurate knowledge there 
 can be no useful instruction. Moreover, the information 
 conveyed, even if accurate, could be of no use to those 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 23 
 
 who have new actions before them. Every moment in 
 history is the result of a relation between the forces in 
 operation and the general conditions under which they 
 operate, and the combination can never be either re- 
 peated or modified. Therefore, it is of no assistance to a 
 man living now to know how certain people acted under 
 given circumstances in the past. The_circumstances^re 
 notlhe^ajme ; and even if he wished to imitate the action, 
 he could not. Were he to make some clumsy attempt, 
 the result would not be identical. As a matter of fact, 
 no single person or group of persons has ever allowed 
 their action to be determined by historical precedent. In 
 forming a resolution, the detepnining fac to r is the neces- 
 sity of the present, not the experience of the past. The 
 only way in which more or less accurate historical knowl- 
 edge does operate is seen in the case where one genera- 
 tion transmits to another a prejudice, an attraction or 
 repulsion, a confidence or mistrust, an appreciation or 
 depreciation, that may have originally been sound, and 
 has not been discovered by the descendant to be so no 
 longer. In this case knowledge in the ancestor creates \ 
 ignorance in the descendant, and gives rise to conclusions ' 
 that are false, because based on premises no longer ac- ; 
 curate. The great conquerors, rulers, and law givers | 
 have never possessed what is called the historical sense : ' 
 that they had it not was ^ conditionjof th^ir success./ 
 Their eyes, troubled by no visions of the past, were fixed 
 on the visible present. With no thought for what had 
 stirred the men of bygone days, they saw the needs and 
 opportunities of the present. History was never their 
 teacher. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the mass of mankind have no real 
 
24 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 — no organic, if I may use the word — interest in his- 
 torical narrative or in history itself. They have a deep- 
 seated impulse to observe, to study, and as far as possible 
 to understand nature, to use all their available knowl- 
 edge to interpret her. Long before they have consciously 
 reflected, they are_dimly aware that knowledge is their 
 bestjPTeapoiij both of attack and defence, in the life-and- 
 death struggle they have to wage with her; that the 
 wages of ignorance here are death, and the rewards of 
 every advance in knowledge are greater security, a longer 
 tenure, and better conditions of existence. They cherish 
 such cognizance as they have won, and transmit it as 
 their most precious possession to their descendants. The 
 mystic tales of forgotten secrets possessed by the ancient 
 Egyptians, Chaldees, Indians, and Aztecs, represent, no 
 doubt, some branch of nature knowledge acquired at one 
 time and again lost. The play of nature's mighty forces, 
 the phenomena revealed once or periodically in a per- 
 plexing whirl of movement, rouse in man an excitement 
 that lasts from childhood to old age, a noble curiosity 
 that compels all save the weak in intellect, the man who 
 is a morbid exception, to gaze and to try to understand. 
 No such instinctive desire for knowledge exists in the 
 case of his own past. The vast majority even of edu- 
 cated people are completely indifferent to it. They never 
 think of it. They are at no pains to remember it. If 
 they consulted their personal inclinations, they would 
 never either burden their own memories with it, or as- 
 sign any importance to burdening the memories of their 
 descendants. 
 
 Every now and then the papers contain the results of 
 the examination of soldiers in history; and they invari- 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 25 
 
 ably prove that people are either completely ignorant, 
 even of quite recent events, or that they have a ridicu- 
 lously false conception of them. Italians of this gen- 
 eration know neither Cavour nor Garibaldi/ Germans 
 have never heard the name of Moltke or Roon, think 
 that Bismarck was a great ruler or general, and are ab- 
 solutely ignorant of the war of 1870. Frenchmen know 
 nothing of Gambetta or Thiers, of Sedan, or the revolu- 
 tion that followed it, and believe the most mythical and 
 ridiculous stories about Napoleon.^ And these are 
 mostly young persons who have learned at least to read 
 and write in their passage through the elementary 
 school, and could very easily instruct themselves in any 
 subject that they found attractive or interesting. Ex- 
 perience proves that the very greatest historical event 
 retains a real and vivid place in human memory only so 
 long as there are men living who took part in it, who 
 were personally affected by it, who watched it with keen 
 interest and excitement themselves, or who have heard 
 tell of it from someone who himself took part in or wit- 
 nessed it — ^men, in a word, to whom the event was di- 
 rectly or indirectly part of their own experience. This 
 applies to all great events, and limits their remembrance 
 to three generations at the most — contemporaries, their 
 children, who catch from the lips of their parents some- 
 thing of the force and freshness that belongs to the sight 
 of one's own eyes, and perhaps the third generation, 
 
 ' Faola Lombroso, " Mario Carrara, Nella Penombra della Civilt^ 
 (Da un' inchiesta sul pensiero del popolo)," Torino, 1906, pp. 47 
 et seq. 
 
 ' Roland, " L'Bducation Patriotique du Soldat," Paris, 1908, 
 pasiim. 
 
26 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 who may, if they are lucky, hear the story at the family 
 board of " I have heard my father tell . . ." But the 
 tale loses so much of its colour in this second relation 
 that the impression it makes on the hearer is slight — ^too 
 slight to impel him to transmit it to his children in his 
 turn. The limitation of remembrance to three genera- 
 tions is, in fact, a law based upon the actual processes 
 of memory. Under normal healthy conditions only a 
 revival of the associations or emotions that originally ac- 
 companied an impression will call it up again to the 
 surface of consciousness. As a rule however, strong 
 emotion is only aroused and a chain of associations set 
 going by the jmmediate individual _sgnse-stimulus and 
 prompt reaction of consciousness and will that is present 
 in a personal experience; no such effect is produced by 
 the mere hearing and reading of words, which as often 
 as not fail to suggest to the average dull and lethargic 
 intelligence the ideas into which they require to be trans- 
 lated. The account of a past event with no immediate 
 practical bearing awakens no emotion, starts no manifold 
 and diversified chain of associations: a more or less 
 isolated fact in consciousness, it is soon forgotten, and 
 has little prospect of ever being revived again In the form 
 of a recollection. 
 
 The law of three generations applies to events con- 
 nected with a place, a tribe, or a species, and to the his- 
 tory of the family also, which should be of the first and 
 greatest interest to men of any degree of intellectual 
 development. Civilized man — savages can for the 
 moment be left out of account — normally knows nothing 
 of his ancestors farther back than his grandparents. 
 Beyond three generations all is obscurity, even under 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 27 
 
 the most favourable circumstances, when a family has 
 remained fixed in one spot, has lived and moved and had 
 its being in the same surroundings, and might find in the 
 unchanging names of everything around it, whether the 
 work of man or nature, in the buildings and the country- 
 side, so many mnemonic aids to memory. If the family 
 change its dwelling, even a recent past will vanish more 
 quickly and completely with the disappearance of the 
 landmarks and images that to some extent helped to 
 keep it alive. At the best, an uncertain, waving legend, 
 with no distinct features, is all that then remains of the 
 ancestral story. On the journey of life, man travels 
 within a little circle of light that is extinguished with 
 him, and leaves no trace behind it save a dazzling 
 of the eyes of some fellow-traveller. Outside this circle 
 all is eternal darkness, broken only here and there by 
 scattered sparks — a darkness that few care to try to 
 illuminate. 
 
 To this stern law of oblivion an exception seems to be 
 afforded by certain great festival days in commemoration 
 of important historical events yearly celebrated after 
 thousands of years by the whole population of a locality 
 or country. Rome still keeps as a festal day April 2 1, on 
 which day it is naively assumed that the city was founded 
 2,660 years ago (753 B.C.). For four and a half cen- 
 turies Basle has celebrated St. James's Day (August 
 26) ; every 9th of May Orleans recalls its deliverance 
 from the English besiegers by Joan of Arc ( 1429) ; and 
 England remembers on November 5 the failure of Guy 
 Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, etc. But such remembrance 
 is an illusion. The populace celebrate a festival without 
 thinking much of its origin. Out of thousands of Eng- 
 
28 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 lish boys who dance round Guy Fawkes' bonfire, hardly a 
 hundred know anything about him. They sing away — 
 
 " Remember, remember 
 The fifth of November," 
 
 but would be hard put to it to explain why the day 
 should be remembered. In the course of the last century 
 the custom has grown of establishing State celebrations 
 on historical days, in which the population, willy-nilly, 
 must take part, since the law prescribes it, and it is 
 done by all public offices and institutions. In Germany 
 there is Sedan Day, in France July 14, in Italy Constitu- 
 tion Day, etc. But, recent as is the establishment of 
 most of these celebrations, their origins are already 
 becoming dim. In the schools, teachers impress the 
 significance of Sedan Day upon the minds of their pupils 
 by the writing of essays; and not without reason, for 
 there are plenty of grown-up people to whom the name 
 of Sedan conveys very little distinct meaning. Few of 
 the countless multitudes who conscientiously celebrate 
 the French national festal day, drink, dance, and enjoy 
 the fireworks and illuminations, know anything about the 
 storming of the Bastille; and there are numbers of 
 ItaHans to whom no definite idea is suggested by " lo 
 Statuto." The masses enjoy the jollification: they like 
 to have it organized and patronized by the classes. The 
 occasion matters little: to them the carnival, the satur- 
 nalia, is the thing. What appears to the cultured 
 minority as a historical reminder is to the majority, in 
 spite of their board-school education, no different from 
 any other spiritual or temporal holiday. It is in records, 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 29 
 
 and not in the consciousness of man, that the historical 
 part is preserved. Only in this sense is there a grain of 
 truth in that arrogant assertion that " History is that 
 portion of the world's story which is established by tradi- 
 tion, and recorded in written history." History goes on, 
 whether recorded or no ; whether its recollection by man 
 is artificially preserved or allowed to fall into natural 
 oblivion. Such knowledge as we possess is due solely to 
 those witnesses of events who, instead of relying solely 
 upon oral transmission, have preserved their experiences 
 by writing and other arts. Without such aid the most 
 civilized nations, who have attained the highest intel- 
 lectual and scientific development, would remember as 
 little of their own history as the rude barbarians, from 
 whom even the immediate past is shrouded in impene- 
 trable darkness. 
 
 The almost organic indifference of mankind to the 
 past, to whatever lies outside the range of their imme- 
 diate sense perception and apprehension, is an observed 
 fact that it is vain to attempt to argue away. It seems, 
 however, to be contradicted by the equally incontrover- 
 tible fact of the existence of history in a highly developed 
 form, regarded as a necessary element in a cultured edu- 
 cation, and claiming the attention of governments, so- 
 cieties, and countless individuals in the investigation and 
 preservation of the recorded past. The contradiction is 
 more apparent than real. A knowledge of history, un- 
 like that of Nature and her laws, is not a biological ne- 
 cessity : it is a psychological, and, above all, a sociologi- 
 cal need. 
 
 The individual, psychological basis upon which the 
 origin and continued development of history rests is two- 
 
30 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 fold, depending on two fundamental human attributes — 
 curiosity and self-love. 
 
 The orig in of .curiosity is the demand of the nerve- 
 centres for impressions that must of necessity proceed 
 from the external world. This demand, at first instinct- 
 ive and accompanied in its satisfaction by a certain 
 pleasure, acquires pari passu with the development of the 
 organism the element of purpose : the impressions to be 
 received from the external world must be such as antici- 
 pate danger, and assist in the provision of nourishment 
 and other gratifications. In the struggle for existence 
 active curiosity is an advantage to the individual: it is 
 the way of enlightenment. As differentiation advances, 
 curiosity, which was directed to the mediately or imme- 
 diately practical needs of the individual, forgets its 
 origin in the functional requirements of the nerve- 
 centres, and its purpose as alleviating the struggle for 
 existence, and becomes that desire to know which, ap- 
 parently severed from all selfish aims, strives solely for 
 the attainment of new knowledge and the comprehension 
 of the world of phenomena presented to its view.^ And 
 the individual whose curiosity has thus risen to the desire 
 
 * Hermann Lotze ("Microcosm: Idea of a Natural History and 
 History of Mankind: an Anthropological Essay,'' Leipzig, 1864, vol. 
 iii., p. 3) is well aware of the meaning of curiosity, and continues 
 that it is quite wrong to speak contemptuously of the " restlessness 
 of vulgar curiosity," which, " without any sense of the different im- 
 portance of different questions, tries to invent a history of the 
 origin of every fact of experience, great or small." But he relapses 
 into his usual mysticism when he goes on : " Yet it is from this vulgar 
 curiosity that there was developed the profound longing to see this 
 riddle of the universe, which is the history of the earth, emerge 
 wholly from the higher world, and return thither when it has com- 
 pleted the task for which it was sent forth." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 31 
 
 to know is made uncomfortable and uneasy by every gap 
 in his knowledge of the phenomena before him and of 
 their causal connection. Just as a wild beast is terrified 
 by a dark cavern difficult of access in his hunting- 
 ground, and regards it as a mysterious danger until he 
 has gathered the courage to penetrate to its depths, so 
 man cannot rest until he fills up his gaps with solid 
 masonry or hides them behind some painted screen. To 
 the individual who has once risen to the desire to know, 
 the darkness of the past is as troubling as that of the 
 future, and the question of remote causes as torturing as 
 that of those near at hand. In this desire to know and to y. 
 understand lies the origin of all sciences, and of all super-A' 
 stitions and other systems of self-deception and false y. 
 guesses. Philosophic speculation, seeking to find the final 
 cause, resolved itself for most men into the theological 
 revelation which reveals nothing to the understanding. 
 The theory of knowledge investigates the contents of our 
 consciousness reduced to their simplest terms, and en- 
 deavors to discover their origin. Prophecy, magic, and 
 the other black arts that strive to penetrate the darkness 
 of the future, seemed for long to the keenest and most 
 mature intellects of the race to represent the brightest 
 branch of human knowledge.^ It is only necessary to 
 
 ' R. Campbell Thompson, " Late Babylonian Letters," London, 
 1907. Letter of the King of Assyria to Saduna, in Borsippe. He 
 advises him especially to take possession of the clay tablets in 
 the temple at Ezidda, with war prophecies ihscribed on them: "If 
 there be any charm I have not taught thee, and thou shouldst hear 
 of it, search it out, and take and send to me." The importance at- 
 tributed to the Sibylline books in Rome may be recalled. Compare 
 also ^schylus, "Prometheus Vinctus," vers. 500 et seq., where 
 Prometheus, citing the benefits he has conferred on man, mentions 
 
32 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 recall the importance attached by Romans and Etruscans 
 to the omens from the flight of birds and the 'nspection 
 of their entrails in all State and religious observances; 
 and in the East to the interpretation of dreams down to 
 much more recent times. But the very eagerness of their 
 desire to obtain foreknowledge of the future led men to 
 subject the results of the would-be art of prophecy to 
 such a severe examination as soon showed them to be 
 mere twaddle, without so much as a kernel of truth. 
 Cicero tells us that, late in antiquity, the augur, or harus- 
 pex, had come to be regarded as a comic figure. 
 Thoughtful men sadly admitted that means for the re- 
 liable investigation of the future did not exist, and that 
 this search, like that for the final cause, must be regret- 
 fully abandoned. Thus, only the intellectually backward 
 and absolutely uneducated sections of the populace con- 
 tinued to believe in the primitive forms of revelation by 
 lines on the hand, the interpretation of dreams, laying 
 out of cards, astrology, the shapes in lead or coffee- 
 grounds. Yet the irresistible desire to know the unknow- 
 able lingers among the educated too. It is seen in the 
 tentative eschatology which philosophy has even yet not 
 wholly renounced and in the delight with which a specu- 
 lative forecast like Wells' " Anticipations " is accepted 
 by hundreds of thousands of people, who do not seem 
 aware that the reason why such a speculation affords 
 them so much pleasure is simply that it corresponds ex- 
 
 aa very important that he taught him to interpret dreams, under- 
 stand signs, and foretell the future by magic arts: 
 
 ** Tpbirovs Tf iroK'Koifs fiavtTK^s itrroix^ffa 
 K&KpLva rp&roi el dvapdrav & xP'h 
 inrap, "^eviaSai, KKijSbvai re SvcKplrovt 
 fyvdpur' airois ipoStovs re <TviJ,p6\ovs," etc. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 33 
 
 actly with the knowledge, the assumption, the intentions 
 and wishes of the present day, and in so far is a repre- 
 sentation, not of the future, but of the present. 
 
 The light which was turned upon the future also threw 
 its weak and flickering beams across the darkness of the 
 past. The practical value attaching to a knowledge of 
 the future undoubtedly led men to busy themselves with 
 it before they turned to the past. Magicians and sooth- 
 sayers existed everywhere long before chroniclers and 
 historians, and even to this day many races still living in 
 a state of primitive barbarism, who care little or nothing 
 about their traditions, are deeply interested in prophecy. 
 But the desire to know threw, in the course of time, a 
 more or less distinct light on one section after another of 
 the whole circle of darkness around us, and so came in 
 turn to try to penetrate the unknown sections of the 
 past as it had tried to penetrate the future. It brooded 
 over the questions that Milton put in Adam's mouth: 
 " How came I thus, how here? " Imagination laid hold 
 of the witnesses to the past, existing in the shape of un- 
 certain recollections, confused and contradictory tradi- 
 tions; monuments, such as buildings, carvings, tombs, 
 furniture, or, in later times, inscriptions, coins, and rec- 
 ords; and uncritically filled up all the gaps by the ar- 
 bitrary exercise of its creative faculty. From such 
 materials there have gradually developed connected 
 narratives, in which the little that is certain, much that 
 is probable, and far more that is only possible or frankly 
 invented,^ are so blended and welded together that not 
 
 'Wilhelm v. Humboldt ("The Task of the Historian," Proceed- 
 ings of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, for the years igzo-zi, 
 Berlin, 1822, Historico-Fhilological Section, p. 305) admits this 
 
34 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 only the hearer, but even the relator, ceases to be aware 
 of the different parts of which his fable is composed, or 
 to see where they join. The critical sense is very slightly 
 developed in the majority of mankind. They have not 
 the capacity, and hardly the wish, to distinguish between 
 truth and delusion. Any confident assertion they accept 
 without asking for proofs or criticizing their soundness. 
 No assertion is ever doubted, mistrusted, or denied, un- 
 less it either happens to be in glaring contradiction to 
 something already well known or to injure someone's 
 feelings and interests, especially in the latter case ; other- 
 wise, so long as it contains in itself no inherent impossi- 
 bilities, it is accepted at once, and occupies the position 
 in consciousness of an accepted fact. As theology taught 
 men the final causes in the universe, and soothsayers 
 explained the secrets of the future from signs, history 
 solved the riddles of the past. Fundamentally it be- 
 longs to the same class as these two; its means are as 
 incapable as theirs to satisfy man's desire for knowledge. 
 Even now the great majority of mankind unhesitatingly 
 accept the teachings of theology as to the origin of the 
 universe, because, since they have no particular personal 
 interest in not being deceived as to final causes, beyond 
 a general curiosity, any explanation is as good as another. 
 Most men of any power of thought at all ceased to 
 believe in soothsayers when their forecasts did not come 
 true. But the fact that history is to this day for the 
 most part just as much in the air, just such a tissue of 
 
 almost naively: "The past is only partly visible in the world of 
 the senses; part must be felt, resolved, guessed at. . . . It may seem 
 questionable to allovr the spheres of the historian and the poet to 
 touch at any point. But it cannot be denied that their activities are 
 related." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 35 
 
 guess-work, intuition, masked wishes and desires as 
 theology and prophecy is concealed from all save a very 
 small minority, because it is only rarely that facts appear 
 which definitely prove the falsity of any historical nar- 
 rative, and because it is practically immaterial to the 
 living whether the past, unchangeable to all eternity, is 
 represented in one way or another. 
 
 If information about final causes were as interesting 
 to man as that about immediate ones, theology would 
 long ago have vanished like the natural history of Pliny, 
 the biology of Aristotle, and the cosmology of Ptole- 
 mseus. If information about the past were as important 
 to him as information about the future, they would long 
 ago have seen that history has nothing more reliable to 
 tell about the one than astrology or cheiromancy about 
 the other, and that the historian who described himself 
 as a backward-looking prophet '■ correctly estimated his 
 own credibility as about equal to that of the soothsayer 
 who pretends to reveal the future. 
 
 Human curiosity demands an explanation of the past, 
 and written history pretends to be able to give it. Man- 
 kind is satisfied with the connected narrative it presents, 
 because they have no reason for questioning its truth. 
 It pleases them first because it satisfies a want, then 
 because it is uncommonly entertaining and exciting. The 
 love of stories is inborn in man. He delights to hear of 
 a picturesque and melodramatic past, of extraordinary 
 events to which common experience affords no parallel, 
 and the deeds and destiny of unusual men. Historical 
 narrative is full of tragedies, dramas, comedies of char- 
 
 ' The phrase was coined by Sainte-Beuve, who applied it to 
 Bossuet. 
 
36 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 acter and intrigue, novels of adventure. But the excite- 
 ment that it arouses is purely aesthetic, and not essentially 
 different from that with which one hears or reads the 
 " Thousand and one Nights." It only differs from 
 admitted fairy-tales by its piquant attempt to prove that 
 everything did actually happen as it is set down. 
 
 Curiosity, developing into the desire fot information 
 and knowledge, is, as I have said, one origin of the writ- 
 ing of history; the other_ is self-love. Everyone thinks 
 his doings important, and his experiences worthy of 
 being preserved. Homer's Nestor, chanting the praises 
 of the matchless men and deeds of his youth, with which 
 the young generation has nothing to compare, is an 
 eternal human type, civilized and uncivilized, primitive 
 or modern. Man loves to imagine himself performing 
 prodigies of strength and courage: he would fain be 
 represented permanently in the role of conquering hero. 
 This attitude flatters his self-esteem. Moreover, since 
 a warlike exterior has always enriched its possessor with 
 distinctions and privileges, it has a practical utility as 
 well. 
 
 The savage notches or smears upon his arms the 
 number of enemies he has slain. The Indian paints the 
 combat in which he has been victorious on the outside of 
 his wigwam, and carries the scalps of the vanquished at 
 his belt, while the custom of the tribe provides strictly 
 that the number of eagle-feathers he wears when in 
 battle array is no more than that of the warriors he has 
 slain. These notches, smears, eagle-feathers, scalps and 
 paintings are the earliest historical records, useless, in- 
 deed, for the community, but full of flattering meaning 
 for him whose deeds they testify and keep alive in the 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 37 
 
 memories of contemporaries and those who come after, 
 and of value, as a rule, for his family and posterity, 
 game is-a means to ^wer, in the hands of lordlings and 
 tribal chieftains. They maintain their authority more 
 easily, and without the necessity of resorting to com- 
 pulsion, when their dependents and those whom they 
 have subdued regard them with admiration and fear. 
 Hence the bards retained to glorify their deeds by the 
 Greeks of the mythical, heroic age, by the German and 
 Scandinavian warrior kings and the Norman conquerors. 
 Official history — history written with a purpose — is 
 legitimately descended from the songs invented by the 
 hired poets, the bards and skalds, for the glorification of 
 the heroic deeds of their master and his forefathers; 
 while the free-and-easy school of historical literature, 
 that does not trouble about tendencies, and is sufficient to 
 itself, in so far as it exists at all, derives from Herodotus 
 and the pleasant writers of his school, who simply re- 
 corded remarkable and unusual events. 
 
 The march of intellectual development deepens our 
 curiosity into the desire to know and transforms in- 
 stinctive self-love into a conscious idea of the underlying 
 unity of all individual interests, and an organized at- 
 tempt to maintain and uphold them against other 
 conflicting interests. In the simple, primitive conditions 
 of savage or half-savage tribes, it was enough for the 
 warrior to revel in the recollection of his exploits; he 
 would create a flattering impression by recounting them 
 to his comrades, and then assist their memories by 
 mnemonic images, pictures, and signs, and the more 
 effective medium of rhythmic verse. With the develop- 
 ment of the horde or tribe into a people politically or- 
 
38 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ganized under a leader or clan, claiming and ruthlessly 
 exercising prerogatives, tradition acquires the greatest 
 practical importance for those in possession. In so far 
 as their exceptional position at the head of the com- 
 munity is the result of some exceptional deed, it is a 
 matter of life and death to them to foster remembrance 
 of this deed, and use it to rouse in the imagination of the 
 people fear, admiration, superstitious reverence — every 
 sentiment, in a word, that can assist to maintain and, 
 where possible, to increase their power. The earliest 
 historical records are inscriptions and carvings on the 
 temples, palaces, fortresses or tombs set up by kings to 
 celebrate their victorious wars and the battles they have 
 won, the towns they have taken, the enemies they have 
 captured or slaughtered, the people subjugated to their 
 sway, the riches and possessions of every kind they have 
 amassed. The historical Egyptian and Assyrian inscrip- 
 tions we possess contain little else. Who had a natural 
 interest in preserving from oblivion the facts which they 
 commemorate ? Only the kings whose deeds they glorify 
 and the descendants who inherited their power. It was 
 matter of indifference, even of advantage, to everyone 
 else that any recollection of them should fade into the 
 obscurity of the past. 
 
 Conquerors, warriors, founders of dynasties, and the 
 inheritors of their power, are impelled to transmit a 
 knowledge of their exploits to those who come after by 
 means of every kind of self-glorification in the shape of 
 pictures, inscriptions, signs, etc., from the same motive 
 which induces the possessor of any kind of privilege, 
 great or small, to preserve every justification of it — 
 preserve or, where necessary, create. It may be asserted 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 39 
 
 that down to quite recent times there has been practically 
 no instance where a record has been authenticated or 
 set up from the disinterested desire for knowledge of 
 important events, but that in almost every case the 
 creation and establishment of the record was due the 
 furtherance of some private interest. Cloisters and 
 bishoprics had their cartularies, in which many false 
 entries are found mixed up with genuine ones; noble 
 families had their archives ; towns, guilds, and corpora- 
 tions their charters and constitutions ; and the object of 
 all these parchments and papers was to guard the privi- 
 leges of individuals and groups, not to provide material 
 for scientific knowledge. 
 
 Everyjnsritut^^^ in response to some require- 
 
 ment. Even conquest, organized plunder, the murderous 
 rule of a King of Dahomey, are means to the satisfaction 
 of a powerful personality which revels in unlimited 
 dominion and destruction. The creators of institutions 
 need no support from history. Their establishment 
 depends qnjheir own organic necessities, and their title 
 on their will and power to act in accordance with these 
 necessities. But the necessities change and alter; the 
 institutions due to their impetus remain. The moment 
 comes when they have not the strength to maintain 
 themselves, and no rational arguments are forthcoming 
 for their defence. Then those to whom their continued 
 existence is profitable call upon history to undertake the 
 task of frightening off criticism and discouraging attacks, 
 by throwing a rampart of pompous and dignified for- 
 mula; round the structure that is collapsing from internal 
 weakness. 
 
 Goethe has summed up the course of all institutions 
 
40 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 in one Immortal line, '' Reason turns to nonsense, and 
 benefit to nuisance"; and Chateaubriand expresses the 
 same idea when he says, " Every institution goes through 
 three stages — utility, privilege, abuse." When the day 
 of utility is over the uses and abuses remain, and, if 
 inconveniently called to account by the present, point 
 back to the past with a wealth of mysterious sacerdo- 
 talism. Examples are hardly necessary; one may suffice. 
 The nobility was originally — about the ninth century — 
 a class of strong, warlike men, who maintained order 
 within their district, and defended the life and property 
 of the people resident there against murder and robbery, 
 demanding In return unconditional suzerainty over their 
 subjects, and such share of their property as they chose 
 to appropriate.^ Later, a single sovereign, the king, 
 undertook the maintenance of peace at home, and a 
 standing army, police, and a stable constitutional and 
 legal system fulfilled all the tasks once belonging to the 
 nobility. Though thus relieved of all their duties, they 
 nevertheless gave up none of the privileges that had been 
 won by their ancestors as recompense for the toils and 
 dangers of perpetual conflict. They had no reply when, 
 on the eve of the great Revolution, Beaumarchals, in the 
 " Marriage of Figaro," spat in their faces the words, 
 "Ye took the trouble to be born"; they could only 
 
 ' H. Taine, " Origines de la France Contemporaine: L'Ancien 
 Regime," Paris, 1887, p. 10: "In any case the noble of that epoch is 
 the brave, the strong man, expert in the use of arms, who bares his 
 breast at the head of a company instead of fleeing and paying ran- 
 som . . . holds his ground, and protects a piece of land with his 
 sword. For this work he needs no ancestors; he only needs courage; 
 he is an ancestor himself; men are too grateful for the benefits he 
 confers to grumble over his title." 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 41 
 
 point to old parchments and splendid seals for their title 
 to fatten on the life-blood of the people. When the 
 French peasantry after the Revolution stormed the 
 castles, and first of all plundered the archives and burned 
 the records, they were unconsciously executing a sym- 
 bolic act. They recognized thereby that these dis- 
 coloured witnesses of a dead past were the still living 
 roots that nourished the feudal tree, and must be exter- 
 minated before it could be destroyed. 
 
 The historical sense is natural in all those who. profit 
 by respect for tradition; in others it is the artificial 
 product of education and culture. There is good reason 
 why the ruler exercising an authority created by the 
 force of a strong ancestor, a nobility possessing riches, 
 position, and power, originating in a more or less remote 
 past, or the representatives of the numerous and varied 
 interests that gather round a court and ruling class, 
 should foster and glorify the recollection of their origin, 
 and devote an honorable branch of every institution to 
 the study of the past. It is to their advantage to do so, 
 and they have the means to impress their point of view 
 upon the multitude , for whom tradition represents 
 nothing but repression, humiliation, and injury. The 
 ruling classes lay down the course of instruction to be 
 followed in schools, the conditions of examinations, and 
 the official position of different branches of study; chairs 
 are founded by them, the position and dignity of 
 academies and learned societies depend on them ; salaries 
 are disbursed by them; the encouragement and endow- 
 ment of research comes from them, and its results are 
 rewarded by them with official positions, orders and 
 decorations; and they have it thus entirely in their 
 
42 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 power to raise the knowledge of history to the most 
 important place in general culture, and to give to the 
 writing of it a specially high rank among intellectual 
 and scientific activities. Moreover, the general estima- 
 tion of the worth and importance of any branch of 
 knowledge depends primarily, not upon its value as 
 knowledge or its utility to the individual, but upon the 
 repute in which it is held in the State and society — that 
 is to say, among those who have the power and the 
 deciding voice. 
 
 Various intellectual elements compose this artificially 
 fostered feeling for history. First there is the effect of 
 the patronage of the ruling class. It is thought to be 
 well-bred to imitate their views. Then there is the 
 weakness of judgment which makes people incapable of 
 independent or rational criticism, and the intellectual 
 laziness which finds comfort in the generally accepted 
 view. It follows from these characteristics of human 
 thought that, although the majority may obtain no 
 advantage from an institution — ^may even suffer from it 
 — they will feel a respect for its antiquity, and look upon 
 its remote origin as sufficient justification for its con- 
 tinued existence. Moreover, the rebellious spirits of the 
 present day, who have everything to gain by having 
 things as they are, reality, weighed in the balance, com- 
 pared and estimated: and everything to lose by the 
 preference for, and exclusive consideration of, what is 
 over and done with, what never really has been, what has 
 been created by recollection — these men are actually 
 proud of their historical sense, of caring more for what 
 has been than for what is, more for the dead than the 
 living, and would be ashamed of any deficiency In it. 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 43 
 
 It is natural, since this point of view is of extraordinary 
 utility to all those who have inherited privileges, that 
 they should devote every effort to maintain the posses- 
 sion of historical knowledge to be an advantage and a 
 point of breeding, and declare that anyone who is with- 
 out it must be incomplete, debased, possibly weak in in- 
 tellect, and certainly a vulgarian. 
 
 This is the practical significance of the preoccupation 
 with the past, and the disproportionate value attached 
 . thereto. It would be one-sided, however, to refuse to 
 recognize the strong attraction possessed by historical 
 narrative from an assthetic and general psychological 
 point of view. Its stories are exciting and amusing. 
 The imagination is charmed and the slumbering mysti- 
 cism inherent in the human mind agreeably stirred by a 
 glimpse into the misty regions of the distant past. We 
 long to draw aside the veil from what is partly hidden, 
 to build up the ruins, to call up the spirits that are buried, 
 and solve the riddles that clamour for solution. Poetic 
 dreams are wakened in us by the mysterious faces that 
 swim before us out of the dimness of the past. 
 
 Finally, historic narrative has the charm of offering 
 us the logical satisfaction of a clear and consistent ex- 
 planation of many institutions, customs, and records that 
 are incomprehensible in their existing form. Much that 
 outrages the intelligence to-day, by its absurd and con- 
 temptible injustice, is convincingly explained by the 
 discovery of its origin and the fact that it then was 
 rational, well founded, and, if not abstractedly just, at 
 least suited to the conditions of the time. Written 
 history is a zealous and eloquent counsel for the existing 
 order, and secures acquittal or a judgment of extenuating 
 
44 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 circumstances for many a client that deserves condemna- 
 tion. The advocate does not even imperil his success 
 by the admission that his defence rests on the dangerous 
 ground of incomplete information as to fact, arbitrary 
 inventions, and uncritical inferences of his own. All 
 these causes explain the sedulous attention which all civ- 
 ilized peoples devote to historical research and writing, 
 in spite of the utter worthlessness of history as a guide 
 to life, and the extremely small and uncertain informa- 
 tion it can afford of the near, far less of the remote, past. 
 
 I will now summarize the conclusions I hope to have 
 established. 
 
 History is not identical with written history, and is 
 only to a very small extent included within it. The 
 claim of written history to be a science is unfounded. 
 It is not a descriptive science, since it is not certain of 
 the facts which it claims to collect and establish,* nor 
 a pure science, since it knows nothing of the laws that 
 govern the causal relations of the events of human life.^ 
 It provides us with no knowledge. It does not assist 
 the adaptation of the species to the conditions of life 
 given by nature. It affords it no help in the struggle 
 for existence. Moreover, it corresponds to no natural 
 requirement of the human mind, except, perhaps, the 
 
 ' It does, of course, partly know the cruder, external facts : that 
 battles were fought at Marathon, on the Catalonian plains, at 
 Lutzen, and at Sadowa; that Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon 
 have lived, etc.; but (P. Lacombe, op. cit., p. x) "what is the use of 
 mere knowledge of bare facts? What use is it to us to know that 
 ... a Macedonian called Alexander . . . defeated the Persians at 
 such and such a place . . . without deducing some truth or some 
 feeling?" 
 
 ■' Georg Simmel {op. cit., p. 43) maintains that history delineates 
 " scientifically " what has actually happened (it cannot do so, as 
 
HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 45 
 
 highly general desire for an illumination of the surround- 
 ing darkness. This it can only satisfy formally, for the 
 pictures that it throws upon the black background of 
 the past are not aspects of reality, but projections of 
 subjective ideas. The greatest events, even, are only for 
 three generations a part of the living consciousness of 
 posterity and those most intimately concerned in them. 
 After that remembrance is only preserved in books, 
 which are a dead-letter to the great majority; or, in the 
 case of less civilized peoples, as the kernel of fantastic 
 sagas, which are preserved by the tribe, not for their 
 truth, but for their charm as fairy-tales. Nowadays re- 
 membrance is probably not even preserved in this form. 
 The impulse to the creation of folk-lore dies away as in- 
 tellectual development progresses, and memory is less 
 relied upon when the habit of trusting to the written 
 word grows up. The high favour, nevertheless, still 
 enjoyed by written history rests on the love of story- 
 telling innate in mankind and the intense assthetic delight 
 felt in stories of human life, adventure tales, and anec- 
 dotes, whether true or invented. The historical sense is 
 an artificial product of the ruling classes, who use it as a 
 means for investing the existing order, which is advan- 
 tageous to themselves alone, with a mystic and poetic 
 
 I have shown), but does not need "to be carried to the point of 
 establishing the laws governing historical events " ; but some 
 pages farther on (p. ss) he contradicts himself by correctly stating, ^ 
 " There would be no history did we not see a meaning behind > 
 the external event, an intention behind the external deed, and a 
 sensation behind the external definition; interpretation alone gives it| 
 meaning." But the interpretation is arbitrary and purely subjective, 
 the opposite of scientific; thus that which, even according to Simmel, 
 gives rise to history (more correctly to written history) removes it; 
 claim to be a science. 
 
46 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 charm, for beautifying abuses by the glorification of their 
 origin, and for casting a glamour of half-tender, half- 
 reverential awe over institutions that have long lost any 
 reasonable justification and become useless and meaning- 
 less. Its practical purpose, in a word, is to oppress and 
 deceive the present with the assistance of the past. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 It is only at a very early stage of human development 
 that the desire for knowledge, so far as it exists at all, 
 is confined to what previously existed ; it is soon extended 
 to the why and the how. Men are no longer satisfied 
 with facts, more or less hidden, more or less credible; 
 they demand to understand their causal connection. 
 They fight against the conception of chance as the motive 
 force in the universe, and strive to discover some deter- 
 mining law of which it is the visible expression. Those 
 who related the story of the past were conscious of this 
 desire, and strove to satisfy It by passing from a naive 
 chronicle of events to a pragmatic historical method, in 
 which they developed one event from another, explained 
 one by another, and described one as conditioned by 
 another. From the examples already given in the pre- 
 ceding section, whose number could easily be increased, 
 it can be seen hoW arbitrary this connection and inter- 
 pretation, as a matter of fact, was in almost every case, 
 and to what extent it was dominated by the subjective 
 feelings and opinions of the narrator. Human longing 
 fpr_ knowledge ji'as not_ arrested by the pragmatic 
 method of historical description. It pretended to ofEer 
 an explanation of Isolated phenomena while neglecting 
 altogether the notion of a universal story, of which the 
 narration of the historian represents only a part. Long 
 
 47 
 
48 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 before the conception became definite it was dimly 
 realized by men that all human existence is a unified 
 process, in which the concrete events that are the subject 
 of written history are but incidental features. They felt 
 a keen desire to advance from arithmetic to algebra, 
 from the action of one individual or group of individuals 
 to a universal formula that should include the regular 
 course of human action as a whole. Thus the transition 
 was made from historical writing proper, the narration 
 of events with a definite space and time, to the phi- 
 losophy of history. 
 
 We need not dig very deep to find the source of the 
 philosophy of history. " Singly or collectivejy," as 
 Lacombe ^ correctly observed, " it displeases us tobe 
 the sport of chance." In other words, we think causally, 
 and our intellect cannot rest until it has assigned to 
 every phenomenon that it perceives such a cause as 
 seems adequate at the stage of knowledge which has been 
 reached, and can without glaring contradiction be fitted 
 into the current system of ideas and judgments. It is 
 frequently maintained, and repeated without examina- 
 tion, that the philosophy of history, both the word and 
 the thing, originated with Voltaire.^ Baudrillart proved 
 this to be an error.' He proved that, two centuries 
 before Voltaire, Jean Bodin consciously developed a 
 philosophy of history. But he failed to notice, or at 
 least to mention, that the " philosophy of history " was 
 
 ' p. Lacombe, op. cit., p. 23. 
 
 'R. RochoU, "The Philosophy of History: a critical account of the 
 attempts to create it," Gottingen, 1878, p. 66. RochoU gives Bagehot 
 as his authority for " the appearance of the term in Voltaire (Paris 
 edition of 1822)." 
 
 ' Baudrillart, " Jean Bodin et Son Temps,'' Paris, 1853. 
 
CUtlrOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF vHISTORY 49 
 
 also first used by Bodin. He casually remarks that 
 " Philo the Jew might be called a philosophic his- 
 torian." ^ 
 
 The philosophy of history is an attempt to give a 
 rational exglanat]on of historical events. It endeavours 
 to discover the law that regulates them, and to trace a 
 meaning in its operation that introduces logical order 
 into the events of the past, illuminates the present, and 
 casts some light upon the future. There can be no 
 worthier task for the human mind. But it has hitherto 
 been attempted with most inadequate means and by most 
 faulty methods. 
 
 The philosophy of history must proceed from the 
 assumption that Jhistory is governed by some law. Even 
 chance would be such a law; but if chance had to be 
 regarded as the law of history, its philosophy would end 
 where it began. It could have nothing more to say 
 were it once established that human affairs were gov- 
 erned by blind unregulated accident. A round nought at 
 the bottom would be all that could be made of such a 
 sum. This is a conclusion which has not, so far, been 
 reached by a philosopher of any standing. Every one 
 has proceeded on the assumption that there must be 
 some rational meaning in the Ijfe of man as displayed in 
 his history, and devoted himself simply to discovering 
 and expressing what that meaning is. Hardly one has 
 thought it necessary to investigate the theoretical basis 
 and justification of the assumption. 
 
 * I. Bodini, " Methodus ad f acilem historiarum cognitionem," Am- 
 steeaedami, Sumptibus Joannis Ravesteiny, 1650, caput x. : " De his- 
 toricorum ordine et collectione." P. 398: "- . . Fhilonis Judsi qui 
 Philosophistoricus appellari potest. . . ." 
 
50 THE IN'^i^RPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Nevertheless, the demand that history — that is to say, 
 that human life — must possess a meaning intelligible to 
 man is nothing more nor less than anthropomorphism. 
 Self-observation teaches man that every conscious act of 
 will is preceded by some thought and directed to some, 
 jpurpose. He cannot imagine a man's acting without 
 this conscious exercise of will and purpose, unless he be 
 drunk, sleep-walking, or mad. Generalizing, then, from 
 his own subjective experience, he applies it to the realm 
 of phenomena, from which it was not deduced, and to 
 which it does not apply. Human life, looked at as a 
 whole, seems to him to be continuous activity, and he 
 seeks for its meaning as though it were, like an after- 
 noon call or an Easter holiday, the outcome of human 
 reflection and human will, and not the outcome of a 
 combination of forces operating outside -the sphere of 
 human will and consciousness. He goes on in the same 
 way to assimilate humanity to the individual, and to 
 identify its becoming, being, and doing with that of the 
 individual; and thinks that, just as he can say in the case 
 of the action of a man, " What does he mean by it? " he 
 can say to the course of history as a whole, " What does 
 humanity mean by it? " 
 
 He does not notice what arbitrary and unproved 
 assumptions are contained in this question. It premises 
 that the events composing the fabric of history are ful- 
 filled in accordance with a predetermined purpose. But 
 purposive aptjon is only conceivable as guided by an 
 idea and a will conscious of that purpose and of reasons 
 for pursuing it. In what consciousness is there developed 
 the idea of a purpose governing the historical action 
 of mankind and a will directing it to this purpose? 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 51 
 
 Not in the consciousness of a man, for no man acts from 
 any conscious purpose save the fulfillment of some im- 
 mediate need, whether he be the greatest or the meanest : 
 the conqueror who lays the world in ruins at his feet 
 and builds it up anew, who leads his armies across three 
 continents, murdering, harrying, and laying waste by 
 fire and sword; the discoverer, who binds a new force of 
 nature to the service of mankind, and carries civilization 
 a step further on its way; or the day labourer, whose 
 activity provides for the satisfaction of his own wants 
 and creates the material for his own support and that 
 of the community as a whole. The connection between 
 his action and the course of the total life of man, of 
 which he is not conscious, determines it as little as do 
 the distant consequences and remote effects of which 
 he has no suspicion. Moreover, only a small portion of 
 mankind were affected by the greatest deeds, whether 
 of individual personalities or of nations, which history 
 records, such as the destruction of the Persian Empire 
 by Alexander the Great, the conquest of Gaul by Caesar, 
 the establishment of Christianity among the Gentiles 
 by the Apostle Paul, and the discovery of America by 
 Columbus; the great majority have been entirely 
 unaware of them at the time. If they have exer- 
 cised any influence upon their destiny, it has been 
 remote and secondary, and it is only by doing vio- 
 lence by facts that a meaning can be sought or found 
 in them relative to the course of human history as a 
 whole. 
 
 A developed idea of a rational purpose governing 
 human affairs and a will directed to its fulfilment is not 
 to be found in the consciousness of any actor. There 
 
52 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 are historical personages who were in their time famed 
 for their foresight, and who are known as the authors 
 of far-reaching and comprehensive schemes and of 
 political testaments. Henry IV. of France dreamed 
 of a federated Europe, Richelieu made the fighting and 
 weakening of the Hapsburgs the one object of French 
 policy for a century and a half, and Frederick the Great 
 left a wide range of advice to his successor. Had the 
 idea of any object of political activity other than the 
 direct advantage of their own country or dynasty en- 
 tered the minds of these or any other men, they would 
 have expressed it as they did their ideas of the line of 
 policy to be pursued for the profit and aggrandizement 
 of their realm. Had they done so, we should possess 
 reliable information as to the lines and aims of human 
 development, instead of being dependent on the in- 
 genious suppositions and impudent assertions of philo- 
 sophic historians, who, without any practical experience 
 of action, are always able to give us precise information 
 as to the motives which were unknown to the actors 
 themselves. 
 
 I think I have proved that the conception of a pur- 
 pose governing the historical action of mankind is not 
 present in the consciousness of the actors, nor the out- 
 come of their will. To establish the existence in that 
 \ action of a rational meaning and an aim, another con- 
 isdousness must be postulated which knows the aim, 
 ! conceives the purpose, and excites its will for its realiza- 
 tion. Such a consciousness can only exist outside of 
 humanity. It must be situated in a Mind that thinks, 
 develops ideas, can exercise will, and uses men as the 
 ploughman uses the oxen that draw his plough, without 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 53 
 
 knowing why or to what end. But such a thinking and 
 willing Mind above and beyond humanity would be God. 
 Now, the philosophy of history could only rest upon a ', 
 scientific basis had the course of history itself displayed 
 such a conception of purpose at work as finds no place in 
 the consciousness of man, and involves the assumption of 
 God as consciously directing the unconscious action of 
 mankind. But its actual procedure has been the exact 
 opposite of this. The existence of God was from the 
 beginning taken as proved, and as postulating the con- 
 ception of a purpose in history; after this artifice the 
 reality of the conception no longer requires to be proved 
 by historical facts, since it can be referred back to God,, 
 whose existence has already been assumed. 
 
 The_problem involved in the question as to the mean- 
 ing of human action was not at first apparent to the 
 philosophic historian. It is like the flask that Loki 
 cunningly set before Thor, and which he in vain tried to 
 empty. He did not see that it was the ocean that he was 
 trying to drain. Humanity is a portion of the universe. 
 Its destiny is bound up with, and dependent on, the 
 universal. There was a world before man ; there will be 
 a world after him. J^F human existence has a meaning, 
 the existen ce of the universe must have a meaning too. 
 The appearance and future disappearance of humanity 
 is a trivial episode in the eternal origination and dis- 
 appearance of the solar system and life-bearing planets. 
 One episode in a process cannot have a meaning if the 
 process itself has none. If the warp and woof of the 
 universe is a chaos of eternal forces, contending without 
 aim or purpose visible to human reason, it is obviously 
 vain to look for any rational aim or purpose in human 
 
54 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 existence, or in any life that comes into being for a 
 moment when matter in the form of primary vapour 
 thickens to form a heavenly body, lasts for a while, and 
 is doomed to dissolution when matter passes from the 
 heavenly body back, to the condition of primary vapour. 
 As a matter of fact, the philosophy of history undertakes 
 to lift the veil that shrouds the great secret of the uni- 
 verse, and tries to catch hold of it by the nearest corner 
 — the one which covers the history of human life. Could 
 it but succeed in demonstrating that the development of 
 mankind upon the earth is directed towards a rational 
 purpose, and prove the attainment of this purpose to lie 
 along the line of the actual movements of mankind in 
 the course of their history, it would thereby have reached 
 a point from which a far further view of eternity could 
 be gained. We could then proceed logically from the 
 rational aim of human development to a rational pur- 
 pose in the universe as a whole, and find a satisfactory 
 answer to the question why energy is perpetually flashing 
 across the universe ? why the heavenly bodies pursue an 
 endless round of rising and setting? why life and con- 
 sciousness arose in the cosmos? what is the meaning of 
 the world? However the philosophy of history may 
 appear to deduce the conception of purpose solely from 
 the actions of man, it really undertakes the solution of 
 the riddle of the universe, and its solution is the same as 
 that with which mankind originally tried to satisfy their 
 desire to know. Humanity silenced the earliest demands 
 of its reason to comprehend natural phenomena by 
 pleasing inventions, arrived at by means of the method 
 of analogy. The world must be the work of an incon- 
 ceivably clever and powerful artist, as implements of 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 55 
 
 stone, weapons, clothes, and huts were the handiwork of 
 clever men. Thunder and lightning, the roar of the 
 winter storm, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, repre- 
 sented the anger of some tremendous warrior, who 
 threatened men with death and destruction, after the 
 fashion of the enemies, animal and human, to whom 
 they were accustomed. All primitive religion is to some 
 extent the outconie of the need for assigning a rational 
 meaning and comprehensive cause to the phenomena of 
 theexternal worldf. Imagination steps in where certain 
 information falls short. Until the human mind has 
 learned to observe facts patiently, with an attention 
 sternly disciplined, it will accept any convenient notion 
 that happens to be presented to it. 
 
 Before it arrives at testing its hypotheses by continual 
 comparison with reality, experiences are arbitrarily 
 combined and uncritically generalized into stories. Any 
 correction of these stories is resisted as an inconvenient 
 disturbance of a comfortable habit of thought. The 
 mythology which invents gods in the likeness of men, 
 in order to explain the world, introduces the conception 
 of a rational purpose into history in order to shield 
 mankind from the horror of its incomprehensibility. A 
 philosophy of history which tries to interpret history by 
 means of preconceived opinions is not a gamble, as 
 Simmel ^ calls " metaphysical speculations about his- 
 tory," but theology, as Trezza correctly observes.^ The 
 
 ' Georg Simmel, " Problems of the Philosophy of History," Leipzig, 
 1892, p. X05. 
 
 ''Trezza, quoted by R. Rocholl (op. cit., p. 329): "There has' 
 hitherto been no philosophy of history, for the theological method 
 introducing a divine providence or a rule of law that is entirely for- 
 eign has no claim to be such." 
 
56 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 assumption of Gods, or of a God, released men from that 
 time forward from the necessity of searching further 
 explanation. God is an answer to everything, a way out 
 of every difficulty. The beginning of all things? God ! 
 The purpose of all existence ? The knowledge and wor- 
 ship of God. The meaning of human life ? A prepara- 
 tion for the eternal service of God. The philosophy of 
 history merely waves the torch of religion across the 
 darkness that it pretends to light up. It decrees that the 
 progress of history is directed by God. Human action 
 has a purpose laid down by God. This purpose is the 
 attainment of goodness, virtue, justice, and wisdom by 
 means of the subjugation of evil. Nationalities are 
 forms through which humanity must pass in a per- 
 petually ascending scale of freedom and morality. This 
 unctuous doctrine has been put forward in almost every 
 philosophy of history up to the present day, in complete 
 disregard of the innumerable facts that prove such 
 dogmatism to be the most senseless twaddie. For one 
 '':^Lingard, who candidly admits that History represents 
 - the sorrows heaped upon all men by " the passions of 
 \v- the few," there are ten Bancrofts crying with uplifted 
 eyes that " History is a divine power that cannot be 
 falsified by human interpolations." William von Hum- 
 boldt declares: " The historian must believe in the gov- 
 ernance of the universe." Schelling sees in history as a 
 whole " a continuous revelation of the Absolute grad- 
 ually accomplishing itself." Krause confidently preaches 
 that " History describes the temporal revelation of 
 God," and the dominant Idea of Bunsen's philosophy 
 of history is sufficiently expressed in its title, " God in 
 History." 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 57 
 
 " Much the same way the preacher spoke, 
 Only with slightly difierent phrases." — (Faust.) 
 
 But the preacher assigns his wisdom to divine revela- 
 tion, while the historians maintain that their view is 
 drawn from the facts of history. But their attitude to 
 these facts, one and all of them ! They treat them as 
 the gardener of a French park treats his box-hedges. 
 They clip them, improve them, and alter them, until 
 they assume the shape that they have determined upon 
 from the beginning. They approach history with the 
 preconceived notion that it declares the purposeful ruling 
 of God, and overlooking or omitting whatever does not 
 harmonize with, or absolutely contradict, this view, 
 they arbitrarily and forcibly twist the rest into the shape 
 they want. 
 
 The theo logians are really the most honest in their 
 procedure. They resort to faith without any beating 
 about the bush, and so avoid the necessity of convincing 
 the critical understanding. They set up their assertions, ; 
 and triumphantly cast a verse from the Bible in the teeth 
 of any heretic who ventures to dispute them. Anyone' 
 godless enough to question the authority of the Bible is *, 
 damned, and the most they can do is to pray for the,* 
 salvation of his soul. The first and most distinguished 
 of this class of philosophic historians is St. Augustine, 
 who, in his principal work, " De Civitate Dei," under- 
 took to discover and relate the meaning of all human 
 history. There are two kingdoms, the divine and the 
 earthly. " The kingdom of God is that whose citizens 
 we long to be, with the love inspired in us by its founder. 
 The citizens of the earthly kingdom prefer their idols to 
 
S8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the founder of the heavenly kingdom." ^ The kingdom 
 of God is that of the pious and true believers, the earthly 
 kingdom that of heathens and heretics. " Thus the two 
 different kingdoms have been created by two different 
 kinds of love : the earthly by the love of self rising to a 
 contempt of God, the heavenly by a love of God rising 
 to contempt of self." ^ , "We have no assurance that 
 mankind was at the time of Arphaxates removed from 
 the worship of the true God, but the kingdom or society 
 of the impious may be dated from the impiously arrogant 
 attempt to build a tower reaching to Heaven." ^ "A 
 premonition of the kingdom of God may be noted . . . 
 at the time of the patriarch Abraham, after which it 
 becomes more pronounced."* The kingdom of God 
 was fully revealed to man at the coming of Jesus Christ. 
 Since His mortal pilgrimage, the earthly kingdom, 
 which serves Satan, the fallen angel who rose in rebellion 
 against God, has fought obstinately, but with ever- 
 weakening strength, against the kingdom of God, which 
 will at the end of time finally conquer the earthly king- 
 dom ; the number of the saints determined by God will 
 be fulfilled, and after the elimination of evil from the 
 earth, mankind will be admitted to full communion with 
 God. The life of humanity upon earth lasts seven of 
 God's days of a thousand years each. The first day lasts 
 from the creation of Adam to the Flood, the second from 
 the Flood to Abraham, the third from Abraham to 
 David, the fourth from David to the Babylonian cap- 
 tivity of the Jews, the fifth from the Babylonian captivity 
 to the Advent of Christ. Since Christ mankind has been 
 
 * " De Civitate Dei," xi. x. ' Ibid., xiv. aS. 
 
 ' Ibid., xvi. lo. ' * Ibid., xvi. 12. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 59 
 
 living in the sixth day. At the close of the sixth day the 
 Last Judgment and the Resurrection will take place, and 
 the seventh day will begin God's day of rest — the Sab- 
 bath that has no end.^ St. Augustine's chronology is 
 not perfectly exact. The third day does not include a 
 full thousand years, but only fourteen generations, which 
 became much shorter after the time of the patriarchs 
 than they were from Adam down to the Flood, and in 
 the time of Abraham. St. Augustine is also careful to 
 remark that he cannot answer for the duration of the 
 sixth day. He wished to avoid the possibility that six 
 hundred years hence — he wrote his book on the King- 
 dom of God in a.d. 400 — his calculations might be falsi- 
 fied by the non-arrival of the Last Judgment. The sixth 
 day is " nuUo generationum numero metienda " — not 
 measurable by any number of generations — ^because it 
 stands in Holy Writ; " non est vestrum scire tempora 
 quae pater posuit in sua potestate " — " it is not yours to 
 know the things which are in the hand of the Father." 
 This did not prevent Christianity in A.D. 1000 from ex- 
 pecting the end of the world, the termination of the sixth 
 day, and beginning of the Sabbath according to St. Au- 
 gustine. But when the awful day, expected with mortal 
 fears, passed by without anything remarkable happening, 
 the reputation of the prophets who had followed Au- 
 gustine in dating the Sabbath for the year 1000 did not 
 suffer at all. Real faith is not perturbed by facts that 
 prove to be ridiculous — it passes them by or interprets 
 them in some other way. 
 
 The plan of the philosophy of history of the Bishop 
 of Hippo places it outside the reach of rational criticism. 
 
 ' " De Civitate Dei," xxii. 30. 
 
6o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 One can hardly investigate seriously such dogmatic 
 assertions as those concerning the revolt of Satan against 
 God, the seven days of the world, and the Resurrection 
 and Last Judgment on the eve of the seventh day. St. 
 Augustine records the pious fairy-tale of his own inven- 
 tion with fervour, and does> not trouble at all about its 
 truth. His sole source is the Bible. He accepts every 
 word literally. He regards Adam, his sons and de- 
 scendants, Noah and Abraham, as historical personages. 
 He believes in Methusaleh's 969 years. His mode of 
 thought and his logic may be estimated from passages 
 like the following: " Of all visible things, the greatest is 
 the world: of invisible, the greatest is God. That the 
 world is, we see; that God is, we believe. Our belief 
 that God made the world rests on the testimony of no 
 less a witness than God Himself. Where have we heard 
 Him? In no less place than Holy Writ, where His 
 prophet has said, ' In the beginning God made the 
 Heaven and the Earth.' " ^ 
 
 For him a verse in the Bible is proof of the existence 
 of God, and a sufficient explanation of the origin of the 
 universe. The only ancient history that has any value 
 or existence for him is the history of the Jewish people. 
 He turns away from the past of all the rest of mankind 
 with perfect indifference. The account of Christ in 
 the Gospels is for him strict historical truth. The 
 coming of Christ, of which the greatest peoples of the 
 earth knew nothing, and which seemed to the majority 
 of his own contemporaries, living in the scene of His 
 activity, an event so unimportant that it is not recorded 
 by one impartial contemporary witness — ^this is to him 
 
 • " De Civitate Dei," xi. 4. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 6i 
 
 the greatest event In history, and its sole essential con- 
 tent. The growth and decay of nations, the rise and fall 
 of kingdoms, the struggle in the community for power 
 and dominion, the rise and modifications of public institu- 
 tions, are to him matters of complete indifference, except 
 in so far as they can be connected with the ostensible 
 preparations for, and spread of, Christianity, its battles 
 and its victories. What are race-migrations, wars, or 
 revolutions ? Why linger over them ? why inquire as to 
 their origin and development? why seek for a law gov- 
 erning their progress ? All that has no significance. On 
 the one side are the faithful who believe in Jesus, on the 
 other the servants of the devil, who will know naught of 
 Him. Between the two camps there is irreconcilable 
 enmity, until in the fulness of time there comes the Last 
 Judgment, and all history is brought to its sacred con- 
 clusion with the triumph of the kingdom of God over 
 Satan and his crew. 
 
 Such is the philosophy of history as expounded by 
 St. Augustine. It is a supplement to the Bible and the 
 Catechism. It is based upon revelation, and scorns 
 earthly proofs. It has nothing to do with reason. Any- 
 one who doubts or denies is a heretic, deserves only the 
 treatment the Church reserves for such. It is under- 
 standable that the Middle Ages should have reverently 
 followed in the steps of the Bishop of Hippo, and built 
 up their history upon his interpretation. It is less com- 
 prehensible that he should have pointed out the way 
 which the philosophy of history has followed down to 
 recent times. Bossuet was a Bishop of the Roman 
 Church, so it need excite no surprise to find him occupy- 
 ing quite the same point of view as his African brother. 
 
62 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 He, too, divides history into seven epochs, though he 
 assigns their limits somewhat differently. With the 
 Bishop of Meaux, the third period extends down to 
 Moses, the fourth to Solomon and the building of the 
 first temple, the fifth to the return of the Jews from 
 Babylon, the sixth to the birth of Jesus, and the seventh 
 down to the last day. The two first parts of his " Dis- 
 cours sur I'Histoire Universelle " are devoted to the peo- 
 ple of Israel, with a few casual remarks on the peoples 
 with whom they came in contact, and by whom their 
 destinies were influenced. We have to wait for the third 
 and shortest section for any fuller treatment of the 
 Asiatic world powers, of the classical nations, and of 
 Western Europe generally, down to the time of Charle- 
 magne; but Bossuet justifies this to his own satisfaction 
 by saying: " These kingdoms have for the most part a 
 necessary connection with God's chosen people. God 
 made use of the Assyrians and Babylonians to chastise 
 His people, of the Persians to restore it, of Alexander 
 and his immediate successors to protect it, of Antiochus 
 Epiphanes and his successors to test it, of the Romans to 
 maintain it in freedom against the Syrian kings, bent 
 only on its destruction. The Jews remained under the 
 power of these same Romans down to the time of Jesus 
 Christ. When they denied and crucified Him, divine 
 vengeance used the unconscious Romans as the instru- 
 ment for the extermination of the thankless race. Hav- 
 ing resolved at a certain time to gather all peoples 
 together into a new community, God joined land and sea 
 under the sway of this empire. One of the most power- 
 ful instruments of Providence for the free spread of the 
 Gospel was the intercourse thus afforded between the 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 63 
 
 many different peoples, who ceased to be strangers to one 
 another when they were brought together under the do- 
 minion of Rome." ^ 
 
 The blind faith of the Middle Ages makes it little 
 astonishing that the medieval historians — ^Ekkehard, 
 Bede, Isidor of Seville — accepted, as did Bossuet, the 
 seven epochs of St. Augustine, and the four world 
 powers of the prophet Daniel. It is, however, amazing 
 to find Bossuet's views expounded with solemn earnest- 
 ness down to recent times. Johannes von Miiller de- 
 clares with an assurance that admits of no doubts, 
 " Jesus Christ is the key to the history of the universe." 
 Schelling says almost in the same words: " Christianity 
 is the centre and key of all history." Fichte is, as usual, 
 rather nebulous and mystical, but if his pronouncement 
 at the close of his " Characteristics of the Present Age " 
 be correctly interpreted, he anticipates as the end of 
 history the realization of the Christianity of the Gospel 
 according to St. John, the kingdom of heaven upon 
 earth, a spiritual kingdom of love. Unlike the clerical 
 historians, he never cites the Bible; his knowledge Is 
 wholly drawn from the depths of his own inner con- 
 sciousness. " The philosopher who concerns himself, as 
 a philosopher, with history follows up the a priori clue 
 to the cause of the world, which is clear to him apart 
 from history. His conclusions are already established 
 prior to and independent of history, which is to him use- 
 less as a method of proof." ^ A philosophy of history 
 
 ' Bossuet, " Discours sur I'Histoire Universelle a Monseigneur le 
 Dauphin," part iii., chap. i. 
 
 ''J. S. Fichte, "The Characteristics of the Present Age," col- 
 lected works, edited by J. H. Fichte, Berlin, 1846, vol. vii., p. 139. 
 
64 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 which can unerringly establish the object^ and meaning of 
 history without studying it is indeed the chef d'csuvre of 
 intellectual gymnastics. 
 
 Of course, a juggler who is clever in the use of dia- 
 lectic, and unscrupulous enough to combine, without 
 criticism, events that are glaringly discrepant, can readily 
 draw a historical picture in which every event refers back 
 to Jesus and depends upon Christianity. But by the 
 same inventive sophistry it could be proved that the 
 course of universal history up to 1492 was only a prepa- 
 ration for the discovery of America, which has deter- 
 mined its course ever since; or, to push the joke a little 
 further, to find the meaning of history and its obvious 
 aim in the invention of the game of Skat, with the Per- 
 sian War, the destruction of the Roman Empire, the 
 dissolution of the Spanish world-monarchy, the Thirty 
 Years' War, the French Revolution, and the campaign 
 of 1870 as its preliminary stages. The whole course of 
 history can in this fashion be referred to any event what- 
 soever, only provided that events are arranged and 
 selected accordingly, some being omitted and an unreal 
 importance assigned to others. 
 
 Voltaire ^ ridicules Bossuet's conception of history, yet 
 his " Discours sur I'Histoire Universelle " is used to this 
 day as a textbook in higher-grade schools in France. 
 Robert Flint, author of the best general account of the 
 literature on the philosophy of history of the principal 
 European nations, enters a wise caution against the 
 views of St. Augustine, Orosius, Bossuet, and their 
 disciples, whose " assertion of the existence, power, and 
 
 ' Voltaire, " Essai sur les Moeurs et I'Esprit des Nations, CEuvres 
 Completes," Paris, ZS53, chap, iii., p. 73, § i. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 65 
 
 wisdom of the First Providential Cause ... is not sup- 
 ported by adequate proof." But a few lines further on 
 he is guilty of the same dogmatism himself: "The 
 ultimate and greatest triumph of historical philosophy 
 will really be neither more nor less than the full proof 
 of Providence, the discovery by the processes of scientific 
 method of a divine plan which unifies and harmonizes 
 the apparent chaos of human actions contained in history 
 in a cosmos." ^ There could be no more ingenuous con- 
 fession of the old deductive, aphoristic mode of thought. 
 The genuine seeker after truth and knowledge must 
 approach facts without preconceived opinions about 
 them. If human destiny seem s-chaoticiie jnuat sadly 
 admitjthat^hfi, sees it as chaos,,_aiid.can d iscover in it 
 neither^ ordfec. nor meaning., Flint does not do so. He 
 starts with the conviction that history must evidence a 
 Providence and divine plan. Whence does he obtain 
 this conviction? Not from history — history appears to 
 him a chaos — ^but from the arbitrary invention of his 
 own fancy, from his own wishes and desires. He ap- 
 proaches history with a subjective conviction already 
 formed. What he sees directly contradicts his convic- 
 tion. He sees no plan, no Providence; only a chaos. 
 Far from bowing before the truth and abandoning the 
 conviction that is falsified by the testimony of his eyes, 
 he clings to it, and confidently expects that facts will 
 accommodate themselves to it! AH honour, then, to 
 the courageous consistency of a Fichte who proudly de- 
 clares that his opinion of history was formed with- 
 out so much as a glance at it, and that the cursed 
 
 'Robert Flint, "The Philosophy of History in France and Ger- 
 many," Edinburgh and London, 1874, p. M. 
 
66 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 facts have got to conform to his opinion as best they 
 may! 
 
 There is one most serious difficulty in the way of those 
 whowishto see history directed by a divine plan through- 
 out, and echoing the praises of the all-wisdom and good- 
 ness of God: or to regard it, with Schelling,^ as a " rev- 
 elation of God," or " an epic composed in the mind of 
 God " : a difficulty that has involved many of them in 
 most fearful confusion — namely, the^ presence pf_eyiHn 
 the world.^ There is no denying it. It is far too glaring 
 for that. History displays an unbroken succession of 
 wars and conquests, tyranny and risings against it, 
 deceit and treachery crowned by success and triumphant 
 over persecuted virtue, and might victorious over right. 
 Is all this to be regarded as the direct will of a moral 
 order governing the world? Can it be the hand of a 
 loving God that purposely heaps these horrors upon 
 man ? To explain suffering as, on the one hand, a pun- 
 ishment for the sins of men, and, on the other, as a 
 salutary discipline ordained by Providence to test and 
 purge them, so that they may be worthy of the eternal 
 grace of God, may satisfy a superficial philosopher. 
 More profound thinkers cannot dismiss the question so 
 easily. Leibnitz required the many volumes of his 
 " Theodicy " to prove that all is arranged for the best in 
 this best of all possible worlds, and that all the phe- 
 
 'Fr. W. J. V. Schelling, "Collected Works," Stuttgart and Augs- 
 burg, i860, vol. vi., p. ST- "History is an epic composed in the 
 mind of God: its two principal parts relate the departure of 
 humanity from its Centre to the furthest point of distance, and their 
 return. The one part is the 'Iliad,' the latter the 'Odyssey' of his- 
 tory. . . . Thus is the great purpose of the universe expressed in 
 history." 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 67 
 
 nomena of the universe fit into a place ordained by God. 
 That no one has hitherto noted the colossal humour of X 
 the " Theodicy " is the strongest possible proof of the;^ 
 extraordinary rarity of a sense of the ridiculous. In 
 " Candide " Voltaire is certainly inimitably witty at the | 
 expense of Leibnitz's optimism ; but even he hardly | 
 seems to feel the absurdity of jjmortaTs^ feeling obliged! 
 to hold ^the brief for G od, and expend the greatest pains j 
 and all the resources of his professional skill In order to \ 
 acquit his client of the charges brought against him, or, i 
 at least, to obtain a verdict of extenuating circum-,' 
 stances. 
 
 RochoU ^ divides philosophic historians into the 
 " theological," who see In history the handiwork of God; 
 the " humanistic," who regard it as the work of man; 
 and the " naturalistic-materialistic," who regard It as 
 the work of nature. I will devote no more time to the 
 theologians. They explain the course of history by the 
 ordinance and Providence of God, who created the earth 
 and mankind, and is directing them by wondrous hidden 
 ways to a predetermined goal. For proofs of this 
 fantastic product of their own brains they point to the 
 Bible. They no longer look to it for their cosmogony, 
 or uphold the story of the Creation In Genesis against 
 the conclusions of science ; but they still seek the key to 
 history in the Bible, and look at human life as the 
 medieval scholastics looked at nature. Like them, igno- 
 rant, blind, and arbitrary In their interpretation of the 
 facts, which they are unable or unwilling to observe, they 
 intentionally close their eyes to everything that contra- 
 dicts their assertions. 
 
 ' R. Rocholl, op. cit., p. i. 
 
68 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 The desire for objective conclusions rather than sub- 
 jective eloquence finds little more satisfaction among 
 those whom RochoU calls the humanists. There is no 
 fundamental difference between them and the theo- 
 logians, for they too assume the existence of a world 
 ordinance and Providence without bringing forward a 
 single proof in support of their assertion that could stand 
 before unprejudiced criticism. 
 
 The reputation of Giambattista Vico, who is com- 
 monly regarded as the first philosophic historian who 
 was not a theologian, stands especially high. Goethe, 
 Johannes Miiller, and Fr. A. Wolf had a high opinion 
 of him. In his Preface to Hegel's " Philosophy of His- 
 tory," Edward Gans ^ says : " There are only four truly 
 philosophic historians — Vico, Herder, Fr. v. Schlegel, 
 and Hegel." Vico, the earliest " truly philosophic his- 
 torian," did, as a matter of fact, regard himself as a dis- 
 coverer, for he calls his book " A New Science of the 
 Common Nature of Nations," " and claims to expound 
 the principles of this science. These principles are as 
 follows: " Belief in a divine Providence, the moderation 
 I of the' passions by the Institution of marriage, and the 
 I doctrine of the immortality of the soul consecrated by 
 • the use of burial." ' History cannot teach faith in the 
 divine Providence. Where was this Providence when 
 Greece was given over to the plunder of the rude 
 
 ' G. Wilh. Friedr. Hegel's Works, complete edition, edited by a 
 band of friends of the deceased, vol. ix., "Lectures on the Philosophy 
 of History," edited by Dr. Edward Gans, Berlin, 1837, Preface, p. x. 
 
 ' " Cinque libri di Giambattista Vico de' principj d' una scienza 
 nuova d' intomo alia natura delle nazioni," second impression, Naples, 
 1730. 
 
 * Vico, op. cit, p. 182. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 69 
 
 Romans, when ancient civilization was blotted out by the 
 race migrations, when the Anglo-Saxon England of 
 Harold was handed over to the Norman freebooters, 
 when Europe was laid waste by the Mongolian Genghis 
 Khans and by the Black Death? How did it permit 
 Alba to carry out what he did in the Netherlands, permit 
 Henry IV. to be murdered by Ravaillac, allow the Thirty 
 Years' War to ravage Germany, and take sides with op- 
 pression against freedom in 1849? Such a list can be 
 almost indefinitely extended. If there be a Providence 
 at work In these cases. Its actions are not governed by 
 whatjnortal men understand as justice or morality. It is 
 no proof of the Immortality of the soul that savages be- 
 lieved In It, and therefore ceremoniously Interred their 
 dead. As for the second principle — the " moderation of 
 the passions by the institution of marriage " — it has 
 nothing to do with the philosophy of history, for It 
 throws no light on any historical event. Moreover, it is 
 false. Marriage did not arise and develop \ylth the ob- 
 ject of " moderating the passions." It was a social insti- 
 tution, devised to strengthen the family and Insure the 
 inheritance of property by the heirs of him who had ac- 
 quired it. Its origin lies In the economic conditions of, 
 the law of property, and is neither physiological nor 
 morale Throughout the course of history there is only 
 one instance of marriage as a political question. In 
 Rome full legal marriage — confarreatio — ^was reserved 
 originally to the patricians, and could not be entered Into 
 by a plebeian. The plebeians fought long and bitterly to 
 be admitted to the full marriage rite. But they did so 
 not " to moderate the passions," but because the right of 
 inheritance was confined to the children of such a mar- 
 
70 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 riage. The plebeians, in fact, sought through con- 
 farreatio for that full right of inheritance that the pa- 
 tricians reserved to themselves. The question was thus 
 one episode in the century-long struggle for supremacy 
 between the orders ; it reappears nowhere else. To re- 
 gard it as a determining factor in universal history, as 
 Vico does, is absurd. 
 
 Even his famous conception of the ricorsi,^ the 
 continued recurrence of human events, is really very 
 limited, and founded on an extraordinarily restricted 
 basis of fact. For the origin of his view he produces 
 only one fact : the similarity between the origin and de- 
 velopment of the medieval feudal systems and the foun- 
 dation of Rome. Even were the comparison of the two 
 phenomena a just one, which is far from being the case, 
 such a single instance of the occurrence of parallel de- 
 velopment would be far from justifying the predication 
 of a universal law of the " recurrence of human events." 
 There is something far more impressive in the old Greek 
 theory of the eternal cycles encompassing the whole 
 universe. Vico's little ricorsi are but parodies of the 
 cycles of Empedocles, Zeno, and Aristotle. 
 
 Vico's book teems with eccentricities. He divides 
 history into three periods — ^the divine, the heroic, and 
 the human. In the first period the earth was inhabited 
 by mighty giants, still in direct relation to God. In the 
 second the heroes ruled, whose exploits are recorded in 
 folk-lore and to whom the nobility traces back its 
 descent. Humanity is at present in the third stage. Yet 
 this fairy-tale has had considerable effect. Auguste 
 
 ' Vico, op. cit., book v., " Del ricorso delle cose umane," pp. 438 
 et seq. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 71 
 
 Comte's three phases of development — theological, 
 metaphysical, and positive — were undoubtedly sug- 
 gested by Vico's three periods. And the twaddle of 
 Gobineau about the heroes, sons of kings, who are called 
 to lead the populace is but an echo of Vico's description 
 of the heroes of the second period. 
 
 As Werner ^ correctly observed, Vico did, as a matter 
 of fact, " like Bossuet, emphasize the providential 
 guidance of history and the fundamental importance of 
 the religious element in it." In other words, he is 
 orthodox, like Bossuet and St. Augustine, and drags 
 into history the improved theological assumptions of a 
 divine ordinance of the world and predetermined goal 
 of human development. 
 
 He puts his doctrine in a nutshell when, at the close 
 of his " New Science," he remarks " that God rules men 
 and reveal^ His true light to mortals in flashes." This 
 idea that the action of men is ordered by God, of whose 
 will they are but the unconscious instruments, is repeated 
 by Kant in his " Idea of a Universal History from the 
 International Point of View." He says, in the Intro- 
 duction, that since " death, birth, and marriage appear 
 to be governed by calculable laws, individuals and na- 
 tions, while imagining themselves to be following their 
 own opposing purposes, are really, without being aware 
 of it, under the guidance of a great natural design." 
 What a logical summerset ! If we are to look for design 
 and will in every regular phenomenon, the ebb and flow 
 of the sea, which appear " to be governed by calculable 
 
 ' Professor Karl Werner, " On Giambattista Vico as a philosophic 
 Historian and Fpuni^^i: of the New Italian Philosophy," Vienna, 
 1877, p. tz, 
 
72 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 laws," must be obeying a design foreign to themselves. 
 Such obviously is not the scientific view of tides. 
 
 Edward Gans' second " truly philosophic historian " is 
 Herder. His " Idea of a Philosophy of Human His- 
 tory " was greatly admired on its appearance, regarded 
 at the close of the eighteenth century as a textbook of 
 the subject, and respectfully quoted to this day. It is, 
 however, hardly readable now, as much on account of its 
 form as its subject. It is written in an ornate and florid 
 style. Turgid declamation is varied by rhetorical invo- 
 cation of the subject in hand — " Fare ye well, ye wild 
 regions beyond the mountains ... it is under another 
 aspect that we shall see most of you again. . . ." 
 " Tone on, mystic harp of Ossian; fortunate the man in 
 any age who obeys thy soft tones." " I bow reverently 
 before thy lofty form, thou head and founder of an 
 empire based on such noble aims," etc. His point of 
 view is that of a childlike theology. Everything that 
 meets his eye must have a rational, human purpose. 
 Everything betrays the wise design of an omnipotent 
 Creator. Man is created upright, in order " to direct 
 his thoughts and wishes towards heaven." ^ Apes have 
 been denied the gift of speech, because they would have 
 misused it. " Speech would be dishonoured in the 
 mouth of the coarse, sensual, brutal monkey, who would 
 undoubtedly ape human utterance with half the intelli- 
 gence of man. A horrible mingle of human tones and 
 monkey thoughts — no! human speech could not be so 
 degraded. Thus the monkey was made dumb, more 
 
 ' Johann Gottfried von Herder, " Idea of a Philosophy of Human 
 History," Introduction by Heinrich Luden, Leipzig, i8i2, vol. i., 
 
 p. 120. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 73 
 
 dumb than any other animal." ^ " The sole effect of the 
 cold on him (the Inhabitant of the North Polar regions) 
 was to bow his body and constrict the circulation of his 
 blood. . . . But his vital forces, working from within 
 outwards, built him up for warmth, toughness, and com- 
 pactness, rather than for height. . . . His hair re- 
 mained stiff and straggling, since his sap was not con- 
 stituted to grow soft, silky hair." ^ Such pearls occur on 
 almost every page. Herder constantly reminds one of 
 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who said of the melon, in his 
 " Harmonies de la Nature " : " It is externally divided 
 into sections, because Nature intended it for family eat- 
 ing I " In his " Democritus," Weber introduces a ribald 
 German, who humorously parodies the easy way in 
 which the pious explain phenomena by saying: "How 
 wise of Providence to have made holes in the cat's fur 
 just where the eyes are ! " 
 
 Herder sees a purpose in history, and expresses it 
 briefly and concisely: " The purpose of human natureis 
 human ity." * This revelation recalls the profound 
 economic explanation which Fritz. Reuter makes his 
 inspector Brasig give for the poverty of the country- 
 people : " The people's poverty is due to their necessitous 
 state." " The purpose of human nature is humanity." 
 What, then, is humanity? Herder does not omit to 
 answer the question : " Humanity is reason_ and reason- 
 ableness in all classes and all human affairs." * Now we 
 know. Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, Rome 
 subdued the known world beneath its yoke. Western 
 Christendom instituted the Crusades, Spain colonized 
 
 ^ Herder, op. cil., vol. i., p. 132. " Ibid., p. 198. 
 
 " Ibid.j vol. ii., p. 330. * Ibid., p. 243. 
 
74 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 South and Europe North America, Napoleon made the 
 last first all over Europe, in order that " reason and 
 reasonableness might prevail in all classes, in all affairs." 
 Herder hastens to snub anyone who doubts " that a de- 
 sign of this kind can be the sole purpose of Providence 
 for our race. The fact is self-evident." ^ Only a per- 
 verted mind can doubt a fact that is " self-evident." 
 
 The whole book is a welter of words without the 
 smallest kernel of meaning. A few examples will suffice 
 of his constant concatenations of words that appear to be 
 full of deep meaning, and really express nothing at all 
 when one looks into them: "The more the muscular 
 energies enter the domain of the nerves they are cap- 
 tured by the organization, and compelled to serve the 
 purposes of sensibility." ^ " The genetic force is the 
 mother of everything upon the earth; climate can only 
 assist or hinder it." ^ " Nature has expended all her 
 store of human types upon the earth, in order that she 
 might deceive mortals throughout their lives by pro- 
 viding for each his own delight at his own time and at 
 his own place." * " Epochs are linked together by virtue 
 of their own nature." ° Herder does not explain a 
 single historical event. He orders and describes them 
 one after another, and thus preserves an appearance of 
 logical consequence. It would be impossible to under- 
 stand how such a mass of arbitrary and often senseless 
 propositions, and a kind of florid fine writing that is 
 particularly intolerable in what purports to be a scientific 
 book, could ever have been taken seriously, if it were 
 not to some extent explained in Book XVII. In that 
 
 ' Herder, of. cit., vol. ii., p. 302. ' Ibid., vol. i., p. 81. 
 
 'Ibid., p. 265. * Ibid., p. 335. 'Ibid., vol. ii., p. 249. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOrY 75 
 
 book Herder speaks of the origin of Christianity, the 
 nature of Christ and of His doctrines, with the intel- 
 lectual freedom of a rationalistic child of the age of 
 enlightenment. Such outspokenness on the part of an 
 official naturally made a profound impression on the 
 cultivated classes in Germany, who were for the most 
 part still confined within the limits of a narrow ortho- 
 doxy that looked askance upon the Christianity of Rous- 
 seau's Savoyard Vicar. But to designate Herder's 
 " Ideas " as a philosophy of history is an irritating de- 
 ception. 
 
 Edward Gans' third " truly philosophic historian," 
 Friedrich von Schlegel, need not detain us. Many dec- 
 ades have now elapsed since any sensible man troubled 
 about the dismal twaddle of that reactionary fanatic. 
 But the fourth, Hegel, cannot be so readily dismissed, 
 since his influence has not yet completely disappeared. 
 Barth, who is not on the whole a Hegelian, says in his 
 Preface to Hegel's " Philosophy of History " : " How- 
 ever deservedly and completely Hegel's logic and 
 Natural Philosophy may be forgotten, certain elements 
 in his general, intellectual position, which are practically 
 developed in his ' Philosophy of History,' do still 
 stoutly hold their ground, not only in Germany, but also 
 in England, America, Italy, and even France." ^ Ed- 
 ward von Hartmann declares that " Hegel's philosophy 
 of history has not yet been superseded," and says that he 
 regards " the ' Philosophy of History ' as Hegel's most 
 permanently valuable contribution." Hermann was a 
 pupil and disciple of Hegel's, without any individuality 
 
 ' Barth, " The Philosophy of History of Hegel and the Hegelians 
 down to Marx and Hartmann: a Critical Study," Leipzig, 1890. 
 
76 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of his own ; it is therefore small matter for surprise that 
 he eulogizes him in terms of absurd exaggeration, calls 
 him the " founder of a systematic philosophy of his- 
 tory," and his theory " the only one worth consider- 
 ing." ^ In the same way, when Arnold Ruge calls Hegel 
 " the greatest and freest intellect of our time," " one has 
 to remember that Hegel was his master. But even Flint, 
 who had no personal relations with Hegel, and who has 
 criticized him, though very sparingly, declares: "It Is 
 quite impossible to deny him an extraordinary wealth of 
 thought of the most profound and delightful kind." * 
 
 Let us examine one or two of the profound and de- 
 lightful thoughts which find a place in the " Philosophy 
 of History." Hegel's philosophy of history rests upon 
 a single postulate: "The contribution of philosophy is 
 solely . . . the simple thought of reason, reason as 
 governing the world, the world process as a rational 
 process. . . . That reason is revealed in the world, and 
 nothing else Is there revealed except it, its honour and 
 its glory — this Is what has been proved ... by philos- 
 ophy, and may here be assumed as proved." * Nothing 
 could, In fact, be more convenient. Hegel's sole postu- 
 late Is that history is a rational process. But this 
 postulate Is, In fact, precisely the thema probandum; If 
 we are ready to postulate it, to take It as proved, we need 
 no philosophy of history. But let us follow Hegel a step 
 
 ' Hermann, " Philosophy of History," Leipzig, 1870. 
 
 ' Henry Thomas Buckle's " History of Civilization in England," 
 German translation by Arnold Ruge, fourth authorized edition, 
 Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1871, vol. i., p. xiv. 
 
 ' Robert Flint, " The Philosophy of History in France and Ger- 
 many," Edinburgh and London, 1874, p. 496. 
 
 ' Hegel, op. cit., p. 13. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 77 
 
 farther. History is understood " as the impulse of jhev 
 S£inLto_find the^Absolute^-that is to say, itself." Thus, y 
 Hegel knows there is a spirit; and it has obviously lost x 
 itself. We are not told where and when this rather 
 incomprehensible misfortune took place. But, anyhow, 
 the poor spirit then felt a very natural impulse to find 
 itself. Through this impulse it created the history of 
 the world, in the course of which it happily did find 
 itself. The process is not very clear, but the result is 
 satisfactory. And empty nonsense like this passed, and 
 frequently still passes, for profundity! The goal of his- 
 tory is freedom. " The history of thejwprld is simply 
 the^evelopmentjof the conception of freedom." This 
 looks promising. But Hegel hastens to add: " Objective 
 freedom involves the subjection of the accidental will, 
 which has only a formal existence." ^ What does all 
 this amount to practically ? A man wills something : for 
 example, to start a school where there shall be no reli- 
 gious teaching. He imagines that freedom consists in 
 being able to carry out his will. Hegel shows him his 
 mistake. His will has only a formal existence (this 
 statement has no meaning, though it makes one stop 
 and think) ; it is accidental ; he must give it up ; the police 
 will prevent his opening a free-thinking school, and that 
 will be real objective freedom. 
 
 And the details of Hegel's " Philosophy of History " 
 are equally remarkable. It ought all to be quoted, for 
 there are pearls on every page. " Europe represents 
 finality in the history of the world." ' Let us hope that 
 America will take no offence at hearing this : '* America 
 has shown, and does still show, a complete lack of 
 
 ' Hegel, of. at., p, 446. ' fbid,, p. 10?. 
 
78 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 physical and intellectual power." ^ " The subjection of 
 the Asiatic kingdoms to the European is inevitable."^ 
 This judgment will no doubt convince the Japanese of 
 the great significance of the Hegelian philosophy. 
 " The advantages of connecting the Mediterranean with 
 the Arabian Gulf and the Pacific are less than might 
 have been believed, since the difficulties of navigation in 
 the Red Sea are aggravated by the prevalent north wind, 
 which renders it impossible to sail from south to north 
 in all save three months of the year." ^ Lesseps, how- 
 ever, was not a Hegelian, and he did not do so badly 
 with his Suez Canal. " Greek life is essentially youth- 
 ful, and was begun by one youth, concluded by an- 
 other. ... It started with Achilles, the embodiment of 
 poetic youth, and was brought to a close by Alexander, 
 youth in its reality." *" This is very subtle, but softly — 
 did Greek life really begin with Achilles, and did it not 
 go on for at least a century and a half after Alexander 
 the Great? And since Romulus was a youth, and Rom- 
 ulus Augustulus another, was not Roman life also 
 begun by one youth and ended by another ? And is not 
 the whole Hegelian phrase, for all its pretentiousness, 
 devoid of real meaning and value ? " This principle 
 (Christ) is the pivot upon which the world rotates. 
 From it history starts and to it returns. God is subject, 
 Creator of Heaven and Earth, yet it is not in this power 
 that revelation consists, but in the Sonship by which He 
 has differentiated His own personality. Spirit exists 
 only in so far as it is conscious of an object, and of itself 
 as object. Thus that Other which God sets outside of 
 
 ' Hegel, op. cil., p. 77. " Ibid., p. 147. 
 
 'Ibid., p. 3IO. *Ibid., p. 833. 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 79 
 
 Himself is Himself ; and in His contemplation of Him- 
 self as Other, love and spirit exist. We are aware of 
 God as spirit when we are aware of Him as Three in 
 One, and it is from this principle that the history of the 
 world has developed." ^ And this is what is put forward 
 as the philosophy of history — ^these ravings that might 
 have fallen from the lips of a delirious monk whose 
 brain was fevered by the writings of the Dominicans. 
 Hegel is indeed one of the most appalling figures in the 
 intellectual history of the human race. Not on his own 
 account — there have always been cobweb weavers, and 
 many of them have wrapped their threadbare thought 
 in a magnificent diction of their own invention — ^but 
 because of his influence on his contemporaries. One is 
 almost impelled to believe that the faculty of judgment 
 either does not exist in man, or is never used by him, 
 when one realizes, after reading the works of Hegel, 
 that this oracular utterance of a tissue of unmeaning 
 phantasies, this ignorant jugglery with unreal and arbi- 
 trary words, called concepts, was received, not only by 
 Germany, but by the world at large, as a revelation of 
 the most profound wisdom; finds, too, the Hegelian 
 dialectic, with its arid and valueless formulae of thesis, 
 antithesis, and synthesis, accepted by a whole generation 
 as a law of thought," and Hegel still regarded as a great 
 thinker, and named with pride by the German people. 
 The incapacity of the vast majority of mankind to apply 
 
 ' Hegel, op. cii., p. 330. 
 
 ' Krause could say, in Hegelian style, " The old world is the 
 thesis, the new world the antithesis, and Polynesia the synthesis," 
 and must be excused for having once taught, in the good old student 
 days, " Thirst is the thesis, beer the antithesis, and the synthesis under 
 the table." 
 
8o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the tests of intelligent criticism or discover the meaning 
 of words is indeed sufficiently proved by their acceptance 
 of the dogmas of positive religion. But the crushing 
 significance of Hegelianism lies in the fact that it was 
 precisely the most learned and distinguished men of his 
 time who fuddled themselves senseless with his frothy 
 beverage. Even his critics, Trendelburg (" Logical In- 
 vestigations ") , Ulrici ("Principles and Methods of 
 the Hegelian Philosophy "), and Heinrich Leo (" He- 
 gelinge ") are all slaves of the word. They talk round 
 about Hegel, make some small- reservation here, some 
 slight objection there, raise their eyebrows, lay finger on 
 nose, without seeing that they are all expending their 
 energy on a soap-bubble, as the Hegelian philosophy 
 was correctly described by Schopenhauer. 
 
 The four " truly philosophic historians " selected by 
 Edward Gans are really indistinguishable from the 
 philosophic theologians, whose history is concerned with 
 the four world kingdoms of the prophet Daniel, the six 
 days of Creation, and the Sabbath of Genesis. The brief 
 and concise quotation from William von Humboldt 
 which Hegel chose as motto for his " Lectures on the 
 Philosophy of History " — " World history has no mean- 
 ing without world government " — contains in eight 
 words all the wisdom which the so-called philosophic 
 historian spread into so many volumes. The man who 
 thirsts to know, to understand, asks, " What is the mean- 
 ing of all this human activity recorded in history? " He 
 receives the unctuous answer: " God has His own de- 
 signs for men, and they fulfil them without knowing it." 
 He who is not satisfied must go empty away. 
 
 However, since the days of antiquity, there have 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 8i 
 
 always been a few isolated thinkers who did not feel that 
 either human destiny or the existence of the universe 
 and of natural phenomena was satisfactorily explained 
 by this reference to God. They observed human affairs 
 closely and without prejudice, and since they found no 
 indication there of a common purpose, they forbore to 
 ascribe to history such a purpose as would solve its 
 riddles, and confined themselves to searching for its 
 causes. In Hippocrates' treatise on " Air, Water, and ) 
 Places" is the first recognition of the relation between | 
 human beings and the places in which they live. From 
 the time of the Father of Medicine onwards the influence 
 of the climate and the condition of the soil upon men and 
 their historical development has been brought forward , 
 as a subject for constant investigation. J. Bodin ^ rec- 
 ognized it as the determining factor in all historical 
 events, and quoted Galen and Polybius, who " aflErmant 
 asris temperiem necessario nos immutare " " state the 
 necessary effect upon us of the temperature of the air." 
 The excessive importance ascribed to climate by Montes- 
 quieu exposed him to the ridicule of Voltaire. Never- 
 theless, both Turgot, and later on Herder, devoted much 
 time and attention to the question, and Karl Ritter made 
 it the turning-point of his geographical teaching. 
 
 There is no doubt th at man is influenced_by his sur- 
 roundings. But it is an error to see in them the sole 
 explanation of his actions and development. Bagehot's * 
 argument against those who overstate the importance of 
 
 ' Joannes Bodinus, " Methodus ad Facilem Historiaium Cog- 
 nitionem." Cf. also Henri Baudrillart, "J. Bodin et Son Temps," 
 Paris, i8s3, PP. tso, 151. 
 
 'Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics," London, 1872. 
 
82 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 climate is irrefutable. He shows that in the Indian 
 Archipelago and in Australia two distinct races are 
 found inhabiting the same island, and draws the correct 
 inference that the cause of their different peculiarities 
 cannot be found in the climate, which is the same for 
 both. An even more illuminating instance can be given. 
 The climate of North America has not substantially 
 altered in the last four centuries. About 1500 America 
 was a wilderness swept by bands of barbaric warriors in 
 a rudimentary stage of civilization. By 19O0 civiliza- 
 tion there had reached the highest point known. New 
 men, in fact, had come and created a civilization such as 
 could not have been created by their savage forerunners. 
 In this case climate has had nothing to do with the ex- 
 planation of the change. To the objection that civiliza- 
 tion as it exists in America to-day is not of native growth, 
 but an importation from Europe, and that the influence 
 of climate is exerted on the origin and not on the spread 
 of civilization, one can reply that the wandering of peo- 
 ples from country to country and continent to con- 
 tinent constitutes an essential stage in histpry, to which 
 many important events in the development of States and 
 institutions, and much in the existing condition of 
 Europe, America and Australia must be referred. If 
 the influence of climate is to be excluded from the wan- 
 derings, because they neutralize its effect, it can no longer 
 be regarded as a determining factor in far the greatest 
 portion of history. 
 
 This cuts the ground from under the feet of T. H. 
 Buckle. Buckle collected a mass of valuable particulars, 
 wrote most useful chapters on the insubstantiality of 
 metaphysics and theology, on the falsity of the assump- 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 83 
 
 tion of a free will, on progress and its conditions, and the 
 childishness of the older school of historians. He has 
 done solid and suggestive work on certain sections of 
 English history ; but his initial assumption that the one 
 determining factor in the fate of nations is climate and 
 the conditions of the soil, is an obvious fallacy. " If," ^ 
 he says, " we consider man's constant contact with the 
 external world, we shall be convinced that there is an 
 inner connection between the actions of man and the 
 laws of Nature." This is correct. But the " laws of 
 Nature " must not be limited to climate and the con- 
 ditions of the soil. All the laws of Nature affect man, 
 and among them those, indeed, principally that govern 
 his thought and feeling. There is no doubt that man- 
 kind was originally, like every other sort of living thing, 
 a product of the external conditions under which he had 
 to live. But, once adapted to the universal conditions of 
 existence on this planet, his action is far more governed 
 by acquired characteristics than by the peculiarities of 
 different localities. Auguste Comte is nearer to the 
 truth than Buckle when he says : " The history of society 
 is dominated by the history of the human spirit." ^ As 
 a matter of fact, all human activity is determined by the 
 human spirit, which finds its stimuli in human needs. 
 It is here that we seek in the last resort the key to all 
 action, whether individual or general — that is, to history 
 itself. Comte's famous division of human development 
 into three stages, called by him theological, metaphysical, 
 and scientific, based as we have seen on an idea of Vico's, 
 
 * Buckle, op. cit., vol. i., p. 31. 
 
 ' Auguste Comte, " Cours de Philosophie Positive," Paris, 1839, 
 vol. iv., p. 460. 
 
84 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 is arbitrary in so far as it suggests a stern succession in 
 events really contemporaneous. 
 
 In the theological period man's thought is animistic 
 and anthropomorphic : he endows Nature with life, and 
 personifies its phenomena, and invents gods. In the 
 metaphysical his thought is deductive: he approaches 
 phenomena with definite hypotheses, in the light of 
 which he connects and co-ordinates what he sees. In the 
 scientific, finally, he proceeds by induction, observation 
 and experiment, and adapts his thought to the conditions 
 of reality. It is, of course, possible that at some remote 
 period in the past all thought was theological or meta- 
 physical in form, although there are many indications 
 that there have at every time been a few men 
 whose thought was scientific and conditioned by the 
 actual. One thing is certain: that even at the present 
 day the vast majority are still in the theological and 
 metaphysical period, and only a tiny minority has 
 reached the scientific stage. Comte's division is only 
 valuable as a historical explanation in so far as it throws 
 a certain light on the processes and development of 
 human thinking, and on the ignorance, superstition, and 
 error at the root of so much human activity. It is true 
 that mankind was originally profoundly ignorant, and 
 acquired any knowledge only by a slow and painful ef- 
 fort. But the establishment of this fact, and the dis- 
 covery of nomenclature to describe it, does not in itself 
 entitle Comte to be regarded as a philosophic historian. 
 
 ^Tl_Nlarx_is in one sense the antithesis, in another 
 the complement, of Auguste Comte. The latter centres 
 the whole mechanism of history in the human spirit, of 
 whose movements it is the effect; the former views all 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 85 
 
 his torical e vents nierelj_as the resuk of man's endeavour^ 
 to^jugglj^^is jmmediatephysicd needs. According to 
 him, the law of property determines all the forms of 
 society and "the State. The desire for possession is the 
 driving force in human activity, and the struggle for 
 earthly goods at once the goal of all pohtics, the mean- 
 ing of all institutions, and the cause of every legal suit.* 
 Vico had regarded history as substantially a conflict be- 
 tween rich and poor, although he admitted the force of 
 other considerations. Marx is certainly on the right 
 track in lo oking upon man 's needs a s. the ca use of his 
 aciiaiWj but he makes the mistake of conceiving of need 
 in too limited a sense. It is not enough for a man to 
 have his hunger and thirst satisfied, and his body clothed 
 and adorned ; he has intellectual and spiritual needs that 
 are as a rule far more acute than his merely vegetative 
 ones. The critics of the Marxian view of history have 
 pointed to numerous important events that cannot with- 
 out violence be referred to strictly economic causes. 
 Alexander's conquests, the occupation of Spain by the 
 Moors, and the seven hundred years of war there 
 against their domination, the Hundred Years' War be- 
 tween France and England, the Napoleonic campaigns, 
 the Puritan settlement in North America — certainly 
 
 * Maix himself sums up his theory as follows: "The sum total 
 of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of 
 society — the real foundation on which rise legal and political super- 
 structures, and to which correspond definite forms of social con- 
 sciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the 
 general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of 
 life. Itisnot the cojisciousness of men that determines their existence, 
 but, on the contrary, thgir social existence determines their conscious- 
 ness" (Karl Marx, "Criticism of Political Economy," edited by Karl 
 Kautsky, Stuttgart, 1897, Preface, p. xi.). 
 
86 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 none of these events originated in the acquisition or 
 division of property. 
 
 With naive anthropomorphism men believed that 
 their desire to comprehend the meaning of life and of 
 the world could be satisfied from the contemplation of 
 the history of the world, although humanity occupies no 
 larger place in the universe than any order of ferns or 
 insects, and the history of mankind can go as far and no 
 farther towards the solution of the riddle of the universe 
 than the life and development of the polar bear or the 
 cockchafer. The customary philosophy of history pre- 
 tends to discover in the history of mankind an answer to 
 the eternal questions whence, whither, why, and where- 
 fore, and ascribes to it a purpose comparable to the crud- 
 est theological inventions of primitive man. This teleo- 
 logical philosophy of history has no scientific value, 
 and may be completely neglected by any reasonable man. 
 Less discreditable to human intelligence is that causal 
 philosophy of history which neither finds nor seeks for 
 any purpose in history, and is modestly content to in- 
 vestigate the causes of human action. Hitherto its re- 
 sults have certainly been very incomplete and dubious, 
 and it has systematized no convincing explanation of the 
 laws of human development and the course of historical 
 events. 
 
 Every philosophic historian who is what is called 
 materialistic — everyone, that is to say, who on principle 
 refrains from the dreams or the delirium of metaphysics 
 — tends to see man in one aspect only, and not man as a 
 whole, as he lives, and moves, and has his being, as he 
 suffers, seeks, and loses his way. This is true even of 
 Marx, even of Buckle. But a -philosophy of history 
 
CUSTOMARY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 87 
 
 which thus fails to present the whole living man, with 
 all his idiosyncrasies, is necessarily false. For it is this 
 whole living man who composes the history which the 
 philosophy of history has to explain. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 
 
 A TRUE understanding of the matter and meaning of 
 history is not to be obtained either by the anecdotal 
 method, which records events, and nothing but events, 
 with the delight of the gossiping barber; or by the in- 
 tellectual method, which seeks to discover causes and 
 events, and explains them in a more or less childish, 
 short-sighted, and arbitrary fashion; or the philo- 
 sophical, which, while claiming to deduce universal laws, 
 a general plan, direction, and goal from the multitude of 
 individual instances, has really only introduced subjective 
 preconceptions that are often of the most terrifyingly 
 foolish kind. All these methods must fail, because all 
 alike devote a diligence and devotion that is really piti- 
 able to the study of the inessential, while their eyes are 
 firmly closed to what is essential. The historian en- 
 deavours to realize the circumstances of an individual,^ 
 of a definite group or community, to discover by accurate 
 investigation the exact condition under which a particular 
 event took place. He tries to find the names of persons 
 and places, dates and turning-points in a man's career. 
 
 ' Thomas Carlyle, " On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic 
 in History," Lecture I. (I quote from an edition in one volume; 
 undated; Ward, Lock and Co.; p. 3) : "For, as I take it. Universal 
 History ... is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have 
 worked here." 
 
 88- 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 89 
 
 But what is the object of all this concrete individual 
 knowledge ? It may afford esthetic satisfaction, but not 
 real knowledge. 
 
 If history is to be anything more than a mere collec- 
 tion of stories and tales, if it is to do anything more than 
 while away the tedium of the reader like any other 
 imaginative story, jt must^^ve a picture .Q£.jhe life of 1 
 manki nd : must show the means by which the human 
 species has gradually occupied the earth's surface and \ 
 established itself upon it, the ends at which it aims, the 
 means by which it pursues them ; the forces, internal or 
 external, that determine its actions; the emotional and i 
 intellectual elements of its consciousness, the impulses ' 
 that dominate the habits that control it, and the means 
 by which it satisfies its needs. In one word, history, if i 
 it is to teach anything worth knowing, must not be the ; 
 history of this or that individual, but of humanity. 
 
 The only point of view from which sound conclusions ' 
 are to be obtained as to the action and existence of 
 humanity is that from which it is viewed as j^art by 
 the^nafcural order, and not apart from and elevated above 
 it. Humanity is one among the animal species that 
 contend together for the possession of the eartJi, or di- 
 vide it among themselves, without disturbing competi- 
 tion ; only it is, by reason of its more highly developed 
 brain and nerves, more capable than any other of acquir- 
 ing very favourable conditions by adaptation to, and 
 alteration of, the given environment. What we want, 
 then, is to_obseryeJts_ behaviour under _the most varied 
 circumstances, keeping attention focussed on attributes 
 of universal significance, and not on such so-called " his- 
 torical " facts as the Christian and surname of any 
 
90 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 individual, the place and time of his birth, and the bench 
 on which he sat at school before he got Into trousers. 
 Suppose we are investigating, not man, but some other 
 animal species. To avoid transgressing into the regions 
 of imagination, I will not say suppose an inhabitant of 
 Mars came to earth, not with any such hostile intention 
 as Wells ascribes to our planetary neighbours, but simply 
 in order to inform himself about the ways and habits of 
 the highest living species upon this earth. Let us rather 
 take any animal species. For example, take the ants, 
 which have been so lovingly and thoroughly studied by 
 Huber, Forel, Lubbock, and Wasmann. We can watch 
 them building streets and towns; see them engaged on 
 warlike or predatory expeditions ; see their domestic and 
 family life, their social institutions, their class system, 
 the animals they keep for milking, their cultivation of 
 nourishing mushrooms. All this is worth knowing: it 
 has a meaning and an interest for us. But would it occur 
 to any investigator to record with painful exactitude the 
 day and spot in a certain wood where the battle was 
 fought between the armies of the Formica rufa and 
 Lasius alienus, and the names of the leaders and heroes 
 on either side; the duration of the reign of a certain 
 queen in any heap, the manner in which the youthful 
 swarms are driven from the parent heap, and when they 
 founded new heaps, etc. ? Had the students of ant life 
 lost themselves in such tedious detail, and attempted to 
 relate the lives of individual ants, and their accidental 
 relationships, encounters, and adventures. Instead of 
 being held in high estimation for their knowledge of 
 nature they would have been laughed at as fools, even 
 had they written most poetical biographies of ants in 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 91 
 
 the approved anthropomorphic fashion. In so far as 
 they were successful therein, our Interest would have 
 been aroused, not by ants, but by men dressed up and 
 disguised as ants; and while we might once more have 
 enjoyed the artistic creation, we should have acquired no 
 knowledge. The ant student will recognize that every 
 activity of the species under observation displays certain 
 common traits, and responds In a certain regular way to 
 given circumstances; that certain characteristics of sen- 
 sation, will, and action are common to all the individuals 
 composing it. He will then endeavour to discover the 
 common element, and prove Its constant recurrence amid 
 the changing conditions of time and place, while he neg- 
 lects the accidental Individuals In whom the universal 
 characteristics of the species happen to be expressed. In 
 this way he can extract what is really worth knowing 
 from the swarming activity of the ant, and give us an 
 Intimate knowledge of Its life. 
 
 It may be objected that what he gives us is natural 
 history but not history, and the two ideas must not be 
 confounded. " History," says Barth,* " is the history 
 of man as distinct from natural history : the distinction 
 is more than two thousand years old." The distinctlqn 
 is artificial; It h as no reaLexistence. The answer to 
 Earth's further statement that : " The first difference 
 between natural and human history is that the former is 
 concerned with the species, the latter with society 
 within the species," Is that society Is the condition of the 
 existence of the species, the form It has evolved In the 
 struggle for existence, just as the ant-heap is for the ants, 
 
 ' Dr. Paul Barth, " The Philosophy of History as Sociology," Leip- 
 zig, 1897, p. 2. 
 
92 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 which do not live as isolated individuals, and that the 
 one species can no more be described apart from society 
 than the other apart from the heap. At least, beyond 
 a certain stage in development, life in society js identical 
 with_the life of the human species. The ideas are in- 
 separable; and there is no justification for the antithesis 
 between the history and natural history of man. 
 
 Equally fallacious are the other apparent objections 
 to the view that, in investigating and recording human 
 development, the individual, as accidental, must be 
 neglected, and attention devoted to the universal 
 peculiarities of the human species that are displayed in 
 individual action. The reason why the fate of any 
 particular ant appears to us of no importance when we 
 are studying the species biologically is simply that we are 
 not ants. If we were, we should not be satisfied to know 
 that wars have been waged, battles fought, and captives 
 taken by different nations among the ants, and we should 
 also seek to know the fate met by this or that ant in 
 battle or slavery, and the details of this or that cam- 
 paign. The inhabitants of Mars may view human 
 history with the detachment with which we regard the 
 existence of the ant ; but since historical research is not, 
 as a matter of fact, undertaken by Martians, but by men, 
 it is natural that, instead of confining themselves to the 
 observation and record of features of universal appli- 
 cation, they should dwell on the accidental incidents of 
 concrete persons, and enter into all the ins and outs of 
 their earthly existence. 
 
 This fact involves the naive admission that history, in 
 so far as it clings to concrete events and individual 
 action, does not contain objective truths of universal 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 93 
 
 application. Instead of affording scientific knowledge 
 of the life of the human species, it tends to reflect the 
 subjective emotions of attraction and repulsion. Sym- 
 pathy with certain individuals, satisfaction or dissatis- 
 faction with certain events, tends, in a word, to 
 reproduce the psychical and emotional atmosphere of a. 
 stupid tea-party. In so far it is no more than a rather 
 solemn form of gossip, and in no sense that natural his- 
 tory which it must be if it is to deserve the attention of 
 earnest seekers after truth. 
 
 The attempt to regard the life of man in space and 
 time from the same objective standpoint as that of the 
 ant meets with another objection, that is brought for- 
 ward more generally, and frequently with a good deal of 
 feeling. It is said that to place mankind on the same 
 level as any other animal species, high or low, is an insult 
 to the dignity of man. The spirituaJLexistence of man- 
 kind and of every individual man sets him in a world 
 apart, with its own riddles to be answered and its own 
 far-reaching truths to be discovered. Animal life offers 
 nothing of comparable significance. This indignant 
 claim is but a belated and impotent outburst of the same 
 anthropomorphic vanity that once rose in wrath against 
 the teaching of Copernicus: the idea that the earth 
 inhabited by man was not the centre of the universe, but 
 merely a subordinate member of a system regulated by 
 the sun, a handful of dust lost in the endlessness of the 
 All. Nowadays the idea of our planet as predominant is 
 left to childish ignorance and obsolete theology. But 
 there was another outburst when the comfortable as- 
 sumption of the supreme importance and significance of 
 the human race was again disturbed by Linnaeus's in- 
 
94 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 elusion of primates — apes, lemurs, and, oddly enough, 
 even bats — in one order. It grew to a tempest when 
 Darwin gave definiteness to the Linnaan idea by main- 
 taining a blood-relationship between men and monkeys, 
 which has since been proved by Uhlenhuth's bioch emical 
 experiments on serum reaction. 
 
 From the point of view of natural science it is proved 
 beyond dispute that the human family belongs to a 
 certain family of animals, and through it is connected 
 with all animals, and probably with all living things. Big 
 words may be used by those who fulminate against such 
 a relationship, but the proofs of it are incontestable. It 
 is therefore accepted that rnan is an animal like anxother 
 animal, so far as corporeal faculty and organic a ctivity 
 goes. But that is all. The consequences are not faced. 
 Very unwillingly, and after long struggles, the geocentric 
 conception was abandoned; with an entire disregard of 
 logic the anthropocentrifi^^isstill maintained. In spite 
 of Darwin and Uhlenhuth, historians and historic 
 philosophers still regard man as the central fact of 
 creation, as the goal to which everything in nature works, 
 and in which it finds its significance. Did man really 
 dominate the universe, or even the earth, in this manner, 
 every detail of his life and activity would acquire an 
 importance to which that of no other living thing would 
 be comparable. But it is not so. It is a childish illusion 
 by which man tries to hold the field against the advance 
 of science. 
 
 Human vanity and prejudice apart, the human species 
 appears as one special form of life upon the earth and in 
 the universe, influencing natural forces and the destiny 
 of our planet no more and no less than an order of flies 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 95 
 
 or mosses.. There are species enough on the earth whose 
 influence has been far greater than man's upon the 
 minutiae that compose the external surface of our planet : 
 its main lines remain unaffected by any of them. Tiny 
 creatures, often invisible to the naked eye — fora- 
 miniferaea, bryozoa, coral polypi, shellfish, and crustaceae /- 
 — ^have built islands, heaped up mountains, created or 
 transformed continents, directed winds and currents, y: 
 determined the courses of streams, fixed boundaries to 
 the ocean, and influenced the climate of whole regions of 
 the world. Compared with this, al^lmari's creations and 
 transformations sink into insignificance. The few 
 isthmuses he has dug through, the few canals he has 
 constructed, the few tunnels he has made through the 
 mountains, are gunY_un^d^er takings ijij^omparisqnwith^ 
 vast stra tifications of chalk an d mussel-shell s ; and many 
 a South Sea atoll shows more real creative effort, meas- 
 ured in miles, than any of man's undertakings. Were all 
 life extinguished upon earth, there would remain far 
 fewer traces of the former existence of man, after the 
 stone, wood, and metal erections had rotted away from 
 its surface, than of the animals, who are so much more 
 numerous and so much more deeply fixed. And at the 
 last analysis, human life, traced from its animal origin, 
 through all the stages of its historical development down 
 to its final inevitable extinction, appears as no more than 
 an inessential episode of cosmic life : onie of the countless j 
 epiphenomena accompanying the complex of eternal 
 forces at work, and no more important than this or that \ 
 flickering of the northern light, than the growth and ; 
 subsidence of a mountain, the rise and disappearance of ' 
 a comet. 
 
96 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 No student of natural science now believes in the 
 eternity of the earth and the planetary system. Obser- 
 vation of all the available processes of the universe com- 
 pels the assumption of an endless creation and disruption 
 of the combinations we call planets. The earth, like 
 every other mass, body, sun, or solar system, had a 
 beginning as such, and will have an end as such, what- 
 ever the movements may have been that caused it to 
 come into being, that will continue after it has ceased to 
 be. And man will not survive the earth. This is 
 obvious except to the spiritualists^ who believe that the 
 species, incarnated in astral bodies, will be translated to 
 another star when existence upon the earth is no longer 
 possible for it. Long before the earth is dissolved into 
 primary ions, long before it scorifies or freezes, all 
 differentiated forms of life will, in all probability, be 
 extinct upon it. This I hold in spite of a strong con- 
 viction that, however unfavourable natural conditions 
 may be, man is capaM^pf adaptations as yet undreanied 
 of. But when the human race is extinct, when the last 
 trace of its existence, the last bone, the last bit of human 
 handiwork, has disappeared, and the earth has followed 
 after the other stars in the eternal cycle of generation 
 and dissolution, what, then, will be the significance of 
 that human history the orthodox historian obstinately 
 places above and outside of the processes of nature? 
 
 Such a consideration Involves the standpoint of eter- 
 nity; from which, of course, only the eternal can be 
 regarded. Humanity, however, is finite. The views of 
 a small portion of this finltude such as ourselves can only 
 have a value when they are accommodated to our limited 
 vision. Philosophically, we are entitled to an interest 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 97 
 
 in whatever happens to humanity, although we know 
 that it must one day pass away, and with It all that 
 thought of which it was the object; to an interest in 
 whatever happens to ourselves, although we stand in 
 the shadow of death, and the day must come when we 
 shall cease to be, ourselves and all that we have felt and 
 thought and made our intellectual possession. But this 
 interest is various in its nature, as are the needs from 
 which it arises and the satisfactions that it demands. 
 We have seen that, when aroused by anecdotes relative 
 to a particular time and place, it arises partly out of a 
 natural feeling of sympathy with whatever affects human 
 nature, and partly from the hunger of the imagination 
 for anything extraordinary, excessive or surprising, in 
 which case the interest is purely emotional and closely 
 akin to the aesthetic. It is the beauty, not the truth, of 
 the anecdote, then, that matters: a preference for the 
 probable or the possible exists only in so far as the 
 grown-up finds his jesthetic appreciation impeded by the 
 doubt and difficulty created in his mind by an anecdote 
 that is palpably fictitious. Schiller has expressed this 
 emotional and sesthetic interest : " Only what has never 
 happ ened never cangrow out of_date/^ It again ex- 
 plains why people cling more closely to stories of things 
 " that have never happened " than to any well-authenti- 
 cated narration of the dry bones of truth, and prefer the 
 unreliable but brilliant historian, or, more properly, 
 story-teller, to the conscientious investigator, who ven- 
 tures on no statement of which he is not practically 
 certain. But over and above this emotional and aesthetic 
 interest there is another — the scientific interest — ^which 
 has no use for concrete anecdotes of a merely entertain- 
 
98 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ing and moving kind, if they have nothing to teach and 
 represent no general truth. I am not forgetting that 
 even this intellectual interest is originally rooted in the 
 feeiings. It is, however, differentiated from the merely 
 emotional, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively, and 
 stands in much the same relation to it that artificial 
 attention, directed by judgment, and will, occupies 
 towards the purely natural response awakened by imme- 
 diate sense impressions, and sustained by sensations and 
 feelings. Ordinary history, with its tedious circumlocu- 
 tions and disproportionate interest in what is inessen- 
 tial, appears wholly trivial from the point of view of 
 such an intellectual interest, and the philosophy upon 
 which it rests wholly false, in so far as it aims, not 
 at drawing conclusions as to the origin and develop- 
 ment of man, but at throwing over it a net of artificial 
 fancies. 
 
 The inquiring mind of man, hungry for knowledge, 
 and dimly aware that written history has hitherto failed 
 to give it what it wants, has attempted in a number of 
 different ways to get at the sources of real information. 
 Thus, out of the desire to understand the whole range of 
 man's natural history, there have arisen a group of 
 special sciences devoted to the study of man^ Anatomy 
 gives instruction as to his structure, physiology as to the 
 workings of his organic mechanism. In the course of 
 their development these two branches have expanded 
 into comparative anatomy and general biology. They 
 have ceased to be sciences of man in becoming sciences 
 of life in general, in which man takes his place beside 
 many other living forms, and in so far they do not belong 
 to our subject. A specifically human character was long 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 99 
 
 maintained — ^longer than by anatomy or physiology — ^by 
 psychology, which tries to lay highroads across the world 
 of consciousness. But it, too, has recently entered the 
 wider sphere of animal psychology, thus following the 
 universal tendency that directs all branches of the sci- 
 ence of man that really have knowledge for their object 
 to transcend the boundaries that limit them to him, and 
 claim to be co-ordinated with universal being and the 
 world as a whole, where man and humanity play but a 
 subordinate part. Anatomy, physiology, and psychology 
 have collected the positive material out of which a 
 human science has already been built up — anthro- 
 pology — ^which does for him what zoology does for 
 any animal species. More dubious is the position of the 
 subdivision of anthropology, known as ethnology, the 
 study of peoples. It is a hybrid, half natural, half social 
 science. Proceeding from the assumption that each 
 people presents a definite unity created by nature, it 
 endeavours to describe, and where possible to elucidate, 
 the characteristics of peoples, the distinctions and resem- 
 blances between them, the changes they have undergone 
 in time and place. But the assumption is not proved, 
 and is very difficult of proof: it is far more probable that 
 peoples are artificial jtni purely jjolitical creations, and 
 that their origin, transformation, and destruction, slow 
 though it may often be, is the work of man. Thus any 
 description of them has no really scientific Interest, and 
 can teach nothing of mankind that is not more com- 
 pletely and searchingly revealed by anthropology. From 
 this specious, fundamental error of regarding as a 
 natural organism what is really the work of man ethnol- 
 ogy naturally obtains a number of false conclusions: it 
 
loo THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 introduces preconceived opinions into the observation 
 and description of peoples, characterizes them by 
 factitious traits, and presents a false picture by means of 
 statistical averages and audacious generalizations, all by 
 way of deducing a national psychology that does not 
 correspond with reality, and altogether is little adapted 
 to the spread of knowledge. The extension of history 
 into the unrecorded past has led to the creation of a 
 special branch — primitive history — ^which differs from 
 history principally in so far as, in the absence of any 
 proved and provable evidence, it has of necessity to do 
 without exact delineation of isolated events, the period 
 at which they happened, and the persons actively or 
 passively concerned in them, and to confine itself to the 
 general features of the existence of human individuals 
 and groups. Primitive history seehj to know the physical 
 constitution of early man, his intellectual capacity and 
 manner of speaking, living, feeding, and dressing, his 
 progress in crafts, art and knowledge, his loves and 
 hates, battles, alliances, wanderings and settlements; 
 ignorance of the names of particular leaders, warriors 
 and magicians does not disturb it. Any accurate knowl- 
 edge of such names as might possibly come its way, by a 
 collocation of circumstances that is indeed almost incon- 
 ceivable, could add nothing to the edifice of primitive 
 history, significant as it might be for the philologist. 
 The results which it can give are a real contribution to 
 the natural history of the human species, and not a mere 
 rubbish-heap of anecdotes, in which what is essential 
 is overlaid and hidden by what is unimportant. When 
 the methods of primitive history are applied to human- 
 ity as it is in the present, and as records reveal it to have 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY lor 
 
 been in the past, we have the history of morals; and 
 when we leave the material forms and conditions of 
 existence, and envisage the phenomena presented by the 
 life of man in groups, and when regularly organized 
 into societies, we see rising before us the science of 
 sociology, new, and as yet confined within no strict limi- 
 tations. Sociology does really deserve the name of 
 science, since it investigates the laws expressed in the 
 form and operation, the morphology and dynamics, of 
 human life when organized in society and the State, and 
 tries to understand how and why society and the State { 
 have arisen and assumed the folrms they do as a matter, 
 of fact present. 
 
 The purpose of sociology is, by definition, closely akin 
 to that of the philosophy of history, but there is between 
 them a fundamental difference of method. Whether 
 inevitably or no, the philosophy of history has, as a 
 matter of fact, always been deductive, while sociology is 
 indu ctive. The former is subjective dreaming, the latter 
 the collection and arrangement of objective fact, from 
 which the mere co-operation of a number of students 
 tends almost automatically to sift out the subjective 
 points of view which do undoubtedly exist. The one 
 handles its facts with despotic violence, the other treats 
 them with respect and deference. One can foresee that 
 when sociology has fully mastered and analyzed its ma- 
 terial, it will completely relegate the philosophy of his- 
 tory to a position alongside of dogmatic and apologetic 
 theology, in that museum of human errors to which 
 augury, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, and all 
 the other silly games that once passed as sciences, have 
 already been consigned. Wundt is a great thinker, but 
 
I02 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 when he called the philosophy of history the becoming, 
 and sociology the being, of society, he was guilty of an 
 artificial distinction between identical things that must, 
 with all respect, be called a mere play upon words. An 
 understanding of the being of society Includes a knowl- 
 edge of its becoming, and, conversely, becoming can only 
 be understood from such a correct observation of being 
 as shows it to have been determined at all periods of 
 human history by the same forces and laws, those forces 
 and laws which have also been the condition of becoming. 
 To take an analogous case, the laws of geology were not 
 understood until It was realized that throughout the past, 
 as far back as the original formation of the earth, the 
 same chemical, physical, and mechanical laws prevailed 
 which are operative in this planet to-day, and that the 
 most ancient strata were formed in the same manner as 
 those which have just appeared beneath our eyes. Sqci- 
 olpgy is destined to occupy the highest place in the 
 encyclopaedia of human sciences, since it co-ordinates the 
 results of all the rest ; It is the keystone, maintaining and 
 crowning their span ; it is the completion of anthropology 
 on the intellectual side. 
 
 Barth ^ sums up the relation between sociology and 
 history in the dazzling formula : " History seems to me 
 to be concrete sociology in the sense in which a drama is 
 concrete psychology." This is only true within limita- 
 tions. A drama is a poetic invention. It could only 
 serve as a source for the serious study of human char- 
 acter were It that faithful reflection of actuality which 
 it practically never is, even when the poet has genius 
 
 ' Dr. Paul Barth, " The Philosophy of History as Sociology," Leip- 
 zig, 1897, p. iv. 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 103 
 
 enough to penetrate the hidden depths of character, and 
 instinctively divine the complicated interaction of the 
 forces at work there. Zola imagined, when he plunged 
 his invented characters in a flood of invented action, that 
 he was following the method of Claude Bernard, and 
 making scientific experiments. His " experimental 
 romances " are the outcome of this remarkable Idea of 
 his. Barth has some sort of experimental drama in his 
 mind. 
 
 Certainly, however, it would never occur to any 
 scientific psychologist to use a drama as material for 
 research, and obtain from it any valid conclusions, even 
 about the psychology of its author. History can only 
 be called concrete sociology In so far as the historian is 
 certain of the events which he describes, and conscious of 
 the sociological mechanism that moves his human 
 marionettes — ^two assumptions that have hitherto hardly 
 ever been realized. But if Barth simply means that 
 history, if correctly narrated, is sociological casuistry — 
 is, that is to say, a collection of examples illustrating the 
 laws established by sociology as governing the being and 
 activity of man — one can agree with him, for to this 
 extent the formula contains its own proof. Concrete 
 historical narrative, that Is to say. Is only useful to en- 
 liven the austerity of sociology, to make it more at- 
 tractive and less dull, and give It some aesthetic and 
 literary charm. At the same time the true science of 
 human existence cannot be concrete history, but general 
 sociology. We may put it thus: Sociology is history 
 without proper names; history Is sociology made con- 
 crete and individual. The relation between them is that 
 between algebra and arithroetic. The subject-matter 
 
104 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 and content of each is the biology of the species, homo 
 sapiens. 
 
 For sociology the present affords a more fruitful field 
 of study than the past, because it can be more precisely 
 observed with the aid of exact enumeration and measure- 
 ment. At a pinch it could do without history, although 
 it must be admitted that certain survivals are more com- 
 prehensible when we know their origin and the part they 
 once played; but history without sociology is a mere 
 collection of anecdotes or philosophical speculation, sub- 
 jective and devoid of scientific value, such as deserves the 
 contempt of old Sextus Empiricus, who called history 
 d/i£^o8os v\-q, a confused collection of accidents. 
 
 When the existence and activities of mankind are 
 once viewed in the right light, it is clearly revealed as 
 one among many living species, but far more interesting 
 than any of them, both objectively and subjectively, 
 because it has attained the highest stage of Intellectual 
 development of them all, and because we ourselves be- 
 long to It. We comprehend that its destiny Is condi- 
 tioned by the development of natural tendencies under 
 the pressure of the outer world. To arrive at any results 
 about it, we must study it on the same plan and by the 
 same methods that are applied to every other living 
 species. Observation and its results are nullified by the 
 introduction of any preconceived hypothesis for which 
 there Is no foundation in objective fact — ^for instance, 
 that the human species occupies an exceptional position 
 towards nature and the universe as a whole, and enjoys 
 privileges shared by no other species — If, in fact, we are 
 childishly enslaved by the anthropocentric superstition. 
 Freed from this venerable error, we may profitably ob- 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 105 
 
 serve man, and construct an accurate picture of his nature 
 from his behaviour under dififerent circumstances. All 
 knowledge of mankind, all anthropology in the widest 
 sense, must be and subserve biology. This is as true of 
 psychophysics and introspective psychology as of anat- 
 omy, embryology, and physiology. Sociology, too, is 
 biological, and must, in so far as it claims to be scientific, 
 follow the statistical method in its descriptions, and the 
 psychological in its interpretation, explanation, and 
 classification. History makes a useful contribution to 
 the natural history of mankind only when, as a form of 
 retrospective sociology, it throws light upon the universal 
 characteristics common to mankind as a whole. Were 
 its facts securely established and the psychology of 
 primitive man accessible, it might complete sociology by 
 means of a scientific account of development, which 
 would settle the vexed question whether human nature 
 has maintained its original qualities, its basic instincts, 
 and typical reactions unchanged throughout the ages, or 
 whether it, in the course of thousands of years, displays 
 something more than formal adaptation — ^namely, real 
 change and progress. But psychology remains the most 
 important branch of the science of man. It is through 
 his intellectual activity that man is distinguished from 
 the other living creatures dwelling beside him on the 
 earth ; it is his intellect that must be studied if he is to be 
 represented different, as he is, from all other living 
 things. Psychology must supply sociology with an ex- 
 planation of the phenomena of the common life of 
 man: the rise and development of institutions, the na- 
 ture and activity of the State, the forms of government, 
 religion, law, morality, and national intercourse. For 
 
io6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 all these departments of human life correspond to needs 
 of human nature and an understanding of them depends 
 on psychology, and never on history alone. John Stuart 
 Mill enunciates this principle in his "Logic": "The 
 explanation of historical phenomena lies in the laws of 
 the human spirit " ; and Herbart ^ expressed the same 
 view almost at the same time: " There is no doubt that 
 the forces operative in society are psychological in their 
 origin." There is no use in knowing the visible origin 
 of institutions, and the course of their development to 
 existing forms, unless the intellectual peculiarities, 
 needs, impulses, and efforts out of which they grew, and 
 must have grown, can also be displayed. Only then can 
 we begin to understand them. History can assist us to 
 this knowledge in various ways. It can refer the com- 
 plex phenomena to simple causes, such as can be fully 
 penetrated and understood. It can remove the obscurity 
 that hides their connection with definite human peculiar- 
 ities and tendencies, by bringing forward a mass of ex- 
 amples to prove that man has always, at all times and 
 places, been actuated by similar needs, and sought to sat- 
 isfy them by the same method — a method always subject 
 to the conditions of his own nature. At the same time, it 
 can keep in sight certain exceptional situations valuable 
 as experiments, becausethey are favourable to the display 
 of certain psychic traits and peculiarities which remain 
 in the background under the average conditions of life, 
 and are therefore a^t to be overlooked. Sociology and 
 history, identical as concepts, are the product of human 
 psychology, and from them we can obtain a retrospect 
 of psychology itself. All the peculiarities of human 
 
 ' Herbart's Works, edited by Hartenstein, vol. vi., p. 33. 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 107 
 
 nature, those most obvious and those most profoundly 
 concealed, are displayed in the manner of his reaction, 
 past and present, to impressions from the external 
 world, and in the terms he has made for himself with 
 life and with that world. The biologist who studies 
 these peculiarities by the clear light of reason, un- 
 clouded by any mystic haze, can determine from 
 them the laws according to which man has reacted 
 on his environment, and must continue to react upon 
 it so long as his nature does not undergo a complete 
 change. 
 
 An exact scientific knowledge of the general concrete 
 features of the life of the human species can only be 
 acquired by the observation of great masses of in- 
 stances — that is, from statistics. There is thus insight 
 in Schlozer's witty epigram: "History is statistics in 
 movement, statistics history in repose." But it is neces- 
 sary to look away from the general to the particular so 
 soon as the causes of phenomena are touched, and an 
 explanation required of the how and why, as well as 
 the what, of institutions, habits, etc. In other words, 
 the natural history of man is psychology, and psychol- 
 ogy is necessarily individual. 
 
 There is no psychology of the crowd. What goes by 
 that name is an error, a word without meaning, or else 
 the unimportant result of a multiplication of individual 
 psychology, unimportant because addition or multiplica- 
 tion of a quantity does not alter its nature or convey 
 any further information about it. Thus there is some- 
 thing paradoxical in the name of the new science of 
 sociology, since it cannot be the science of society, but 
 only of the individuals that compose society — ^that is. 
 
io8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 only anthropology. We cannot approach society sci- 
 entifically until we possess an exact knowledge of the 
 component parts of which it is the sum. 
 
 Auguste Comte goes so far as to declare that the 
 individual man absolutely does not exist; there is 
 nothing but humanity.^ He denies that the develop- 
 ment of society can be deduced from the peculiarities of 
 the individual. This opinion is shared by Wundt ; ^ and 
 even Ernest Mach, who would exclude metaphysics 
 from philosophy, departs so far from this view as to 
 conceive of humanity as a unified organism, " a poly- 
 pus," whose members " have lost their organic rela- 
 tionships." Here he is drawing upon something that is 
 not the result of observation. The characteristic 
 that he introduces into the infinitely complex and 
 perpetually changing picture presented by human be- 
 ings, and called humanity, exists in his mind, not in 
 reality. 
 
 Such propositions lead a superficial writer like Gum- 
 plowicz ^ to make the rash assertion that " science has 
 done with individualism and atomism," although the 
 most casual perusal of the literature of the subject shows 
 that such a statement has no foundation. Simmel * 
 says: " Nothing is real save the movements of the mole- 
 
 ' Auguste Comte, " Cours de Philosophie Positive," fourth edition, 
 Paris, 1877, vol. vi., p. 590: "From the static or dynamic point of 
 view, man is really and fundamentally an abstraction; reality belongs 
 to humanity alone." 
 
 " W. Wundt, " Logic," second edition, Stuttgart, 1895, vol. ii., p. 
 891. f 
 
 " Ludwig Gumplowicz, "Principles of Sociology,'' second edition, 
 Vienna, 1905. 
 
 * Georg Simmel, " Problems of the Philosophy of History," Leip- 
 zig, 1892, p. 39. 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 109 
 
 cules and the laws that regulate them. No peculiar 
 law can be assumed as governing the sum of such move- 
 ments when grouped together in a totality." Spencer ^ 
 says the same thing: "A totality of men possesses the 
 qualities that can be deduced from the qualities of the 
 individuals. . . . The qualities of the units determine 
 the qualities of the combination." H. S. Maine dis- 
 tinguishes the society of ancient from that of modem 
 times. Previously the sociological unit was the family. 
 " But the unit of modern society is the individual 
 man." Lotze says in the " Microcosm " : " The only 
 active points in the course of history are the minds of 
 living individuals." Schopenhauer ("Parerga and 
 Paralipomena ") says: "Peoples only exist in ab- 
 stracts ... it is the individuals that are real." Louis 
 Blanc sees only individuals in history: "Individualism 
 triumphed through Luther in religion, through Voltaire 
 and the Encyclopedists in the intellectual sphere, 
 through Montesquieu in economics, and through the 
 French Revolution in the world of reality." No cita- 
 tion of authorities is, however, necessary to prove that 
 individual men alone, and not a totality of men, whether 
 it be called people, class, society, or humanity, repre- 
 sent reality for the natural history of man, which we 
 have called sociology, or history looked at from a 
 sociological point of view. 
 
 The notion of regarding the abstraction " humanity " 
 as a reality must have come from theologians and meta- 
 physicians, who are in the habit of regarding the spirits 
 they have themselves created out of words as possessed. 
 
 'Herbert Spencer, "Introduction to Social Science," Paris, 1880, 
 p. SS- 
 
no THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of a matter-of-fact existence. In Ezekiel, chapter xvi., 
 we find the first comparison of Jerusalem to a man who 
 passes through childhood, grows up, takes a wife, is false 
 to her, and is stoned to death; and it is done with the 
 full consciousness of employing a merely poetic simile. 
 But Cicero was taking the image literally when he 
 found all the stages of human life reproduced in the 
 history of Rome — birth, adolescence, youth, maturity. 
 Seneca, the orator, was pleased with the notion, and 
 borrowed it from Cicero. Florus in the Preface to his 
 " Outline of Roman History," generalized the idea to 
 all peoples, in whose life he found " quattuor gradus 
 processusque " — the four stages and progresses of 
 human existence — 'birth, childhood, youth, age. Am- 
 mianus Marcellinus was satisfied with repeating the 
 words of Florus. St. Augustine goes a step farther. 
 He no longer confines himself to a political form, such 
 as a people, but sees the life of humanity as a whole as 
 that of an individual man; its life, like his, as a prog- 
 ress from childhood to youth, maturity and old age. 
 Whether he is comparing or identifying is not clear, 
 even to his own mind. Sometimes he begins by premis- 
 ing that he is using a figure of speech, but, as his 
 thought develops, he falls a victim to his own imag- 
 inative faculty, and his metaphor is transformed under 
 his pen to a living organism of flesh and blood. Pascal, 
 too, observes in the Preface to his " Traite du Vide ": 
 " We must look upon the continuity of the human race 
 throughout the centuries as the continued existence and 
 progressive experience of a single human being." He 
 thought to throw light upon the path of progress by 
 this fiction. It is, however, quite superfluous, since tra- 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY in 
 
 dition is handed on by each learned man to his suc- 
 cessors, and the young are instructed by their elders. It 
 is as easy to conceive of a progress of successive genera- 
 tions as of humanity as a single man profiting by the 
 lessons of the experience he gradually accumulates. 
 Auguste Comte boasted that his " positive philosophy " 
 did, in contradistinction to all theological and meta- 
 physical speculations, " subordinate imagination to ob- 
 servation." " But when, following the example of St. 
 Augustine and Pascal, he rejects the individual and 
 allows the totality alone to be real, he is maintaining a 
 conclusion that is not obtained from observation, but 
 simply and solely from imagination.^ 
 
 Simplified by dull and superficial minds, Pascal's 
 semi-rhetorical abstractions have suffered literal trans- 
 lation into a crude materialism. Infamous is not too 
 strong a word for the performance of von Lilienfeld. 
 With terrible seriousness, he takes society, or rather the 
 State, as an actual organism in the literal sense of the 
 
 ' Auguste Comte, " La Sociologie," edited by Emile Rigolage, Paris, 
 1897, p. 51. 
 
 ' The image used by Ezekiel, Cicero, Florus, and St. Augustine 
 is so natural and reasonable that it constantly occurred to writers 
 busied with historical considerations down to quite modern times, 
 without their being aware of their predecessors. There is obviously 
 a close relationship between them and Vico and Fontenelle in the 
 eighteenth century; St. Simon at the beginning, and Littre and Eduard 
 V. Hartmann in the third quarter, of the nineteenth, who all speak 
 of the life of a people or of humanity as resembling the life of an 
 individual: and Fontenelle, St. Simon, and Littre go further, and de- 
 clare that a people, like an individual, has in childhood only bodily 
 desires; in youth it grows up to labour and develop the imagination 
 in the form of poetry and art; in manhood it acquires intellectual 
 maturity, and turns to natural sciences and to philosophy. 
 
112 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 word, and proceeds to give an exact anatomical descrip- 
 tion of it. He displays the bones, joints, muscle, tissue 
 and nerves, the circulation, the limbs, and the internal 
 organs that nourish the creature and determine its 
 functions. That it is born, develops, overcomes disease, 
 grows old, and dies is obvious. Von Lilienfeld has not 
 enough imagination to go farther, and tell us whether 
 his State is an organism of the male or female sex, 
 whether it marries and has children, or spends its life in 
 unblessed solitude, and how its obsequies are celebrated 
 when it dies. From his description, its anatomy is 
 clearly that of a human being, or at least of a mammal. 
 Here again there is a lack of imagination. There Is no 
 necessity to suppose the State a mammal. It might 
 have been an articulated animal, a reptile, or a jelly-fish, 
 any of which would have avoided many difficulties and 
 been much more picturesque. Schaffle makes the same 
 mistake, although he maintained later, in defiance of 
 all probability, that his book, " Structure and Life of 
 the Social Body," was not meant to be taken literally, 
 but allegorically. In spite of Schaffle's recantation, 
 Rene Worms maintained his earlier point of view, to 
 which von Lilienfeld was faithful to the last. 
 
 It is humiliating to have to record that a group exists 
 to this day which supports and cherishes the marvellous 
 delusions of Schaffle and Lilienfeld, and even expands 
 them — a group that takes itself seriously and is taken 
 seriously by others, calls itself a sociological school, and 
 dignifies its play upon words by the prodigious name of 
 the "organistic method" — and that sociological con- 
 gresses, struggling to be scientific, have, with the 
 noblest intentions, gone so far as to enter into heated 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 113 
 
 discussions of what, after all, is mere play upon words, 
 mere drawing of analogies. 
 
 Metaphors apart, to look upon society. State, and 
 humanity as an actually living being is a primitive piece 
 of innocence worthy of the village wiseacre who ex- 
 plains the northern lights as the train of sparks rising 
 from the anvil, on which the axle of the earth is being 
 repaired by the smith ; or of the naughty schoolboy who 
 plays at being a sea-captain, moving over the surface of 
 the earth with an indiarubber fastened to the keel of 
 his steamer in order that he may play a trick on the 
 geographers by rubbing out the lines of latitude and 
 longitude, and even the equator. There is something 
 incomprehensible in this literal acceptance of a phrase, 
 this incapacity to grasp a metaphor, this diseased desire 
 to make a fetish of words. 
 
 The truth is that a number of men living together 
 under the same or similar conditions are no more one 
 living unity, one human being, in the sense in which 
 St. Augustine, Pascal, and Auguste Comte use the word, 
 than a number of locomotives collected in an engineer- 
 ing shop are one single locomotive. Human events are 
 the outcome of individual human activity, the reaction 
 of individuals upon circumstances originating in na- 
 ture and the activity of other human beings; they are 
 only explicable by a consideration of individual qual- 
 ities. Every mass movement, be it a war, a rebellion, a 
 crusade, a migration, a pilgrimage, is the outcome of the 
 actions of individual men, concerted for that purpose, 
 but capable of being regarded and estimated apart. 
 Every institution and the functions connected with it — 
 government and the duties of subjects, religion and the 
 
114 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 observance of Its rites, trade, credit, commerce, industry, 
 and the organization of classes — all have arisen out of 
 some definite human faculty which can only be studied 
 in the individual. 
 
 I am fully aware that human beings are biologically 
 interdependent, inasmuch as certainly all those who 
 belong to one race, and possibly all those who belong 
 to the species, are, in the last resort, related and 
 descended from the same primal parents from whom 
 they have inherited — ^not, indeed, as Weismann would 
 have us believe, the actual corporeal germ-cells now 
 living within them, but the tendencies transmitted 
 through the germ-cells of their ancestors. This bio- 
 logical interdependence is far from involving an organic 
 unity, in the sense in which the philosophic historian or 
 sociologist who believes in the " organistic method " 
 conceives it. For it is not limited to the human 
 species; it includes the other animal species, and, 
 presumably, all the types of life existent on the 
 earth, in the present or the most remote past, from the 
 unicellular organism to the most highly differentiated 
 human being. From the philosophical point of view, 
 the notion of such an interdependence of all living mat- 
 ter, of all life, is valuable; from the historical it is 
 sterile, since an organic unity of the State and of human- 
 ity, which, so far as it exists, exists in virtue of the inter- 
 dependence of the whole animal, and even the whole 
 vegetable, kingdom, is in no sense the key to the com- 
 prehension of a single historical event, a single human 
 institution. Paracelsus came much nearer the truth 
 when he called each man a microcosm, a world in 
 himself. In spite of the relationship existing between 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 115 
 
 human beings, in spite of the resemblance of members 
 of the same species to one another, in spite of an inter- 
 dependence not confined to members of the same type, 
 but extending to all life and to the world in its entirety 
 — in spite of all this, human actions can never be under- 
 stood except from the point of view of the individual. 
 For the organic impulses, in which human actions take 
 their rise, always express themselves through the indi- 
 vidual; it Is by the individual that they are felt, in him 
 they reach the surface of consciousness, in him they 
 arouse motives, aspirations, ideas, and judgments giving 
 birth to deeds. Unless investigation reaches down to 
 these individual roots of human action and behaviour, 
 no accurate explanation of the phenomena of the life of 
 societies, people, and States can be obtained. 
 
 Few words are responsible for so much mental con- 
 fusion as the psychology of the crowd and the psychol- 
 ogy of nations. Scipio Sighele's ^ object in his standard 
 work on " The Criminal Crowd " was to establish the 
 fact that people will do things when they are gathered 
 in great numbers that they would never do alone. The 
 fact itself can only be asserted with reservations, and is 
 capable of various interpretations. A lofty intellectual 
 standard is not to be expected of a crowd, even of one 
 composed of highly gifted individuals. The explanation 
 is simple, and not at all mysterious. The union of 
 numerous individuals in a crowd does not give rise to a 
 new superindividual, possessing an intellectual equip- 
 ment quite different from those of the units of which 
 the superindividual is composed. High intellectual at- 
 
 ^ Scipio Sighele, " La Folia Delinquente," second editioii, Turin, 
 1895. 
 
ii6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tributes — akri'butes that are, by definition, above the 
 average — are individually differentiated. Each indi- 
 vidual differentiation, in so far as it is individual, in- 
 stead of adding itself to every other, separates itself 
 from it, and therefore neutralizes it. Thus there are 
 left, after those attributes which are individually dif- 
 ferentiated, and therefore higher, have neutralized each 
 other, merely the average attributes common to all, 
 which, of course, are on a lower plane. I have else- 
 where ^ gone fully into the behaviour of the crowd. It 
 does not, however, at all follow that, because a number 
 of highly intellectual individuals will, when joined into 
 a crowd, display but mediocre abilities, that a number of 
 highly moral individuals will, when joined into a crowd, 
 prove immoral or absolutely criminal. On the contrary, 
 I most emphatically deny that a crime would be com- 
 mitted by any number of really moral men, however 
 great. Any assertion to the contrary is arbitrary and 
 incapable of proof. Crimes committed by crowds al- 
 ways originate with individuals who, as individuals, are 
 naturally predisposed to crime. In a crowd, at any 
 
 '"Paradoxes," seventh edition, Leipzig, not dated, p. ji. Per- 
 haps the only writer who credits the crowd with better judgment than 
 a highly gifted individual is the tragedian Pomponius Secundus, 
 quoted by Pliny the Younger in the Seventeenth Letter of his Fifth 
 Book, who used, when his verdict on a piece differed from that of a 
 trustworthy friend, to say: "Ad populum provoco " — "I appeal to 
 the people." This is, however, really a question of an expression of 
 feeling, not of ratiocination; and since feeling represents a less highly 
 differentiated activity of the brain than ratiocination, the difference 
 between the average crowd and the cultivated individual may actually 
 be less marked in this case. In this sense only there may be some 
 truth in the saying that Monsieur T out-le-monde is cleverer than Mon- 
 sieur de Voltaire. 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 117 
 
 rate, they find accomplices in other individuals whose 
 more or less pronouncedly criminal tendencies are as a 
 rule kept under by fear of consequences. The fact of 
 numbers removes this check, and the evil impulse is 
 stimulated by the knowledge that the individual Is 
 hardly ever punished for his share in crimes committed 
 by crowds, because of the difficulty of bringing him to 
 book. At the same time, the great majority of average 
 people, being neither specially good nor specially bad, 
 are apt, from their very lack of decided character, to 
 imitate the example of someone else. When gathered 
 into a crowd, they offer no resistance to the suggestions 
 of a few ringleaders, and follow them like sheep. Of 
 course, one would probably not be far wrong in saying 
 that such average people, even when not gathered into 
 a crowd, would probably obey any suggestion made to 
 them, granted that the conditions were as remarkably 
 favourable as are the rush, excitement, noise, and tumult 
 of a concourse. And yet overheated brains would fain 
 see I know not what amazing transmogrifications in this 
 simple fact. With the mysticism so irresistibly .at- 
 tractive to weak intellects, they would fain understand, 
 or misunderstand, Sighele's psychology of the crowd to 
 mean that a crowd is a being apart from and independ- 
 ent of the individuals that compose it, possessing im- 
 pulses, passions, thoughts and judgments of its own, and 
 reasoning, feeling, and acting unlike any individual 
 man. If one penetrates their wild and whirling words 
 to the kernel of fact that lies behind, the absurdity of 
 the assumption is patent. Where is the brain of this 
 new and independent organism, that arises out of the 
 gathering together of individuals into a crowd ? Where 
 
ii8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 are these new impulses, passions, etc., situated? Does 
 the new organism " crowd " develop a new brain and 
 nervous system to express its new feelings, thoughts and 
 actions? Even the mystical exponents of the so-called 
 psychology of the crowd do not go as far as that. Even 
 they assign to the crowd no more than the sum of the 
 brain and nerve processes of individuals. What does 
 this involve? Are the different phases of which any 
 action is the outcome to be conceived as taking place 
 in different individual brains? Does, for example, one 
 individual or group of individuals receive sense im- 
 pressions, another individual or group translate these 
 impressions into perception, a third individual or 
 group start the train of associations and call up in the 
 consciousness the concepts, judgments, and emotions 
 that accompany them, while a fourth individual or 
 group finally obeys these stimuli and translates them 
 into acts ? The absurdity of the idea of such a psychic 
 division of labour in producing a common product of the 
 kind is obvious. Only in each individual brain can the 
 psychic functions of the new super-organism " crowd " 
 be carried on, throughout the whole chain that begins 
 with the sense stimulus and is completed in the function- 
 ing of muscles and glands. It is mere folly to devote 
 long words and high-sounding formulae to pointing out 
 the obvious truth that individuals do perceive, feel, 
 think, judge, and act, whether alone or in a crowd. 
 
 A crowd, in the sense in which one can speak of its 
 voice, its weight, Its strength, has a psychology. That 
 is merely to say that a thousand voices shouting make 
 more noise than one, a thousand pairs of arms can raise 
 heavier weights and do harder work than one, or that a 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 119 
 
 floor that would support the weight of one man quite 
 easily may give way beneath a thousand. But psychic- 
 ally there is no more difference between a crowd and 
 its component parts than between a thousand cannon 
 and a single gun. In each case the dynamic effects, the 
 actual results, are different; but it is the merest anthro- 
 pomorphism to deduce from this difference a difference 
 in the force that creates the effects. 
 
 An apparently reasonable basis for belief in the 
 psychology of the crowd can be found in one direction 
 only. In a crowd the individual is subject to an excite- 
 ment such as he never feels when alone. This excite- 
 ment impels him to feel, think, and act in a manner so 
 different from that customary to him when alone that, 
 on exchanging the crowd for solitude, he marvels at 
 himself and at his having been able so to think, feel, and 
 act. To this extent, then, one can speak of the psychol- 
 ogy of the crowd. 
 
 The fact is correct; the inference false. What does 
 it prove that a man feels, thinks, and acts in one way in 
 a crowd, in another when alone? Only that the sight 
 of a crowd, and the fact of being in it, excites him, and 
 that his brain and nerves act in one way when he is 
 excited, in another when he is at peace. But violent 
 excitement is not caused solely by a crowd. It arises in 
 many circumstances of the most varying kind, as with 
 extraordinarily strong sense impressions, danger, or cer- 
 tain bodily states. The sight of a volcano in eruption, a 
 huge conflagration, an earthquake, a battle, or a tiger 
 out of his cage, will give a man feelings that do not visit 
 him as he sits in dressing-gown and slippers by his own 
 fireside. When suffering the pangs of hunger a man 
 
I20 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 will think, feel, and act rather differently from what he 
 would do after a good dinner. Richard in love, or 
 drunk, is a different creature from Richard cool and 
 sober. Is psychology to be subdivided accordingly? 
 Does the individual soul disappear in each of these in- 
 stances, to be replaced by a new soul conditioned by vol- 
 cano, conflagration, earthquake, battle, or encounter 
 with a tiger, by hunger, love, or intoxication? Yet the 
 assumption of the so-called disappearance of the indi- 
 vidual in the crowd, and the rise of a new crowd-soul, 
 is on the same level as these suppositions. To under- 
 stand the feelings, thoughts, and actions of a crowd, one 
 must penetrate beyond it to the individual. It is neces- 
 sary to investigate his intellectual structure, and its 
 reaction to any sort of excitement. The part played by 
 his imitative faculty and receptivity to suggestions must 
 be understood, no less than the instincts that slumber 
 hidden in his soul, until something removes the bounds, 
 conscious and unconscious, within which they are nor- 
 mally restrained, and they then burst forth tremen- 
 dous. 
 
 This purely individual psychology is not advanced in 
 the least by subordination to any so-called psychology 
 of the crowd, which endows the mere word " crowd " 
 with actuality, and bestows upon a figment of the 
 imagination the qualities of a living being. In the same 
 way verbal abstractions, such as wisdom, love, and pity, 
 are personified by the artistic imagination and repre- 
 sented in the female form with all sorts of attributes. 
 The psychology of the crowd is the psychology of an 
 abstract concept based in fact upon a number of indi- 
 viduals. Either it has no material at all, or, since its 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 121 
 
 material consists of individuals, it must become indi- 
 vidual psychology. 
 
 The psychology of nations, which was believed by its 
 founders, Lazarus and Steinthal, to be a new and fruit- 
 ful science, is as fallacious as the psychology of the 
 crowd. Throughout long periods of time and all the 
 vicissitudes undergone by their government, religion, 
 and habits in the course of history, nations — or, at least, 
 some nations — display certain permanent intellectual 
 and moral characteristics that make successive genera- 
 tions of their people like one another and unlike other 
 nationalities. Upon this proposition Lazarus and Stein- 
 thal base all their views and hypotheses. But the prop- 
 osition itself is highly disputable. Is there, as a matter 
 of fact, a difference between nations? Only the super- 
 ficial observer will answer this great question off-hand 
 with any assurance. The differences apparent at a first 
 glance are of the most external character, such as 
 language, dress, and social habits; go a little deeper, 
 and you come to institutions, customs, methods of work, 
 general views of life, standards of value, objects of as- 
 piration. But the inner life of man lies beyond such dif- 
 ferences as these, and remains unaffected by them; and 
 in the common attributes of humanity, in which all men 
 are alike, feeling, will, reason, and action, there is some- 
 thing far more fundamental than these superficial dif- 
 ferences between nationalities. The Italian proverb 
 which says " The whole world is like one family," comes 
 far nearer to hitting the nail on the head than the pro- 
 found endeavours of Lazarus and Steinthal to discover 
 sharp differences at every turn. Exception may be 
 taken, moreover, to the second half of their proposi- 
 
122 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tion. Is it a fact that, in the whole course of its history, 
 each nation preserves a mental and moral physiognomy 
 that gives it a defined individuality throughout hun- 
 dreds and thousands of years? There are insuperable 
 difficulties in the way of a conclusive answer. We have 
 no reliable knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of 
 the mass of the people in the remote or even in the 
 recent past. Such evidence as exists is capable of vari- 
 ous interpretation. Literature, laws, art, reflect the 
 activity of a small minority or individual persons only; 
 they tell us nothing of the masses. In the artistic de- 
 lineation of a national character, that is supposed to 
 have been the same throughout centuries, the principal 
 part is played by preconceived notions of a subjective 
 kind. This constructive psychology is not usually ap- 
 plied to small nations without any history, but to the 
 more eventful and changing story of great nations. 
 Given a certain parti pris, a certain object to govern the 
 representation, rich history affords the artist in mosaic 
 plenty of material for any picture he please. With a 
 little sophistry it would not take much time or trouble to 
 deduce two entirely different sets of characteristics for 
 any nation selected at will. Fortified with examples 
 from its history, the uncritical reader would swallow 
 them both, though there would not be a word of truth 
 in either. The method, or trick, is simple enough. By 
 selecting certain events from the mass, and grouping 
 them together to the exclusion of others, it is always 
 possible to present a nation throughout long periods of 
 time in the aspect in which one sees it oneself and desires 
 to present it to others. 
 
 What, then, is the basis of the special character and 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 123 
 
 temper of a people ? Is it physiological inheritance and 
 a common descent? Of the great European nations 
 with which the would-be science of national psychology 
 has hitherto busied itself, not one shows a pure strain; 
 there is a mixture of blood in all of them. AH are com- 
 posed of the same elements in different proportions. 
 Why, then, should a mingling of the early European in- 
 habitants of the Alps and Mediterranean have pro- 
 duced, as in France, a national character and soul 
 different from that produced by the later Celts, Ger- 
 mans, and Romans in West and South Germany? The 
 special physiognomy of a nation, in so far as it possessed 
 one different from those of other nations, could not con- 
 sist of such inherited characteristics as are organic, 
 inborn and unchangeable, but of those externals that 
 can be acquired and laid aside, and are thus capable of 
 change. The notion of a special national individuality 
 and physiognomy is, however, entirely in the air, one of 
 those facile generalizations that lie at the root of so 
 many errors and prejudices. The story of the English- 
 man who was waited upon in the inn, to which he went 
 on landing at Calais, by a humpbacked chambermaid 
 with red hair, and wrote in his diary, " French women 
 have red hair and are humpbacked " — this story is a 
 joke. But the dignity of science is claimed by the so- 
 called psychologists who declare, on the evidence of a 
 few Attic painters and sculptors, that " the ancient 
 Athenians were a people of artists " ; on the evidence of 
 the suicide of Lucretia, "the women of early Rome 
 were so chaste that they preferred death to dishonour " ; 
 on the evidence of Voltaire, " that the French are bril- 
 liant and frivolous " ; on the evidence of the poet-Prince 
 
124 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of Weimar and the school of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, 
 and Hegel, " that the Germans are a people of thinkers 
 and poets." 
 
 Lazarus and Steinthal looked upon the varieties of 
 language as one of the strongest proofs of the organic 
 differences between nations, and they lavished an enor- 
 mous amount of ingenuity in tracing them back to, and 
 regarding them as the direct expression of, national 
 differences of thought and feeling. Their analysis of 
 language as the expression of character is the most 
 striking part of their work, for which it seemed to 
 provide a really scientific basis. As a matter of fact, 
 the argument is particularly insecure. Most of the 
 languages spoken to-day were not created by the peoples 
 who use them. For example, the Latin languages are 
 spoken in Italy by Ligurians, Etrurians, and inhabitants 
 of Northern Africa; in France by Celts and Germans; 
 in Belgium by Walloons; in Spain by Iberians and 
 Semites. The Slav language is spoken by the Turko- 
 Tartaric Bulgarians and the Mongolian races of Russia ; 
 German is spoken by the Slavs in Mecklenburg, Lausitz, 
 and the Mark, and by the Celts in the Rhine Vialley; and 
 so on. Although, for the most part, we know nothing 
 of the prehistoric struggles, in the course of which some 
 languages conquered and others were thrust aside, there 
 is no doubt as to the fact of nations giving up their own 
 language and taking on another. But in such a case 
 how can language be called the outcome and expression 
 of a special national spirit? If it expresses the spirit 
 of the people that has created it, it is incomprehensible 
 that the spirit of an entirely different people should find 
 adequate expression in it. On the other hand, in so far 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 125 
 
 as the language can be adapted so as to form the entirely 
 adequate expression of the spirit of any nation, or of a 
 number of nations of different origin, it is not essentially 
 conditioned by the peculiar spirit of the one that created 
 it. If one and the same garment fits different wearers 
 equally well, only one logical conclusion is open — either 
 the wearers are of the same build or the garment does 
 not really fit them. If the most different races can 
 express their thoughts and feelings with complete satis- 
 faction through the medium of the same language, 
 either those thoughts and feelings must be more or less 
 the same, or the language must be so adaptable to any 
 and every thought and feeling that it cannot in itself 
 provide the key to understanding the special character 
 of any one people. Language, then, is no proof of the 
 existence of national character, no source for the so- 
 called psychology of nations. 
 
 At the same time different languages do exist which, 
 though originally perhaps sprung from a single root, 
 have developed according to different rules of pro- 
 nunciation, grammar, and syntax. In the same way 
 institutions and customs, though once, no doubt, the 
 same for all mankind, have developed in many different 
 directions. To investigate the causes of this variety of 
 development is the right and the duty of any student of 
 the human species, so long as he does not conceive that 
 mere oracular utterance of the profound phrase " psy- 
 chology of nations " is an adequate explanation. It Is 
 convenient to say " Differences in language, religion, 
 government, and social institutions, in customs and 
 moral Ideas, depend on the differences of national char- 
 acteristics and modes of thought deduclble from them, 
 
126 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 and subject to little material change in the course of 
 history." But things are not so simple. On the one 
 hand, descendants of a single race are seen dividing into 
 several nations, widely differing in language, institu- 
 tions, and customs; on the other, peoples, not demon- 
 strably related by blood, are found speaking the same 
 language and organizing their life on a common plan. 
 These facts do not support the superstition that each 
 people represents a race or type of the human species, 
 possessing an organic character of its own, and in some 
 sense a soul that determines the language, its policy, 
 religion, etc., according to a certain norm. Rather one 
 is inclined to see the types of human existence as deter- 
 mined, not by any such mysterious organic peculiarity, 
 but by the state of civilization which they have attained. 
 This stage depends partly on the influences of the ex- 
 ternal world,, climate, condition of the soil, and natural 
 resources, partly on less obvious circumstances. 
 
 The gaps in this picture must be filled up by the 
 psychology of the individual, nat by the adventurous 
 psychology of nations. Each individual has certain 
 mental characteristics common to the type and its dis- 
 tinguishing features. He is a creature of habit. He 
 imitates what he has seen before him from his youth up. 
 He is absolutely credulous unless a strong interest 
 rouses his critical faculty. He loves the comfort of 
 obedience to authority. A strong power of suggestion 
 is exercised upon him by dogmatic assumptions. 
 
 The national differences, for whose explanation Laza- 
 rus and Steinthal invented the psychology of nations, 
 can be fully accounted for by the undeniable character- 
 istics of individual psychology. Some peoples write 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 127 
 
 from left to right, others from above downwards, 
 others, again, from right to left ; some burn their dead, 
 others bury them, the position, again, varying between 
 lying and squatting; some sit on the ground with their 
 legs tucked under them, others on an elevated seat with 
 a footstool and perpendicular back; some house under 
 one roof with their animals, others apart from them; 
 some dwell in straggling villages, others build in a circle. 
 The reason is that they have always done so, and not 
 otherwise, and see no reason for troubling to change 
 their habits and discover new ones. And the same ex- 
 planation holds of the higher range of peculiarities — 
 speech, institutions, mental development generally. Of 
 course, one may ask. How did the custom originate in 
 the first instance ? This difficulty presents itself at every 
 attempt to reach the final cause of any set of facts. The 
 psychology of nations does not settle it. A more il- 
 luminating suggestion is that all such habits as have not 
 arisen directly out of the conditions of the external 
 world date from the appearance of isolated individuals 
 of sufficient creative power to discover something new 
 and impose it on their fellow-men. Such mythical 
 figures float vaguely in the recollection of mankind — 
 Cadmus, Prometheus, Minos,- Thor, Moses, or the 
 divine heroes of whom Carlyle speaks in his first lecture 
 on " Hero Worship." Two such heroic personalities 
 fall almost within our own generation — ^Napoleon and 
 Bismarck. The full light of history falls upon their life 
 and activity, and reveals it to the intelligent under- 
 standing as a politico-sociological experiment on a 
 gigantic scale. Within one generation a complete trans- 
 formation can be seen taking place, in each of these two 
 
128 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 instances, in the whole mode of thought of the upper 
 stratum of society of two powerful nations. The peace- 
 loving Frenchman of the eighteenth century, inclined 
 to cosmopolitan views, and enthusiastically proclaiming 
 Rousseau's doctrine of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 
 was filled with Chauvinistic Imperialism of the most ad- 
 vanced type, drunk with glory, and revelling in the poetry 
 of war. At the same time the sentimental, comfortable 
 Germans of the Holy Roman Empire and the Confed- 
 eration, rather petty and bourgeois in their ideas, and 
 with little unity among them, disappeared, and in their 
 stead there rose up the new Pan-Germanism, proud, 
 hard and self-sufficient — or, at least, harsh and arro- 
 gant — bent on spreading its power over the world. 
 What can national psychology make of this? What 
 becomes of its fundamental notion of permanent na- 
 tional characteristics ? The most prominent traits in the 
 upper classes in France and Germany are certainly the 
 fruit of the influence of two towering personalities — ■ 
 Bismarck and Napoleon — ^and not of any peculiarities 
 of the French and German nations as such. This ex- 
 ample justifies the conclusion that all similar peculiari- 
 ties of a people or group of peoples arise in the same 
 way — as the effect of some powerful individual, un- 
 known to us, because partly prehistoric. 
 
 The psychology of nations has adduced no trait that 
 is an organic fact, such as the brain index, bodily struc- 
 ture, colour of skin, hair, and eyes. As a matter of fact, 
 the child of one people, brought up, educated, and 
 dwelling in the midst of another, far from disturbing 
 or alien influences, will display all the pecuHarities of 
 that other. If any proof be needed, it is enough to 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 129 
 
 mention the names of Chamisso and De la Motte 
 Fouque, Germans; Gambetta, SpuUer, Waddington, 
 Frenchmen; Becker and Hartenbusch, Spaniards; Ar- 
 turo Graf, Italian; Petofy (Petrovitsch), Magyar. 
 The psychology of nations has no more real existence 
 than the psychology of the crowd. 
 
 The real thing is the psychology of the individual, X. 
 which teaches how man copies the wo rl d around him y 
 and regularly exercises his imitative faculty in every ^ 
 direction. This is one of the fundamental facts of his- 
 tory. Man is born with certain simple impulses, and 
 grows completely into the external conditions around 
 him. He therefore appears to display national charac- 
 teristics so long as he bears the single impress of a 
 certain set of conditions — so long, that is, as he remains 
 at a stage of culture removed from the influence of 
 active intercourse. This particularity is lost so soon as 
 the individual is no longer rooted in the soil, when 
 goods and ideas begin to circulate freely between peo- 
 ples, and mutual influences overcome the barriers 
 between states and the differences of language. To-day 
 one hears already of the spirit of " Western and Central 
 Europe," and European civilization is constantly spoken 
 of; to-morrow the conception will be widened, and we 
 shall talk of the soul of the white races. Nor can even 
 this limitation be long maintained. Japan, India, and 
 China are every day entering more fully into the intel- 
 lectual life of the whites, and becoming imbued with 
 their culture, methodology, ethics, and aesthetics. The 
 Maoris of New Zealand don the frock-coat and var- 
 nished boots, and, with the Republicans and Socialists of 
 Hawaii and the Philippines, begin to follow fast in the 
 
I30 THE INTERPRETATIOiST OF HISTORY 
 
 footsteps of their yellow brethren, while Booker Wash- 
 ington seeks the admission of the negro to the cultured 
 life. When complete intercommunication is estab- 
 lished throughout all countries and races, and differences 
 removed and universal similarity effected by the mutual 
 interpenetration of civilizing forces, the conceptions of 
 race and its psychology will cease to have any semblance 
 of significance. A psychology of mankind will then be- 
 come inevitable. We shall simply, after a wide detour, 
 be brought back to the psychology of the individual. It 
 will be seen that, morbid disturbances apart, men possess 
 a common spiritual foundation over and above the 
 individual differences caused by greater or less promi- 
 nence of certain traits. The explanation of the fact that 
 large groups appear to possess decided characteristics of 
 their own, in so far as it is not due to the illusion of a 
 prejudicial or superficial observer, lies simply and solely 
 in the stage of civilization attained by them, and the 
 decisive influence of example upon them. A super- 
 psychology has no more existence than a super-soul. 
 The collective organism is a mystical delusion. Col- 
 lectivity is an abstract idea. Life and actuality are 
 found only in the study of the individual. From the 
 study of his feeling, thought, and action the natural 
 history of the human species may be learned, and the 
 results of such study are more reliable when devoted to 
 the living than to the dead, of whose minds we are more 
 ignorant than of those of our contemporaries and our- 
 selves. 
 
 It is natural to us to desire the most complete and 
 accurate knowledge of the species to whicn we belong. 
 The means to such knowledge is observation, wholly 
 
ANTHROPOMORPHIC VIEW OF HISTORY 131 
 
 without bias, of the individual, and his reaction to the 
 manifold influences to which he is subjected from birth 
 to death. History may be a form of such fruitful ob- 
 servation as this, if it be retrospective sociolog y^, in the 
 sense in which I have tried to define it. I mean by 
 sociology t he exploration of the ps ychology of the indi- 
 vidual. wherein lie the instincts and norms of human 
 actions, and the origin of the inst itutions created by man 
 as the framework of his hfe, o r adopFed by him because 
 they existed and he se es no reason or no possibility TiT 
 escaping from them. To a certain extent the particular 
 individual selected for observation is indifferent, always 
 provided that a sufficiently large number are observed 
 to establish securely which traits are common to them 
 all and which represent a divergence, more or less fre- 
 quent or even unique, from the universal human 
 formula. Theoretically, a complete anthropology could 
 be built up upon absolute knowledge of living man. 
 Practically, however, this absolute knowledge is unat- 
 tainable. Gaps and obscurities there always are here 
 and there, and, moreover, understanding of existing 
 conditions is assisted by knowledge of those that have 
 preceded them — 'that Is, of their simple origins and 
 their development, through increased complexity, differ- 
 entiation, and automatism. History , therefore, cannot 
 be omitted from a complete anthropology. Political 
 and biographical history has a place side by side with 
 primitive history and the history of morals in a com- 
 plete anthropology, in so far as Jt thrgwsjlght^on events | V 
 wh ich are accompanied by unusual reactions, such as do I 
 not occur in every generation, and upon the extraordi- 1 
 nary possibilities of mankind as displayed in remarkable I 
 
132 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 personalities, such as could hardly be suspected from the 
 average type. To assist this knowledge of th e type by 
 striking examples is the obiect of history, which should 
 be a museum of pre-eminent in dividual specimens , and a 
 record of the behaviour of aggregates under circum- 
 stances that permit the peculiarities of the type to be 
 clearly observed. In so far as it is anything else, or has 
 any other object, it may possess ajsthetic value as a work 
 of art, but is wholly useless for science, and can be neg- 
 lected by the student who aims at knowledge of the 
 human species. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MAN AND NATURE 
 
 Mankind to-day appears to the observer as the highest 
 and most powerful species on the earth; the globe is 
 subject to man, and completely dominated by him all 
 over its solid surface. The sea escapes him, but fish- 
 eries off the coast, in the shallows and the deep sea, 
 give him control over some at least of its fauna. On 
 the continent and in the air only those animal and plant 
 species are permitted to live which are useful, if only to 
 provide an aesthetic satisfaction, or at least harmless. 
 Anything actually harmful, anything that demands 
 precious space, is ruthlessly exterminated. Everywhere 
 the beasts of prey that were once dangerous to man, and 
 to some extent still are so in India and Central Africa, 
 have had to retire before him. Unable to maintain 
 themselves, they will disappear within a measurable 
 space of time, despite sentimental efforts to maintain a 
 few of them under the protection of man and preserve 
 them for show. The smaller species that, without 
 directly attacking man, are troublesome to him by 
 reason of their numbers, proximity, or offences against 
 his property, lie also under sentence of death. War has 
 been declared on the rat, and in many places on the 
 migratory cricket. It may be long and tedious, but 
 there is no doubt as to the issue. The smaller the 
 
 133 
 
134 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 enemy or disturber of the peace, the more difficult is it 
 for man to make an end of him. Tigers and lions are 
 easily overcome; greater difficulties are presented by 
 poisonous snakes, rodents, and insects. In wood and 
 field to this day he is more afraid of the woodi-scarab 
 and the weevil, the moth and the spider, the locust 
 and the phylloxera, than the wild-cat, wolf, or planti- 
 grade, and finds it more difficult to defend himself 
 against the attacks of the anophelas, stegomyia, and 
 glossina which visit him with the scourge of intermittent 
 fever, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness, than against 
 the claws and teeth of animals of more considerable size. 
 Even after he has cleared off the surface of the earth all 
 the competitors visible to the naked eye, or subjected 
 them wholly to his will, he will have to fight for safety, 
 health, and life with microscopic enemies. In this 
 contest he has to take the defensive; it will be far more 
 protracted and far more difficult than any other he has 
 waged all his earthly existence and struggle for mastery 
 on this planet. Long after the jungle is as safe as the 
 high street of a big town, man must walk in terror of 
 tuberculosis, syphilis, cancer, leprosy, cholera, and other 
 diseases caused by fungi and protozoa. But in the end, 
 and that in no impossibly remote future, he will conquer 
 even these foes. He cannot, indeed, exterminate them 
 — ^the saprophytes will always be able to elude him, but 
 he can keep at a distance those that cause disease. Then 
 the continued existence of animal and plant will be 
 determined by his good pleasure, the surface of the 
 earth will be his, and man his only living enemy. 
 
 He has not always occupied this dominant position 
 on the earth. Before his time it was Inhabited by 
 
MAN AND NATURE 135 
 
 mightier beings, whose fragmentary remains fills him 
 with amazement and horror — the land and sea species 
 of megalosaurus, which devoured animals and plants ; 
 the monstrous early mammals; the terrible primeval 
 cats, with teeth that tore like swords ; the racial ancestors 
 of the beasts of prey, some of which existed within the 
 lifetime of man. After these mighty organisms, that 
 developed freely amid natural conditions that for them 
 were highly favourable, man made his appearance, 
 miserably small and weak in comparison with the bron- 
 tosaurus or dinoceras, and insignificant by the side of 
 the machaerodus, that had the graceful form and pro- 
 nounced colouring of the tiger. No physical attribute 
 marked him out as the future conqueror of his prede- 
 cessors and sole ruler upon the earth, except the com- 
 paratively large brain that set even the monkey-man 
 above all earlier animal forces. 
 
 Man's original position was that of all those who 
 shared the earth with him. He was cradled in condi- 
 tions that favoured his life and development. Other- 
 wise, had such conditions not been present, his species 
 could never have arisen at all. He found the degree 
 of heat, the meteoric conditions, and other comforts 
 necessary to him, and he was well pleased. For him, 
 as for all other creatures, nature spread her table with 
 meat and drink for the trouble of taking. His only 
 care was ^o protect himself against the superior foes 
 whose quarry he was. Had these natural conditions 
 remained unchanged, It may safely be assumed that man 
 would never have risen above the stage of the larger 
 apes to-day, in spite of the possibilities, obviously latent 
 within him, starting, as he did, at the end of a line of 
 
136 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 development characterized by a slow but continual in- 
 crease in the proportion borne by the nervous tissue to 
 the rest of the bodily structure. Certainly nothing is 
 known of man in his earliest stages; but it can be 
 unhesitatingly maintained that nature stood his friend 
 and ally from the moment of his first appearance upon 
 earth, while, like all the other creatures on earth, air, 
 or water, he had enemies to face in the animals among 
 whom he lived. But in the course of periods of time, 
 whose duration cannot be exactly measured, this con- 
 dition of things was changed, either gradually or rap- 
 idly. Over a great part of the area he lived in the 
 climate changed profoundly from tropical or subtropical 
 to arctic or semi-arctic. At the same time the relation 
 of man to the surrounding world was transformed. 
 Nature, his mother and friend, became his most deadly 
 enemy. To defend and protect himself against her 
 'SM- I he had to turn to his fellow-creatures, and treat them 
 'no longer as prey after the fashion of the wild beasts, 
 but as fellow workers and servants. 
 
 Climatic change did not affect man alone. It swept 
 away all the other organisms that had shared with him 
 the warmth of perpetual summer and found it necessary 
 for their existence. Those to whom nature no longer 
 supplied this essential element either went under or 
 made great efforts to adapt themselves physically to new 
 conditions, and succumbed after some struggle when 
 they failed to do so. They grew a closer and warmer 
 coat of fur; they altered their organs for biting and 
 chewing so as to feed in a new way; they adopted new 
 habits such as hibernation, breeding at certain seasons, 
 and migrating at certain times; and as a result emerged 
 
MAN AND NATURE 137 
 
 from their affliction very different creatures, accom- 
 modated to the new conditions of their natural exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Man, and man alone of living creatures, neither sub- 
 mitted to the sentence of death pronounced by nature 
 against all the creatures to whom she denied the means 
 for continued existence, nor directed his efforts to alter 
 his corporeal organization to suit murderous natural 
 conditions. He made some alteration in his diet, took 
 to eating meat instead of the fruits, roots, eggs, jelly- 
 and shell-fish that were natural to him ; but in essentials 
 he remained unchanged. He did not grow a fur coat. 
 On the contrary, he lost the covering of hair that had 
 not been a protection against the cold so much as a 
 means of strengthening his skin and preserving it 
 against insects, sunburn, and rain, and perhaps of adorn- 
 ing it. He did not harden himself to bid defiance to the 
 open weather, after the fashion of the beasts of the 
 fields and of the woods. He did not strain after the 
 mane and claws of the lion, the iron muscle and com- 
 plicated digestion of the cud-chewing ox. On the 
 contrary, he invented a mode of adjustment surpassing 
 the ingenuity of any previous creature on the earth. 
 Instead of altering himself, h e directed his efforts^to^ 
 the alteration of ext em aLcond itions.^ Instead of trying 
 to fit his organism into an environment that had become 
 incompatible with his needs, he tried to adapt that 
 environment to his organism and its needs. 
 
 This new and peculiarly human method of adjustment 
 is still going on, and will probably never cease. It is 
 incessantly becoming more delicate, skilful, and com- 
 plete; all man's gifts are devoted to it; it is, as a matter 
 
138 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of fact, the sole distinct meaning which the impartial 
 observer can discern in the course of history; it deter- 
 mines all human events that are determined by the will 
 of man rather than the order of nature. According to 
 all biological laws, man should have disappeared from 
 the surface of the earth with the first Ice Age, just as 
 every other living thing before him vanished so soon 
 as the free gifts of nature no longer satisfied its organic 
 needs. But he maintained himself in defiance of nature. 
 Instead of submitting, he advanced resolutely to the 
 combat. His survival is a rebellion a gainst the sen- 
 tence_ofjdeath pronounced against him, and still valid. 
 Only a small tract around the equator affords him pro- 
 tection and an asylum from her pursuit — that region 
 which is the last refuge of this kind of men — the greater 
 apes — who once inhabited the whole earth, but now are 
 driven back into the tropical forests. There, too, a 
 few branches of the human race — Australians, Weddas, 
 Central Africans, and perhaps the Indians and Bra- 
 zilians of Central America — could live in very nearly 
 the primitive existence of our forefathers, but for the 
 pressure exercised upon them by more developed races. 
 As it is, spurred by no^ incessant pressure o f_ necessitY 
 to exercise constant exertion, they have remained com- 
 fortable and, from their own point of view, happy in 
 the primitive condition of mankind; they have escaped 
 the progress imposed on less favourably situated races. 
 But outside this zone — all that is left of the earthly 
 paradise — nature denies to man all that he requires , as 
 Rome denied it to the proscribed. Everywhere, and 
 K at every hour, he has to wrest from her the necessities 
 ^ of existence with his own hands. From birth to death 
 
MAN AND NATURE 139 
 
 he surrounds himself with artificial conditions; if he 
 neglects them for a moment, his life is in imminent 
 danger. His body has to be protected. In very warm 
 climates, clothing, like tattooes and scars, the various 
 ornaments in nose and lips, the hanging of trinkets 
 round the neck, on breast and limbs, may have origi- 
 nated as a form of adornment and distinction; but in 
 colder latitudes the covering nf t,JTiR_Jhndy was mainly 
 due to the necessity of keeping warm. Man makes 
 his S Hpceme. discovery, never surpassed or equalled — 
 the _kindling anXTceeping up of fire. With its aid he 
 secures the degree of warmth helpful and agreeable 
 to him, which the chemical action of his own cells 
 cannot provide; by using fire in the preparation of his 
 foods he simplifies digestion, and is enabled to extract 
 nutriment of various natural kinds that he could not 
 otherwise have enjoyed. Moreover, he acquires an in- 
 strument that spares much expenditure of muscular 
 strength, and makes possible exertions that muscle alone 
 could not have accomplished. Many animals whose 
 absolute needs are satisfied by nature need over and 
 above a nest or shelter, and man most of all. He soon 
 ceased to depend on the holes which he found ready 
 made, and began to dig out or build up roofs and walls. 
 In this way he secured, within his own small circle, that 
 protection from the wind, that dryness and warmth, 
 that the open air no longer afforded. He artificially 
 created the climate that he thought suited him. With 
 ever active inventiveness and ardent zeal, he wrested 
 from his environment everything that it denied him, 
 which he could not as yet do without. His whole ex- 
 istence is as paradoxical as that of the diver in the 
 
I40 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 depths of the sea. Destruction threatens it whenever 
 one of the manifold precautions erected by man for his 
 own preservation is disturbed. Goethe's HQffli\^,i;iculus. 
 who can only live In the retort in which he was created, 
 and must instantly perish with the breaking of its glass, 
 appears one of the most far-fetched and unreal, crea- 
 tions of the poetic Imagination. As a matter of fact, 
 it is reality itself, a perfect symbol of the relations 
 of man to nature. The artificial protections that enclose 
 him are like the glass retort; if he emerge from them 
 and stand, naked as he was bom, face to face witJi 
 nature, he must perish without hope, and descend to 
 the fossils which once lived and flourished so long as 
 nature permitted, and disappeared without a struggle 
 when warmth and nourishment were withdrawn from 
 them. 
 
 Deep within man's subconsciousness there lurks a 
 shadow perception of his unnatural relation to his en- 
 vironment, which finds vague expression in myths and 
 imaginative Inventions. Is not the " Land of Cock- 
 ayne " simply a picture of the existence once natural 
 to man, the existence of every other living thing except 
 himself? ;Does not the caterpillar find in a nut a 
 whole mountain of spices that tastes to It more delicious 
 than millet pap does to man? Does not the spider 
 find the little animals that slide down into its gullet 
 as tasty as any pigeon? A pigeon is always thought 
 of as roast by man, and nature never provided it in 
 that form. But man's imagination works on a basis 
 of ideas developed from his artificial existence. He 
 forgets that in the real land of Cockayne pigeons were 
 not roast, soup was not cooked, pigs not made into 
 
MAN AND NATURE 141 
 
 sausages or eaten with knives and forks; there man 
 enjoyed everything in the state in which it was pro- 
 vided by nature, without any alteration or preparation. 
 When he really wishes to rise to great heights of fanq^, 
 he pictures a land flowing with milk and honey. He 
 longs for an existence without labour — the exact oppo- 
 site of the reality that he knows and sees in every human 
 life. Labour , his daily habit, his constant experience, 
 and the command laid upon him from the cradle to 
 the grave, never appears in his dreams; it is banished 
 from the vision inspired by his thirst for bliss. Al- 
 though in this dream of happiness he sees himself 
 surrounded, not only by the delights that nature can 
 offer, but by all the products of labour — palaces, gor- 
 geous raiment, rich vessels, spicy dishes, and women 
 beautifully attired — it does not occur to him that since 
 these creations must be someone's work, his land of joy 
 cannot be open to all; h is happiness is based upo n the 
 effort and abstinence of others, a nd-therefore involves 
 exploitatio n and cruelty. This is natural enough, since 
 his imagination is using the material of experience, 
 while entirely neglecting the law of causality that gov- 
 erns reality. 
 
 It Is seldom realized that the contradiction between 
 life and dream, the actual and the desired, that runs 
 through the whole of human thought and feeling, repre- 
 sents a half-unconscious recognition, a vague appre- 
 hension of the unnatural conditions of human existence. 
 If man dwelt under the conditions common to all other 
 organisms on earth, his desires would be to prolong his 
 habits and experiences there, not to reverse them and 
 fly tp something else. One would imagine a lion's 
 
142 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 paradise, if he could imagine one, to be more success- 
 ful hunting; a mole's, better meadow-land for burrow- 
 ing in ; a stork's, to stand in the swamp and catch frogs. 
 One would expect them to keep to the line of their 
 customary activities. Man alone conceives of paradise 
 as a spot in which he may escape from his usual ac- 
 tivity. Ji^jybne ^pictures .a„,golden a ge w here Adam 
 _SmithV^grx.of -labour as the source, o£wealth would 
 ,bg^J^lsej_^ The Hebrew Bible, one of the earliest prod- 
 ucts of the creative spirit, expressly designates labour 
 as foreign to man's original nature, a visitation and 
 punishment for his sins. The theory is remarkably 
 profound, but the relation between guilt and labour-an 
 ISSertedjjSne^ Labour is not a consequence of sin, but 
 sin a consequence of labour. In a state of nature man 
 could not sin. He found his table laid; there was no 
 one whose share of the goods of earth he need envy or 
 take from him. It was the ne cessity of building up 
 \artificial conditipns for the, satisf action, of his needs, of 
 Jexerting himself, of working, that led to that indiffer- 
 ence to fellow-men in which all the acts and attempted 
 acts that we call Immorality, sin, guilt, crime, arose. 
 Sin appeared in the world on the day when nature 
 ceased to nourish, warm, and fondle man, and compelled 
 him to choose between toil and extinction. 
 
 I have described how this compulsion started man's 
 intellectual development and explains the course of his 
 history. At the same time I am not blind to the fact 
 that the formula does not cover the whole field. It 
 affords an adeqijate explanation of the low level of 
 culture at which the peoples of the equator have re- 
 mained, probably as a survival, down to the present, 
 
MAN AND NATURE 143 
 
 of the original species. The^^ur^fj^^e^it^Jh^a^yiot^ 
 touched them ; they have not had to fight for their 
 existence. But what about the people, say, of Xerra 
 del Fue^ o? Towards them nature is as fierce an enemy 
 as when the Ice Age set in. She tortures them with 
 hunger, darkness and storms, and rains intolerable blows 
 upon them. They have no comfort. They live a 
 miserable existence in which there is hardly any room 
 for satisfaction. And yet they have done nothing to 
 rise above their wretched lot. The enmity of nature 
 has not roused them to defence. They have invented 
 no protection like the civilization of other races. Nec- 
 essity alone cannot, therefore, raise man to conquering 
 independence ; there must be f ^ pglties wit hin him which 
 enable him to combat the hostility of nature effectively ; 
 and it is obvious that these faculties are not present in 
 all men to the same degree. But, because many have 
 proved incapable of learning from necessity, it does not 
 follow that it is false to assume, as the origin of all 
 human development, yisjEa£UteLmfjX9JJXaWe^CQ0.dk 
 tmLh?:VeS9Ic^U^mmJ^ but that 
 
 there must have existed at a very early period inequal- 
 ities of natural endowment within the species, whose 
 inheritance accounts for the origin of different races. 
 
 An important question arises at this point, to which 
 no answer can be given. What would have happened 
 had the Ice Age not supervened, had the conditions 
 under which the species originated lasted for ever, or 
 altered so slowly that there would have been ample time 
 for man to adapt himself to his new environment by 
 purely physical changes, and no necessity to prolong 
 his existence by artificial means? Would he have re- 
 
144 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 mained a beast? Would he, without external com- 
 pulsion, by virtue of inward impulses alone, have risen 
 above the level of the apes? The question has more 
 than a merely human import: it includes the essential 
 nature and significance of the universe as a whole. 
 
 The question of the laws of human development is 
 intimately connected with the question of the develop- 
 ment of the world — its cause, its direction, its goal, its 
 rhythmic movement — and to this vast riddle we can find 
 no solution, for all our guessing. Th at the indispen- 
 sable idea of Jthe et£cnity of th e unive rse is inc ompatible 
 with the idea of development, needs _ no p roof. It is 
 clear that development — a succession of events in time — 
 must have a starting-point, a beginning, a continuation, 
 and a climax. But in eternity no starting-point is pos- 
 sible — one must always go back to eternity again. In 
 eternity any chain of circumstances, however long a 
 time it may have lasted, must, within eternity, have 
 attained its most remote possible goal, and so be closed 
 in. Eternity allows to human thought only the idea 
 of eternal rest or of eternal cyclical movement. The 
 only significance that could then be attached toi develop- 
 ment within the universe would be that of the eternal 
 repetition of the process of differentiating simple con- 
 ditions in terms of ever greater complexity and variety, 
 and then simplifying the complexity and variety: the 
 process that Herbert Spencer described as an unchang- 
 ing and unvarying cycle of integration and dissociation. 
 In a sense development does exist from the point of 
 view of the mortal man enclosed within one of these 
 eternally recurring cycles. He witnesses isolated phases 
 of integration and dissociation, and can observe changes 
 
MAN AND NATURE 145 
 
 that he may interpret as progress or retrogression. But 
 he never sees a whole cycle, far less a succession of 
 cycles. He is so far justified, then, in rejecting the 
 annihilating idea of an unchanging, eternal similarity 
 in the universe, and finding, in his weakness, more profit 
 and encouragement in the notion of development. 
 Moreover, it is rational to assume that the course of 
 development followed by our solar system, which has 
 created the planets and their satellites out of primitive 
 vapour, the cool solidity of the life-bearing earth from 
 a fiery rain of cosmic drops, and highly differentiated 
 mammalia and plants from unicellular organisms — ^that 
 that course did not stop at the monkey-man, the pygmies 
 of the Nyanza or the Weddas. On the contrary, we 
 may assume that the forces that have gradually made 
 vertebrates and animals in human form out of the 
 worms would, under the most favourable conditions 
 of natural existence, have finally developed primitive 
 men to thinkers with mighty craniums and brains weigh- 
 ing from 1,800 to 2,000 grammes — men capable of 
 all the knowledge to which we have attained to-day, 
 although they might not have risen to our technical 
 achievements, which would be unnecessary to them. At 
 the same time, it is highly probable that this advance 
 would have proceeded incomparably more slowly than 
 when existence itself depended on adjustment to hostile 
 natural conditions. This can be seen from the duration 
 of the actual stages in development. The oldest mam- 
 malia, monotremes, and marsupials appear in the keuper 
 bed of the trias, in which the existence of men is doubt- 
 ful. The first certain date for their appearance is 
 the quaternary epoch. The time between the trias and 
 
146 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the transformations effected by the floods covers cer- 
 tainly tens — according to many geologists, hundreds — 
 of millions of years; it was then that the life of man 
 upon earth arose. Man remained in the first stage, 
 if not for millions, at least for hundreds of thousands 
 of years without making any visible progress. It was 
 not till the_first^Stone^Age_that he began to emerge 
 from a purely animal state. Then the first faint dawn 
 of civilization begins. Traces of coal and ashes, marks 
 of burning on bones, show that fire was beginning to be 
 known; clumsy attempts at stone-carying mark the 
 awakening of the creative faculty of the intellect. 
 Maybe 100,000 years, or, according to Dr. Mortillet, 
 238,000 years separate us from the man of Neander- 
 thal ; hardly more than 20,000 years from the man of 
 Golutre, Le Moustier, Chelles, or Acheul. The man 
 of Neanderthal was not, in all probability, subject to 
 the necessity of fighting for his existence, but life had 
 begun to be a hard struggle for the man of the earliest 
 Stone Age. 
 
 Let us now look back over the course of develop- 
 ment, and observe its tempo. From the appearance of 
 the first mammalia to the arrival of man, an incalcula- 
 ble period, hundreds of millions of years. From the 
 arrival of man to the last Ice Age, contemporaneous 
 with the beginning of intellectual effort and its fruit, 
 civilization, several hundred thousands of years. From 
 the last Ice Age that affected man, and the first Stone 
 Age, to the institution of organized political life in 
 Asia and around the Eastern Mediterranean, about 
 fifteen thousand years. Ecom the earliest Assyrian and 
 EgT^tian. mgnunients and, insgyj^tions^ down to the be- 
 
MAN AND NATURE 147 
 
 ginning of really scientific knowledge, about seven thou- 
 sand years. From the beginning of modem science 
 and the utilization of natural forces on a large scale, 
 which it rendered possible, down to the developed 
 mechanics of to-day, with its use of the microscope, 
 radiograph, and electricity, and its advanced physical 
 and chemical powers, about a hundred years. Thus, 
 to develop from an animal to Lavoisier took about 
 twenty thousand years, from Lavoisier till to-day some- 
 thing over a hundred. While the species probably 
 remained in the condition of the men of the Neander- 
 thal for some hundreds of thousands of years, is there 
 anything rash or abitrary in the assumption that this 
 immense acceleration of the rhythm of development was 
 not merely contemporaneous with the sudden appear- 
 ance of the last Ice Age, but conditioned by it? that 
 without that alteration of environment man would not 
 to-day have advanced much beyond the Neanderthal 
 stage, and that the savages of the equator might repre- 
 sent the most developed type ? The supposition at any ■^ 
 rate rests upon the fact that wherever nature has spread jt, 
 her table for man, and freed him from the necessity to v 
 provide shelter and clothing, he has remained at the > 
 lowest stage of culture and civilization. We may go 
 further. Even if it be admitted that within the limits 
 of the cyclical movement of the universe there exists in 
 man, as in all other forms of life upon the planet, an 
 impulse towards development that might have led him 
 on to supreme knowledge even without the necessity of 
 adaptation, such progress must have been extraordinarily 
 much slower — so slow, indeed, that we may ask our- 
 selves whether under such conditions the species would 
 
148 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 have survived its attainment. For it is highly probable 
 that the existence of the earth, or at least of its power 
 to sustain life, is limited in time, and quite possible that 
 it might reach the end of its course before humanity 
 had attained the goal of its development. Thus, while 
 gradual refrigeration had operated to accelerate man's 
 intellectual growth, the disappearance of water and air 
 would have destroyed a race whose instincts might have 
 brought them to great heights in the domain of the 
 creative imagination, but not to rationalizing knowl- 
 edge. Life on earth would then have come to an end 
 without any scientific view of the world as a whole. 
 
 We may leave these possibilities on one side. Experi- 
 ence has established that, with the exception of the 
 human species, no living thing can survive except under 
 favourable natural conditions. If the conditions be- 
 come unfavourable, they either adapt their physical 
 organization to the change, or, if they cannot, perish 
 irretrievably. Man is the sole living thing upon the 
 earth that refuses to be exterminated by an unfavour- 
 able environment, and defends himself actively against 
 nature by the invention of artificial conditions. Instead 
 of adapting his skin, his digestive apparatus, and the 
 means by which he moves from place to place,' he con- 
 fined himself to adaptation by his brain, the most highly 
 differentiated part of his system. Why we do not 
 know, and at the present stage of our knowledge it is 
 bootless to inquire. Once for all we possess a brain 
 relatively heavier and more efficient than that of any 
 other creature ; once for all we are the final stage of that 
 process of development from the unicellular organism 
 that had, by the last Ice Age, produced a_ creature capa- 
 
MAN AND NATURE 149 
 
 ble^ as it proved, pi concentrated and sustained at ten- 
 lion. All that was required for success in the strug^e" 
 for existence arose from thi &. single, capacity in man. 
 Through his capacity to attend he learned to observe 
 phenomena with understanding, and gradually to differ- 
 entiate the permanent, and therefore essential, features 
 from those that were transitory, and therefore inessen- 
 tial. Through it, too, he acquired the power of ab- 
 stract thought, of generalization and logical deduction, 
 comprehended the causal connection of events, and was 
 able at the la st t o create conditions in which phenomena 
 favourable to himself could appear . This was the test 
 of the exactitude of his observation and the accuracy 
 of his conclusions; it established his power; it enabled 
 him to use for the maintenance, protection, and enrich- 
 ment of his own existence some at least of those natural 
 forces that would have destroyed him had he offered 
 no resistance. 
 
 A phei^omenon unique since the formation of the 
 globe was thus presented when one living species, man- 
 kind, finding the conditions of existence offered by 
 nature to be impossible, created artificial ones by means 
 of. a brain that warded off dangers, and facilitated, or 
 even created, the satisfaction of its needs. Equally 
 new was anoth e^ p henomenon which developed from 
 the first, and in close connection with it — parasitism 
 within the species. Sycophancy is of frequent occur- 
 rence in nature among plants as well as animals. One 
 animal species will subdue another, and Instead of de- 
 stroying It for prey, or using it, as the ants do the wood- 
 lice, for some sort of domestic service, make It work 
 regularly for them as Is again the practice of the ants. 
 
ISO THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Cannibalism is also practised, though it is exceptional, 
 and comparatively rare. Certain insects, possibly cer- 
 tain fishes, certainly murine's and wolves, do eat their 
 weaker or sickly fellows, independently of other food. 
 On the other hand, man^isjhgjaaijL^tSatH^^ 
 upon his fellows, and seeks the satisfaction of his needs, 
 not from nature, but from other men ; T^hg. 4i^gts lii§ 
 >^l^^^ rather to subjugating and systematically explmt- 
 X ing his fellow-men than to discovering natural resources 
 K for himself. 
 
 This p arasitic irnpulse is not a primitive instinct in 
 man. It does not appear among the few tribes who are 
 still living in a state of nature, with whom, accord- 
 ing to the testimony of travellers, slavery and every 
 form of personal service or ownership, theft, robbery, 
 and murder with intent to rob, are alike unknown. It 
 does not occur among apes. It is, in fac t, incompre - 
 hensible so long as the coflditions of^ exis tence of the 
 species are determined by nature. When nature is 
 cook and waiter, the table she spreads for one is spread 
 for all, and no one can feel any desire to: wrest from 
 his neighbour by force or fraud what each can take from 
 the common store without any struggle or hindrance. 
 Beasts of prey go on the chase, singly or in packs, with- 
 out expecting or desiring that anyone should do their 
 hunting for them. We may assume that the activities 
 necessary for the satisfaction of wants are, in the case 
 of all creatures living under natural conditions, accom- 
 panied by pleasurable sensations that would be unwill- 
 ingly renounced. Primitive man himself would have 
 preferred to weave his own roof of leaves, to bring his 
 own foliage and moss to make his couch soft, gather 
 
MAN AND NATURE 151 
 
 birds'-nests, and dig roots for himself, to having this 
 done for him by others. But, when external conditions 
 frowned upon him, he began to feel that, since nature 
 no longer provided for him, it was pleasant that his 
 fellow-men should do so. Parasitism arose byi^.^ QESf- 
 ation of the law of least effort^ It is easier and pleas- 
 anter to use the finished product of the work of others 
 than to wrest raw material from nature; and it is 
 obvious that when some men are weak, cowardly, and 
 simple, less trouble, attention, endurance, inventiveness 
 and ingenuity are needed to seize the necessities of life 
 from them than to provide them for oneself. 
 
 Parasitism thu s arises out of the original inequa lity 
 of men. All experience is against the belief, expressed 
 by Plato in the " Republic," in the original^ equality of 
 man. No example of equality between the individuals 
 of a series or species is to be found among the heavenly 
 bodies, or the material substances of which our earth is 
 composed, among the crystals, or any order of living 
 things. Aris|o tle rig htly depart;^ from th is view of his 
 master. He teaches that among men some are born to 
 command, and others to obey. But in this statement 
 cause and effect are confused. The faculties of com- 
 mand and obedience are consequences of original in- 
 equality. This inequality is the fundamental fact ,. 
 From it the mutual relations of men have been devel- 
 oped; in it almost all social institutions take their rise. 
 Few of them serve for the exploItMlaQ„ of ..natural re- 
 source, the great maigrijtY „ifiLr^jJi£,-e.yRloitation of the 
 many by the few. By this fact the State, laws, even 
 morals, and the course of human history have been de- 
 termined. Any investigation which goes deeper than 
 
152 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 unimportant and misleading superficialities must recog- 
 nize, as the determining factor in almost all historical 
 events, this inequality among men, and the attempt on 
 the part of a person or agnation to gain an advantage 
 from the consciousness of it. 
 
 The in s ti n c t of self;preseixajl£yi exists in man, as in 
 all otherliving'^creafiJres7^n3""probably to an even 
 stronger degree. This appears in his defiance of those 
 unfavourable natural conditions to which all other 
 species submitted, often without any attempt at resist- 
 ance beyond generally immaterial corporeal adjustments. 
 In consequence of man's unnatural way of life, the 
 instinct itself has undergone such profound transfonjia- 
 tions that it often appears so disguised that it is difficult 
 to recognize it. The fierceness of the struggle for 
 existence aroused a tendency to parasitism, as involving 
 less effort than direct conflict with murderous nature. 
 And parasitism, in itself a special development of the 
 instinct of self-preservation, adapted to meet the hos- 
 tility of nature, set up in its turn a number of secondary 
 instincts that would have been useless to man had he 
 lived under such favourable conditions as would have 
 enabled him to satisfy his needs without trouble or 
 effort, but were useful and even necessary when he 
 must make his fellows servants of his will, and has to 
 live by plunder and by sycophancy. 
 
 Parasitism itself , in its original and crudest form, is 
 mere brutal violence — murder and robbery of the indi- 
 vidual, the waging of war on a tribe or people. But as 
 the forms of common life become more various and 
 complicated, and the structure of society is established 
 and maintained by recognized rules and binding laws, 
 
MAN AND NATURE 153 
 
 you no longer have the strong and courageous individual 
 looking upon his neighbour simply as his prey, and using 
 him and his goods for the satisfaction of his own needs. 
 Then there arises " thg. will, tg, power," trumpeted 
 abroad nowadays as a new pnilosbphical discovery, but 
 really only the old parasitism, the old perversion of the 
 instinct of self-preservation, adapted to the circum- 
 stances of civilized life under legal forms. 
 
 The will to power is a secondary, not an original 
 instinct. It does not appear in a state of nature. There 
 the individual does not strive to rise above his fellows, 
 or to mix with them from motives of pride, vanity, or 
 ambition. Individuals of the same genus do not fight 
 except about women — either because there are not 
 women enough, or because in one place many men are 
 found wooing the same woman. Then the strongest 
 and bravest man drives his rivals from the field, and 
 keeps the woman for himself ; she apparently, as a rule, 
 shows no particular preference, and yields without re- 
 sistance to the conqueror. Out of the breeding season 
 no animal strives for power. Man alone displays that 
 striving, and parasitism is its object. His aim in seek- 
 ing for power is the exploitation of the strength and 
 capacity of other men. He need not necessarily be 
 conscious of this. During the struggle for power he 
 may believe that he seeks it for its own sake. The in- 
 toxication of power, the sense of pleasure aroused by 
 its possession, do not necessarily include any recognition 
 that it only serves, in the last resort, to save him from 
 the struggle with inhospitable nature, and maintain his 
 existence by means of the efforts of others. Such un- 
 consciousness of the real object of effort is a psycholog- 
 
154 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ical fact frequently observed. The vanity which strives 
 to please, to make an impression, or to rouse envy ; the 
 ambition which sets before itself the higher aim of rising 
 above the others, compelling them to recognize a superi- 
 ority, and determining the thoughts, behaviour, and 
 actions of thousands of millions of persons by its single 
 will, while it is yet generally satisfied with a fame which 
 is but the vain reflection or phantom of real power over 
 men — both of these are but dis torted, fo rms of the will 
 to power , which in its turn is, as I have shown, only 
 the will to parasitism. 
 
 The unfavourable conditions under which man is con- 
 demned to carry on his existence upon earth have thus 
 transformed the instinct of self-preservation, common 
 to all living things, into the tendency to parasitism, 
 peculiar to himself alone. As long as he was the free 
 guest of nature he would never have troubled to try to 
 please Eve or anyone else; he would have felt no am- 
 bition, no striving after power. But when his free food 
 ceased, observation showed him that his best and easiest 
 plan was to take possession of the implements, traps, 
 hunting and huts of his weaker fellows, and thus win 
 by one brief effort all that the others had obtained by 
 long and toilsome diligence. His original battle in- 
 stinct, naturally aroused only by desire for a particular 
 woman already sought by many wooers, was diverted 
 from its first object, and developed in another direction. 
 It was soon aroused by any and every desirable or useful 
 object, and so whatever could satisfy any human need 
 aroused mutual struggles, of which woman was origi- 
 nally the sole cause and prize. Although the battle 
 instinct is no longer immediately connected with and 
 
MAN AND NATURE 155 
 
 dependent on the sex instinct, it is to this day decidedly 
 coloured by it. Psychological investigation, if it go 
 deep enough, will discover ,tfie.Jjattle_jnstmcjt_tg_J)e^ 
 rooj ed J.n sex. The erotic strain visible in certain as- 
 pects of the passionate lust of battle and the delight 
 in victory is undeniable. Thus ambition, vanity, the 
 will to power, all the impulses and efforts that are either 
 admitted or felt to be parasitic, instead oi being new 
 instincts, are, as a matter of fact, merely the^primitiye 
 desire of woman directed to a new end. It was f rom 
 this that th e ba ttle inst jnc.t.jrose in man^ Its object, 
 instead of the winning of a woman, is now the subjuga- 
 tion of and domination over others, and the exploitation 
 of the fruits of their labour, but the unconscious con- 
 nection with thejeyjnstinct jemains,. In the intoxica- 
 tion of victory it is always present, however obscure. 
 Triumph as it presents itself to the i magination of the 
 ambitious c onqueror will hardly omit some faintly in- 
 dicated female forms. 
 
 Ancient poets like Ovid, and dogmatic sociologists of 
 the subjective type of J. J. Rousseau, who describe a 
 golden age in the past, endow primitive man with all the 
 virtues. But their exaggerated descriptions have little 
 relation to actuality. It is more rational to assume that 
 primitive man was neither ^ood nor e vil. There was 
 no room for such moral conceptions as virtue and vice, 
 or any moral judgments of human action, so long as all 
 man's needs were supplied by nature. He was selfish 
 with the innocent selfishness of the animal. His only 
 care was to protect himself against the larger beasts of 
 prey. His only bond of union with his fellows was the 
 habit of playing and possibly of hunting together. His 
 
156 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 relations to his fellows did not alter until nature declared 
 war upon him. Then, to accommodate himself to the 
 n ew and toilsome way of life , he developed parasitism. 
 " Man became a wolf to man "; the weak learned to 
 fear his brother, the strong to prey upon him. He 
 paled and cringed before one who used violence against 
 him, and felt drawn to one who left him alone. Good 
 he called the one who did nothing against him, evil 
 him who had designs on his life, goods, or strength. 
 
 Thus the conceptions good and evil originally denoted 
 the non-parasitic and parasitic respectively. Morality 
 ,gxofie_from thc-u nnatural conditions of human existgnc g, 
 an inevitable result of the prison in which Homunculus 
 is enclosed. Morality would not have been needed or 
 acquired in the condition of delightful freedom enjoyed 
 by the guests of the mythical paradise. Before men 
 could conceive of actions as being good or evil, they 
 must have suffered from the selfishness of their fellows, 
 and felt the need of friendly succour. Only the weak 
 have juffered and called for help ; to them the origin 
 of rn oral^y is due. The parasite could not possibly 
 feel that there was anything reprehensible in his forcible 
 exploitation of his fellows. That was left for the ex- 
 ploited. A moral judgment of good and evil was, in 
 its origin, a confession of weakness, a symbolic rejec- 
 tion by the spirit of the violence which the body was 
 not strong enough to resist. 
 
 Morality has developed, widened, and deepened. It 
 has risen to a degree of subtlety and grandeur that 
 primitive man could not have understood. Oblivious 
 of its origin, it no longer remembers that it once ex- 
 pressed the terror of the hunted before the pursuer, the 
 
MAN AND NATURE 157 
 
 impotent hatred of the vanquished for the conqueror. 
 Out of his own experience man learned to understand 
 suffering, and to hate and condemn those who caused 
 pain to others. In time this generalization mastered 
 the thought of the strong, for whom it had no applica- 
 tion. Thus the framework was created into which 
 there fitted all the further ramifications of morality — 
 love of one's neighbour, self-control, and regard for 
 human personality. 
 
 Such is the progress of human development as it 
 presents itself to the unprejudiced and undogmatic 
 observer. Towards the end of the tertiary or the be- 
 ginning of the quaternary period the earth was inhab- 
 ited by animal species, distinguished from all hitherto 
 existing living forms by the relatively great weight of 
 its brain. At a given movement the clim ate of the earth 
 altered. Nature deprived the favoured species of the 
 very conditions of its existence. The species, which 
 was destined in the course of its development to become 
 mankind as it is, joined battle with the hostile world, 
 and emerged victorious, thanks to its capacity for artifi- 
 cial attention, observation, and correct inference. But 
 the individuals of which it was composed were unequal ; 
 there were among them strong and weak, clever and 
 stupid. The better equipped soon saw that it was 
 easier for them to exploit the less well endowed than 
 to struggle with nature in their own persons. Para- 
 sitism arose, and regulated relations within the species. 
 The exploited then created the notion of morality, as a 
 protection against the parasitism already in operation 
 which threatened them all. Between parasitism and 
 morality th e re is an eternal warfare. Small successes 
 
158 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 are won, now by one side, now by the other. It is by 
 the action of these two mighty forces, the tendency to 
 exploitation on the one hand, and on the other the angel 
 ^o f morality wit h the flaming sword, putting his violent 
 deeds to shame, that the external destinies of mankind 
 are controlled. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 It would be of the deepest interest to know how the 
 individuals composing the human species, who must 
 certainly have originally been completely free and inde- 
 pendent, came to sacrifice their freedom, and to form 
 tribes, peoples, and states on a basis of mutual depend- 
 ence. History has no information to give us. It did 
 not arise until men had long ago been massed into fixed 
 political bodies, and the individual of the original type, 
 one subject to no external discipline, an anarchist in -the 
 root-sense of the word, had disappeared. The fact that 
 there are no primitive records of a time before this 
 ordering into regular bodies took place, not even any 
 mythical recollection of it, has persuaded many that 
 mankind, as a matter of fact, never did consist of dis- 
 connected units ; that It was at Its first appearance upon 
 earth grouped in hordes; that the natural condition of 
 its existence was a congregation of the larger units. 
 ,It was hoped that this fundamental sociological question 
 would be elucldateid by observation of savages; as a 
 matter of fact, the method is Inadequate. Nowadays, 
 and for a long time past, real savages have ceased to 
 exist. No race on earth lives completely apart, without 
 any relation to the rest of the world. Such an isolation 
 does not exist even on the little Islands of Micronesia; 
 
 159 
 
i6o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 even there some mutual intercourse exists. Men might 
 have lived, remote from the world, on an isolated island 
 in mid-ocean, far removed from any other island or 
 from the mainland, but when such islands as Tristan 
 da Cunha, Ascension, or St. Helena were discovered by 
 Europeans in the course of the last centuries they were 
 uninhabited. And even savage tribes do come in con- 
 tact with one another, if only on their outposts, the 
 boundaries of their territories. Although the encounter 
 be hostile, mutual knowledge accrues, and the horizon 
 of each is widened. In the course of long periods of 
 time a kind of acquaintance with the conditions of re- 
 mote lands spreads from race to race. Dim as this 
 knowledge may be, subject to strange and mistaken 
 interpretations, it does gradually carry some faint re- 
 flection of the light that shines in civilized lands to 
 savages that appear exceedingly lonely and remote from 
 all intercourse with the world. Ideas, institutions, dis- 
 coveries, and customs, are conveyed with a slow, yet 
 irresistible, progress from the spot where they arise 
 all over the world. Every nation or race appropriates 
 what the stage of mental development it has reached 
 enables it to retain. Thus the influence extended to 
 all is felt, whether deeply or superficially, by all. For 
 thousands of years no section of humanity can have been 
 entirely without cognizance of the formation of States 
 and people going on in other lands, and the imitative 
 impulse common to the race has certainly assisted the 
 spread of organized forms of common life. That sav- 
 ages show a social disposition, and tend to live in some 
 sort of society or state, is a matter of observation, and 
 proves, not that such social crystallizations are a primary 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL i6i 
 
 characteristic of the species, but that no section of 
 mankind can wholly escape the effect of the example of 
 others. 
 
 It is open to question whether historians and sociolo- 
 gists were on the right track in endeavouring to under- 
 stand the remote past of humanity, and the origins of its 
 civilization from an examination of the views, habits, 
 and customs of savages. In the first place, the name 
 " natural " peoples, used to justify this method, is really 
 not justifiable at all. All the peoples of the earth have 
 long ago ceased to live under their primitive constitu- 
 tion, and the condition of all of them, far from afford- 
 ing any true picture of the primitive status of the race, 
 represents a stage in civilization that, however low it be 
 esteemed, is the outcome of many thousand years of 
 creative and imitative effort. Secondly, conclusions 
 drawn from the conditions of savages cannot be valid 
 for humanity as a whole, since savages are the least 
 gifted and most backward portion of the species, and 
 their intellectual life throughout centuries has been quite 
 different, and on a much lower plan, from that of the 
 more highly endowed races. Of course, there was a 
 time when there was little difference between the remote 
 ancestors of the Germans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen 
 of to-day and those of the Weddas, Nyam-Nyam, or 
 New Guinea races. But they must have far surpassed 
 their coloured fellows in brain, invention, and the thirst 
 for knowledge. They replied to the compulsion of 
 nature by building up the whole fabric of civilization 
 as it is to-day. The coloured races, on the other hand, 
 remained unintelligent and brutish, even in those locali- 
 ties where they were subjected to the same climatic 
 
i62 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 disadvantages as the whites — e.g., North America, 
 Northern Asia, and Patagonia — and were equally com- 
 pelled to fight against the hostility of nature. Even in 
 primitive times the world must have presented quite a 
 different picture to the white man and to the coloured. 
 The thought of a black Australian, a negro from the 
 Congo, or an Indian from Gran Chaco cannot run on 
 parallel lines with that of a primitive German or 
 Chaldee. To try to understand the intellectual prog- 
 ress of civilized man from the study of the savage is 
 like trying to grasp the feelings, thoughts, knowledge, 
 and action of a people from a study of its children and 
 idiots. It should be expressly stated that there are 
 to-day neither white nor yellow savages. Between the 
 white and yellow races, indeed, there is little difference. 
 They probably either sprang from one primitive stock 
 or have been very considerably intermingled. This 
 seems to be proved by the fact, among others, that about 
 three per cent, of white children bear near the cocc)^ 
 the blue mark that distinguishes the Mongolian race, 
 while a Mongoloid physiognomy, that no doubt repre- 
 sents a throw-back, is very common among degenerate 
 whites. When, therefore, we speak of savages or of 
 natural peoples, we can at the present day include only 
 blacks and reds. From them no valid conclusion can 
 be drawn as to the intellectual capacity of mankind as a 
 whole. Maoris may be prominent members of the 
 New Zealand Parliament ; Redskins may be successful in 
 law, journalism, and business in North America. 
 Negroes in the United States and Haiti may have 
 acquired a scientific education, and occupied themselves 
 with music and poetry. This only proves that the 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 163 
 
 imitative faculty is a universal human attribute, in which 
 black and red men are not deficient. All the instances 
 adduced to prove that there is no difference in the 
 intellectual capacity of the chief races are instances of 
 more or less happy imitation. Creative activities, dis- 
 coveries, or inventions have not as yet been credited to 
 members of the black or red race. But the civilization 
 which the white man has built up is no mere imitative 
 game, however clever ; it is a connected body of creative 
 activities. 
 
 No. Observation of so-called savages can teach us 
 nothing of the being, ways, and primitive instincts of 
 those men from which the highest type was to 
 develop. 
 
 A different method, which promises more certain 
 knowledge, is the careful investigation of those innate, 
 involuntary m ovements of the human soul, whichper- 
 sist in spite o f~ec[ucation or cuItureT This method rests 
 on the assumption that in every species, the human in- 
 cluded, there are certain fundamental instincts that are 
 as indestructible as its anatomical form, and as little 
 subject to transmogrification. I know that education 
 can profoundly affect even what seems a fundamental 
 instinct, as in the case of the cats of Ruhla, which no 
 longer behave towards birds as beasts of prey. In such 
 a case, however, it can be proved that the fundamental 
 character, though overlaid, is not destroyed, and can be 
 roused again by any influence strong enough to sweep 
 away the overlay. Let. us keep to our instance. If one 
 were to shut up a cat of Ruhla and a bird in a cage 
 together, having provided the bird with plenty of seed 
 but left the cat hungry, the moment would certainly 
 
i64 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 come when the cat would forget all its training and 
 devour the bird, without delaying an instant to consider 
 the pious duty of feeding on seed. Therefore, if our 
 observation were protracted enough, "attentive enough, 
 and properly directed, we should see the wild hunter 
 of birds through the changes that education had brought 
 upon the cat. And such is doubtless the case with all 
 fiandamental instincts, including those possessed by man. 
 In his natural state he gave way to them without any 
 attempt at resistance. But when his existence became 
 artificial, these instincts ceased to have full sway over 
 him. The instinct of preservation, the mightiest of 
 them all, overcame the others, or turned them aside 
 from their natural aim. Many human instincts served 
 as weapons in the fight with the surrounding world, and 
 determined the form of the civilization that man cre- 
 ated to assist him in the fight; others had to go under, 
 and did not survive. They did not, therefore, dis- 
 appear. They do persist, but deep down, chained in 
 a dark prison, seldom lit by the uncertain light of 
 consciousness, in which they mostly remain strongly 
 guarded a whole life long. Yet sometimes they break 
 loose, and the man who has thus, failed to guard his 
 prisoners passes for an eccentric, a criminal, a revolu- 
 tionary — in a word, an abnormal, anti-social creature. 
 It is these s uppresse d instincts that we have to discover. 
 The task is a thorny one. One must abandon the 
 ordinary point of view — ^morality — since morality is the 
 product of civilization, and these primitive tendencies 
 are prior to civilization, and therefore to morality. 
 Moreover, one must free oneself from all the prejudices 
 bred in us by thousands of years of social tradition. 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 165 
 
 The task is to investigate nature, to establish facts, not to 
 pass judgment; and since the only method that holds 
 out any prospect of success is that of introspection — 
 searching examination of the inner consciousness — the 
 observer must have no presuppositions, he must not 
 pose for a moment : he must regard himself with com- 
 plete objectivity as a physical apparatus, and dismiss 
 wholly from his mind all he may have heard or read 
 as to the nature of man and the fundamental traits of 
 his character, and all the opinions that he himself, as a 
 moral and civilized being, may hold as to the praise or 
 blame-worthiness of individual tendencies. Only so can 
 he hope that, hidden beneath the sugerstructure raised 
 by civilization, hejnay^ discover^ the strange rum that he 
 perhaps never expected to find there. The ruin may 
 rouse disgust and uneasiness within him, he would may 
 be gladly hide it from his own knowledge. He has, 
 however, to recognize in it the primitive history of his 
 existence. For a knowledge of the past of the species 
 it is as important carefully to trace out the instincts that, 
 in the healthy man, are ambiguous, tortuous, and over- 
 laid as it is to investigate those bodily dispositions and 
 organs that are now useless and rudimentary. These 
 instincts are survivals, like the loop of the branchia in 
 the neck of the embryo or the vermiform appendix. 
 They witness to intellectual phylogeny. The question 
 is how to interpret them correctly. For that one may 
 have recourse, as in the case of anatomical atavism, to 
 pathology and the comparison with related animal 
 species. The morbid development of certain instincts 
 in abnormal men may enable us to understand the bare 
 indications of such tendencies in normal men. Certain 
 
i66 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 conclusions as to the primitive nature of man may be 
 drawn from careful observation of the ways and habits 
 of the apes, who are nearer to us in the scale, so long as 
 it is supplemented by a constant comparison with human 
 traits. 
 
 Such a method of observing mankind fills one with 
 grave distrust of the old statement of Aristotle, that 
 man is itoXitikov i<oov. " Man is a political animal," 
 said the Stagyrite, " born for association with other men ; 
 he cannot attain either virtue or happiness as an iso- 
 lated individual." Certainly not virtue, for Aristotle's 
 virtue is a social good, and can, of course, have no 
 value outside of society. But what about happiness? 
 Of that Aristotle knows nothing, for he has in his eye 
 only the man he knows, the child of civilization, who 
 has grown up in the midst of society and the State, 
 whose habits all depend on his relation to his fellow- 
 men, without whom he could not imagine existence. 
 But what Aristotle has not proved Is that man Is by 
 nature what he appears when living with others. On 
 the contrary, everything points to the fact that man's 
 natural state, before he was compelled to support life 
 by artificial means, was not gregarious ; he did not live 
 In herds, but as a solitary being. The solitary naturally 
 strove to form one of a pair, since only then did he 
 attain the Individuality which satisfied all his organic 
 possibilities, and rendered him, in the biological sense, 
 complete. The apes, our nearest relations, do not natu- 
 rally go In herds. The orang-outang, the gorilla, and 
 the chimpanzee live In families, without any attempt at 
 intercourse with neighbours, in this respect resembling 
 the large beasts of prey, who hunt alone, and only form 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 167 
 
 pairs in the breeding season. Only the lower apes go 
 in troops. F. H. Giddings brings forward no proof in 
 support of his purely dogmatic assertion that man's 
 animal ancestors were " social." In Giddings' sense 
 present-day man Is not social, as has been shown ; Ward 
 is undoubtedly on firmer ground in his denial of the 
 existence of any " social feelings " at all. 
 
 The old way of talking of the " political animal " 
 and the " gregarious animal " is, moreover, discredited 
 by the example of the ape. Attentive observation of 
 basic human instincts leads to the same result — namely, 
 that man is not a social, but a solitary animal. How 
 closely In an organized society a man seems bound to his 
 fellows! How Inextricably are their interests inter- 
 twined ! What a tremendously powerful Impulse seems 
 to draw each man to the companionship of his kind! 
 It fills the reception-rooms In palaces — this instinct — 
 the public-houses and the tea-rooms, the bars frequented 
 by the proletariate, and the buffets of the fashionable 
 hotels, the theatres and the music-halls. It creates clubs 
 and unions. It Is one of the forces that draw people 
 from the villages into the big towns. It is the basis of 
 Society, with a big " S." It underlies the countless 
 forms of daily Intercourse of people of the same class 
 and similar tastes. And yet It Is all external, super- 
 ficial; underneath It all, beneath the exclusive vislting- 
 llst of the smart lady, behind all those receptions, din- 
 ners, balls, At Homes, aesthetic tea-parties, private 
 banquet-halls and reserved tables at restaurants, there 
 lurks, In the depths of the consciousness, a secret emo- 
 tion that contradicts It all. Everyone who has passed 
 the lowest stage of Intellectual development shrouds 
 
i68 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the more intimate aspects of his life from the view of 
 others. Whether the conditions of his existence be 
 simple or highly complicated, he conceals them, to the 
 best of his abihty, from the curiosity of his neighbours. 
 Even at school, in the canteen, on board ship, or in 
 the cloister, where a man cannot shut himself away, 
 where every movement is observed, where the individual 
 is most completely absorbed into the community, even 
 there every man guards a secret that he shares with 
 none. One often hears it said: "The life of this or 
 that man lies like an open book before the eyes of all." 
 This statement must never be taken literally. There 
 are always stray pages that cannot be turned. What 
 a man hides from the world is not necessarily anything 
 bad, anything of which he need be ashamed. It is 
 only that he will never reveal himself fully, never 
 expose himself to view on every side, because of some- 
 thing within him that shrinks from such complete pub- 
 licity. In the depths of every soul there is a shyness, 
 a shamefacedness, that represents a still, but enduring, 
 protest against social life — life in the herd. Every 
 soul is a world of its own, and maintains its isolation 
 with desperate earnestness. The gates open but a nar- 
 row chink. The outsider never gets farther than the 
 anteroom. The inner chambers remain for ever closed 
 to him. Countless persons have recorded their own 
 lives. Is anyone so uncritical as to believe that they 
 have been quite honest? Even in the autobiographies 
 that are by way of being full confessions, such as the 
 twelve books of the " Confessions " of St. Augustine, 
 or the " Confessions " of J. J. Rousseau, the author Is 
 almost always unconsciously, and frequently even con- 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 169 
 
 sciously, posing. Even here an impenetrable dusk 
 shrouds the real bases of personality. 
 
 Everyone's first impulse on meeting an unknown 
 fellow-creature is shyness, caution, mistrust, even en- 
 mity. Habit dulls these feelings. They retreat across 
 the threshold of consciousness, but never wholly dis- 
 appear. This is not contradicted by the fact that men 
 seek one another out, find pleasure in one another's 
 society, and try to attract others to themselves. Here 
 all sorts of secondary interests come into play — the 
 vanity that loves to shine before others, ambition that 
 would make use of them, self-aggrandisement that aims 
 at exploiting them. The thousand complexities of an 
 artificial, civilized existence bind every individual mem- 
 ber of a community with threads that are strong for all 
 their fineness, and leave him no longer free to follow 
 his impulses. The mutual cordialities of social life are 
 cut flowers ; their stalks are stuck in the earth, but they 
 have no roots there. Relations between men are not 
 the outcome of a primitive impulse, but of a late de- 
 veloped utilitarianism. Were man really a gregarious 
 animal, he would feel himself irresistibly drawn to his 
 fellows; his relations to them would know no reserve; 
 he would never withdraw into himself, and try to 
 keep his inner self curtained away, nor ever feel an 
 irresistible need for solitude and a retreat within 
 himself. 
 
 Against the theory that man, like the ape, is not 
 naturally a social, but a solitary, being it may be urged 
 that his undeniable tendency to feel distrust and shyness 
 of his fellows is a late, and not a primitive instinct, 
 only developed when he was compelled to live under 
 
170 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 artificial conditions, and consequently to become para- 
 sitic. 
 
 Since from that time on man inevitably saw in every- 
 one, until the contrary was proved, a parasite and 
 exploiter — that is, an enemy — his instinct of self-preser- 
 vation put him on his guard against his fellows, and 
 taught him to fear and avoid them. As civilization 
 developed parasitism concealed itself under more and 
 more subtle and fair-seeming forms. The majority, 
 becoming used to the exploitation to which their inferi- 
 ority in brain and strength condemned them, no longer 
 felt their existence threatened by it. The instinct of self- 
 preservation, thus lulled to sleep, ceased to put men on 
 their guard against their fellows, and to warn them 
 to keep them at as great distance as possible. Thus the 
 tendency to isolation and solitude stepped farther and 
 farther back over the threshold of consciousness, and is 
 now in most men but a wretched survival, only dis- 
 coverable after careful search. 
 
 This objection cannot be proved to be unfounded. 
 It is, however, contradicted by the unalterable inner 
 solitude that is most complete precisely in the strongest 
 types of the species, and therefore cannot possibly have 
 been acquired simply as a protection or defence against 
 attack. 
 
 The avoidance of mankind and flight from the world 
 of many hermits, some saints, and certain sufferers from 
 melancholia may be regarded as a form of pathological 
 atavism. It is observed that primitive instincts, which 
 in a state of health are suppressed by civilization, break 
 out in sickness. In the same way murder and other 
 cannibal predilections appear in criminal degenerates. 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 171 
 
 Similarly, the anti-social feelings that appear in abnor- 
 mal persons represent, in all probability, a reversion to 
 primitive states, not a new phenomenon. 
 
 Unbiassed observation leads, then, to the uncomfort- 
 able conclusion that man walks in fearsome loneliness 
 throughout his life. Apart from love, which will be 
 treated later, he never comes into intimate connection 
 with people in general, except when he abandons himself 
 to some big intellectual current, some view, some 
 aesthetic movement, some political or religious party. 
 There he mixes with those who share his views, without 
 ever getting to know them personally or realizing their 
 individual traits. On the other hand, whenever he does 
 get to know them, natural incompatibility at once proves 
 stronger than the bond of common opinions, as is proved 
 by the friction and the bitter animosities so frequent 
 among leaders of any party, sect, or school, whether 
 philosophic, literary, or artistic. 
 
 Rauber ^ thought that he could prove Aristotle's 
 assertion of man's gregarious nature to be correct, by 
 collecting and critically examining all possible informa- 
 tion about the instances that appear from time to time 
 of men living in a state of barbarism. His conclusion 
 was that, since persons who have grown up far from 
 men, in the woods and amidst animals, cannot speak, 
 and have hardly anything human about them, therefore 
 the individual can never be regarded as a man — society 
 alone makes him a man. So long as Rauber confines 
 the title of man to an individual who speaks correctly, 
 
 ' Dr. R. Rauber, " Homo Sapiens Ferus ; or, The Condition of the 
 Savage, and its Scientific, Political, and Educational Significance,'' 
 Leipzig, 1885. 
 
172 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 has passed his standards, is respectably dressed, and 
 knows how to behave himself properly, he is perfectly 
 right in refusing it to the wild creatures who have from 
 time to time been found in the woods of Russia and 
 South Germany, in the Pyrenees, and in Belgium. But 
 there is no scientific justification for making the idea 
 of man synonymous with that of a model citizen. It 
 should no more surprise Rauber to find men living 
 in barbarism unable to speak than that a child born and 
 brought up in Germany, and surrounded by Germans, 
 does not speak French or English. Language is not an 
 inborn, but an acquired faculty. Wild men had no 
 opportunity to learn it, and no need, since it is merely 
 the means of carrying on those relationships with other 
 men that they did not possess. Rauber maintains that 
 his barbarians were not only unable to speak, but even 
 to think. His own facts contradict him. Barbarians 
 distinguish very clearly between friend and foe; they 
 know how to express comfort or ill-humour; they ob- 
 serve their environment, and to some extent adapt them- 
 selves to it. The mere fact that they succeeded, under 
 the most unfavourable circumstances, in supporting life 
 in the wilderness proves them to be possessed of many 
 faculties wanting in many a civilized man who speaks 
 beautifully, and in other respects comes up to Rauber's 
 ideal. Moreover, as von Schreber correctly observed, 
 most, if not all, wild men did not lose their reason in 
 the wilderness, but fled thither because feeble-minded 
 or insane from their birth. As a matter of fact, 
 Rauber's dictum, " homo sapiens ferus," has no sig- 
 nificance in the question of the mode of life of primitive 
 man. No one denies that, in the present state of 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 173 
 
 humanity, an individual who has been solitary since his 
 childhood, and shut off from the society of his kind, 
 must, from an intellectual point of view, be far behind 
 those who have grown up and lived in a community. 
 To do so would be to deny the value of upbringing, 
 instruction, and example. Obviously, a single being, 
 even were he a supreme genius, could not in the course 
 of a short life make for himself the inventions and 
 discoveries that represent the thousand years of work 
 of the whole human race, and are transmitted to the 
 educated individual in a compressed and abbreviated 
 form, at school, by the reading of books, and instruction 
 in the use of his faculties. But this fragmentary truth 
 does not entitle us to the conclusion that men have been 
 social beings since they began to be. Beneath the great 
 mass of outworn ideas are certain feelings to which man 
 has held fast, and they are solitary feelings. 
 
 For thousands of years men have gone on repeating 
 with lowered voice, and eyes piously uplifted and brim- 
 ming with tears, sentimentalities that they take to be 
 irrefutable, unassailable truths. They rave of friend- 
 ship and love of one's neighbour — in these days of 
 sympathy and altruism — as glorious feelings in which 
 only quite exceptional monsters are deficient. The spec- 
 tacle of social life, however, must give any unprejudiced 
 observer pause, and cause a doubt as to the reality of 
 these universally esteemed qualities of human nature, 
 for, as judged by their actions, men appear to be ani- 
 mated, not by brotherly love and friendship, but by 
 selfishness and a hard indifference to others. Therefore 
 those phrases and catch-words, that form part of the 
 fabric of conventional morality, must be tested without 
 
174 THE INTERPRETATION OF HiaTORY 
 
 any reference to the fact that they pass current every- 
 where, that on one examines and everyone praises 
 them. 
 
 Friendship ! It is a word that makes the heart beat 
 high. Alas ! it is only a word. Does it exist? What 
 is it? Cicero's often-quoted work on "Friendship" 
 starts from the Aristotelian dictum, reiterated with a 
 certain hesitation, that man is a political animal, and 
 therefore disposed by nature to mutual attachment.* 
 He gives the famous definition of friendship : " It is 
 indeed nothing less than the most complete harmony of 
 all things. Divine and human, with good-will and affec- 
 tion." ^ This " good-will and affection " is smuggled 
 In with truly sophistic skill, for it Is that precisely which 
 has to be proved. It is clear that complete harmony 
 in all things is pleasant. Everyone is always convinced 
 that he is right ; when he finds his own views in another, 
 he has the same good opinion of him that he has of 
 himself. But what about good-will and affection ? In 
 friendship defined as harmony the other really has no 
 place; he is merely the mirror for the pleased con- 
 templation of personal vanity, the echo which gives 
 back the agreeable sound of a man's own voice. It 
 is self that is sought, self that is loved, self, one's own 
 personality, that is never limited or restrained, as it 
 must be by real " caritas." Daily experience proves 
 
 ' M. Tullius Cicero, " De Amicitia," v. : " Sic enim mihi perspicere 
 videor, ita natos esse nos ut inter 'omnes esset societas quaedam." It 
 seems to him "tliat we are so constituted that a certain social bond 
 exists between us all." 
 
 ' Ibid., book vi. : " Est autem amicitia mihi aliud nisi omnium divi- 
 norum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate summa 
 consensio." 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 175 
 
 how insecure a basis harmony affords for friendship. 
 Let but some new question arise, upon which two 
 hitherto like-minded friends take different views, and 
 friendships that may have lasted a lifetime are rent 
 asunder in a moment, or even, as happened a thousand 
 times in France during the Dreyfus case, converted 
 into deadly enmities. One seeks in vain for the " bene- 
 volentia et caritas," supposed to have been an ingredient 
 in the friendship, which might have prevented or out- 
 lived the breach had it really existed, and exercised a 
 mutual attraction. If friendship means only a com- 
 mon point of view, it is wholly intellectual, and not that 
 instinctive expression that alone could prove man's prim- 
 itive social nature. Cicero himself, moreover, sadly 
 admits that " throughout the centuries three or four 
 pairs of friends can be named " answering to his defi- 
 nition, and l;hat as a rule men only form friendships 
 for the sake of protection and support — " prassidii 
 adjumentique causa " — not from " benevolentia et cari- 
 tas," and " love their friends as they would a flock out 
 of which they hope to make a profit." ^ A feeling as 
 rare as Cicero admits this to be cannot be a natural 
 instinct. 
 
 From antiquity comes the naive exclamation, " O 
 friends, there are no friends ! " and the saying attributed 
 to Bias, and quoted by Diogenes Laertius, "^iXeTvus 
 jUMT^CTovETas ": — " Ohc shouM lovc in the expectation of 
 
 ' Cicero, " De Amicitia," book xxi. : " Sed plerique .... amicos 
 tanquam pecudes eos potissimum diligunt, ex quibus sperant se 
 maximum fructum esse captures." 
 
 L. Dugas has exhaustively treated the attitude of the ancients 
 towards friendships in his excellent book, " L'Amitie antique d'apres 
 les raoeurs populaires et les theories des philosophes," Paris, 1894. 
 
176 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 hating." Can there be a more horrible denial of true 
 attachment, a more fearsome warning against any 
 simple, unreflectlve devotion than this suggestion that. 
 In the very Instant of overflowing tenderness, one should 
 see the ugly features of the enemy? There was little 
 of self-deception In the cold, keen glance with which 
 La Rochefoucauld acquired his bitter knowledge of 
 mankind. Many of his sayings show how small was 
 his belief In the genuine genuineness of friendship: 
 " We all have the strength to bear the misfortunes of 
 others "; " We often find something far from displeas- 
 ing to us In the misfortunes of our best friends " ; " Our 
 first sensation of pleasure in the good fortune of our 
 friends does not arise from our natural goodness or 
 from our friendship: It is, as a rule. Inspired by the 
 selfishness that flatters us with the hope of being lucky 
 In our turn, or of gaining some advantage for ourselves 
 from their good fortune." 
 
 What is called friendship Is, as a matter of fact, a 
 complex of various emotional and intellectual factors. 
 The superficial relations subsisting between persons 
 belonging to the same profession or rank in society may 
 be dismissed as not worth classification. There is noth- 
 ing spiritual In such ties, indiscriminately formed by 
 interest, habit, vanity, custom, or at best the satisfaction 
 caused by intellectual affinity. The friendships of child- 
 hood and youth are much more deeply rooted. The 
 comradeship formed In these years is usually based upon 
 an inclination in which the element of passion can always 
 be detected, sometimes in a subdued, but often In quite 
 a distinct form. Before puberty the full capacity for 
 love exists, though the consciousness of sex has not 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 177 
 
 awakened to direct it. A child, a young creature, 
 lavishes on its companions the ardent tenderness that 
 informs its love later on : the feeling is the same, though 
 as yet unconscious, undifferentiated. It is love that ex- 
 presses itself in such childish friendships, love as yet 
 unconscious of its own meaning and intention, feeling, 
 as in a dream, after some longed-for object, and uncon- 
 sciously catching hold of something else.^ Later, when 
 the individual, fully developed, realizes what he seeks, 
 his youthful friendships change their tone and lose their 
 ardour. Yet throughout life there rests upon them a 
 mysterious glamour — the glamour with which every- 
 one's imagination illumines his own youth.^ So long 
 as they retain the freshness of the present they are love, 
 unconscious of its aim ; in the past they become part of 
 each man's youth, and share in the soft tenderness of 
 his thoughts of it. 
 
 Even the mature adult is capable of a friendship that 
 penetrates the inmost fibres of his emotional life: the 
 friendship of fellow-soldiers, of Achilles and Patroclus. 
 Men who have fought shoulder to shoulder, who have 
 
 ' Schurtz has recognized, in his book on " Hordes, Classes, and 
 Guilds," the significance of a common life in the years of adolescence 
 in the development of the community, but neglects the psycho-physical 
 side of the attractions subsisting between boys and youths which are 
 often mysterious to themselves. 
 
 'Compare Hermann Lingg's "Friends" (Schluszsteine, Berlin, 
 1878, p. 4) : 
 
 "In the happy days of youth, 
 Under joy's control. 
 
 Thou canst choose thy friends in truth, 
 Knit them to thy soul. 
 Only in those early days 
 Wilt thou make the friend that stays. . . ." 
 
178 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 shared danger and hardship, the terrors of death and 
 the intoxication of victory, are indissolubly knit to- 
 gether, so long as they live. It is as though such mo- 
 ments of extreme tension broke down the barriers that 
 separate each individual from his fellows and the world 
 around him, and made possible a fusion and mingling 
 of souls. Since our conscious thought proceeds by anal- 
 ogy, and tends to transfer the feelings accompanying 
 certain actions to others whose resemblance to them is 
 merely symbolical, it often happens that the friendship 
 peculiar to fellow-soldiers is found among those who 
 are fighting battles where no lives are lost and no blood 
 shed — symbolic battles in defence of some conviction. 
 
 Friendship in these two instances — the unconscious 
 love of youth and the recollection of comradeship in 
 battle — is a genuine feeling resting on a biological 
 foundation. In all others it is a convention, and only 
 skin-deep. This is even more true of philanthropy, 
 generalized friendship for mankind as a whole. It has 
 really nothing to do with feeling. It is an idea, a 
 system, a method — what you will — but not a living 
 sentiment. Philanthropy is only touched to genuine 
 emotion when the abstract notion of mankind appears 
 in some concrete shape, as someone who is personally 
 attractive, as a particular widow, orphan, or distressed 
 man, whose sufferings have a physiognomy of their 
 own; it is an instinct that is only real in reference to 
 definite individuals: when generalized, all form and 
 purpose disappears. Whatever forms of philanthropic 
 activity one likes to name — donations, endowments, 
 societies, and movements of every sort, from Carnegie's 
 millions for free libraries to the Red Cross Society and 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 179 
 
 the Salvation Army — one will find vanity, self-right- 
 eousness, fancies, fixed ideas, delusions, religious, po- 
 litical, social, or merely political convictions at the bot- 
 tom of them all, and never that instinctive sympathy 
 which must, by its very nature, be directed to a clearly- 
 defined individual, and cannot be aroused for such 
 vague, undefined generalities as make no appeal to the 
 feelings. Only in abnormal persons, whose intellectual 
 processes are permanently tinged with feeling, does the 
 love of humanity exist in a real and strongly emotional 
 form, and in them it serves to give an intelligible direc- 
 tion to their overwrought sensibility, hovering between 
 tears and rapture ; to the longing which has no definite 
 aim, and to the hysterical excitement whose pathological 
 ground they do not understand. Sentimental philan- 
 thropy is closely akin to religious mania, and both 
 originate in a morbid mental condition. 
 
 Consciousness tries to provide a content such as reason 
 can sanction for an emotionalism that operates in the 
 vague. The form of this content varies, according to 
 the education, upbringing, and intellectual environment 
 of the individual, between mystical communion with 
 God and self-abnegating worship of humanity. This 
 doubtless is the explanation of the love of mankind 
 that amounted to a religion with St. Simon and his 
 disciples, and with Auguste Comte and the Positivists. 
 The altruism of Spencer and the Socialist doctrine of 
 human solidarity are the logical outcome of certain 
 sociological views: the ethical completion of a certain 
 philosophy of the relations of the individual to society. 
 For sane and rational minds, such views are entirely 
 without an emotional side at all, or possess it only 
 
i8o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 in so far as such social and ethical convictions are 
 artificially reinforced by the suggestion of inherited 
 religious feelings. 
 
 Only the novice in psychiatrical and psychological 
 questions will see anything contradictory in the fact that 
 spiritual anomalies will rouse anti-social atavism in one 
 case and unbounded love of humanity in another. The 
 expert knows that one and the same organic disturbance 
 will, according as it is accompanied by depression or 
 excitement, take the form of hatred of the world or 
 philanthropy, between melancholia and mania, or alter- 
 nate between one and the other. 
 
 The psychology and biology of friendship and altru- 
 ism ought to be studied thoroughly, provided always 
 that sentimental prejudice is avoided. Here it is only 
 possible to refer briefly to the methods and results of 
 a study that is of the greatest importance for a knowl- 
 edge of human nature and an understanding of indi- 
 vidual and social life. According to these conclusions, 
 neither friendship nor philanthropy is a primitive in- 
 stinct proving man to be naturally a social being. They 
 are views and convictions acquired late, as a result of 
 an artificial civilization, and without deep roots in the 
 life of feeling. 
 
 One feeling there is, and only one — not an invention 
 or suggestion of the intellect, nor the mere creation of 
 habit, but a genuine feeling — strong enough to call man 
 out of his selfish isolation and command his relations to 
 others — the sex instinct. It had nothing to do with love 
 originally, and often has nothing to do with it now. 
 Only a slow process of development has ennobled and 
 elevated it. The prehistoric savage and the present- 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL i8i 
 
 day brute sees in woman only the satisfaction of momen- 
 tary desire. When it is satisfied, she is indifferent, even 
 repulsive. As man's consciousness became more varied 
 and refined, the ideas that accompanied his sensual im- 
 pulses became more lofty. Thus that which roused de- 
 sire also roused far-reaching, lofty, and illuminating 
 thoughts; woman acquired an attraction and a charm, 
 and roused a devotion far beyond the mere enjoyment 
 of the moment. 
 
 Love in its ideal aspect, the side of it that enters into 
 consciousness, the concrete imagery of poetic associa- 
 tions, castles in the air and dream-pictures that make 
 it up, is but a superstructure created by man's acquired 
 habits of thought, knowledge, and imagination upon the 
 basic instinct of sex, which alone is natural. With 
 woman this feeling gives birth to a kind of continuation 
 of itself in the maternal instinct. The sex instinct 
 brings the parents together; the maternal instinct binds 
 the children, first to the mother, and In the course of 
 development to the parents. Thus man, the solitary 
 wanderer, is gathered into a group bound together by 
 a real, organic feeling, independent of reason, and prior 
 to any intellectual culture. In the family we have 
 human Individuality completed In its natural form. 
 There can be no doubt that men lived in families before 
 they were obliged to sustain existence by effort and by 
 art. Superficial sociologists often speak as though the 
 organized community and division of labour of bees and 
 ants, their system of earning and spending, and their 
 social arrangements generally, were closely akin to the 
 human State and society, and could serve as an 
 example to It. But the beehive and the ant-heap have 
 
i83 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 nothing in common with society and the State. They 
 correspond to the family, not to these artificial creations. 
 The community in which bees and ants live is not a 
 State, but the natural family of these insects, in which 
 there is one mother, many fathers, a mass of sexless, 
 and a few sexually distinguished children. It is natu- 
 ral for bees and ants to live in such a community as 
 this, for men to live in families — family being under- 
 stood purely as it is natural history. With this, the 
 primitive instinct that binds the members of a biological 
 family together, the legal conception of a family has 
 nothing to do. It is the outcome of the development 
 of property, rather than, as Fustel de Coulanges ^ tried 
 to show, of early religious conceptions, although family 
 life had its own rites, its own place in the general cult. 
 Since the family represents the real self-contained com- 
 pletion of the individual, it is natural that this crystal- 
 lized core should dominate all later developments of 
 human society, and that all the institutions that ap- 
 peared, such as property, belief, law, rank, and nobility, 
 should centre in the family. They influenced its form 
 and significance, but it was there before them, and is 
 not their outcome. 
 
 The sex instinct is the sole social impulse In man 
 that is not due to example, habit, or artificial Interests. 
 It is the sole source of sympathetic emotion, even when 
 not apparently roused by the other sex. Where it is 
 restrained or repressed, as in the eunuch, the whole na- 
 ture dries up, and becomes incapable of feeling for 
 anything or anyone outside itself. Love of child is the 
 
 'Fustel de Coulanges, "La Cite Antique," Paris, i88S, twelfth edi- 
 tion, p. 39, " The Family." 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 183 
 
 first transformation of the sex instinct; it appears in a 
 still less differentiated and more unconscious form in 
 youthful friendship: sentimentality, exaltation, enthusi- 
 astic admiration for ideas and their exponents, for move- 
 ments and those who lead them, for groups, classes, 
 nations, and historical figures — all are the outcome of 
 that primitive instinct which reason and imagination 
 have trained to flow along many artificial channels, 
 like the water of a complicated fountain that issues in 
 countless jets from a single source. Bossuet's truest 
 word was: "All is love transformed." A train of 
 thought or act of will which is not at bottom rooted in 
 the rich soil of the sex instinct remains a mere shadow, 
 colourless and bloodless, warmed by no feeling, power- 
 less to issue in act. 
 
 But while it is true that sexuality, raised to love in 
 the course of man's intellectual development, holds the 
 world together, and lies at the base of all deeper human 
 interests, it would be false to look upon it as the force 
 which has formed individuals into communities, be they 
 societies, peoples, or States. Love only created the 
 primitive family. This was, of course, not based upon 
 monogamy. The example of the apes, and those human 
 instincts which have not been repressed by civilized 
 morality, enforce the assumption that man was origi- 
 nally a polygamous animal : he took and kept as many 
 wives as he could defend against rivals. The patriarch 
 lived in the midst of his wives and the offspring, to 
 which their mothers were devoted if he was not, with- 
 out any close intercourse with other families. Children 
 remained with their parents only until they were fully 
 developed ; then they went off and started new families. 
 
1 84 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Descendants certainly did not go far from the parent 
 tree. Neither man nor any other animal wanders unless 
 he is obliged to do so, and of all habits the hardest 
 and most painful to break is that which binds him to a 
 familiar spot. Only very late did he feel any curiosity 
 as to what lay behind the mountains and across the 
 water, still later any desire for the wide distances be- 
 yond. The unknown was more terrible than attractive 
 to primitive man. If anyone doubt this, let him observe 
 the mental attitude of the simple man of the people 
 towards foreign parts. Doubtless families of a common 
 origin remained neighbours; they were accustomed to 
 one another, played together as children, and found 
 their pleasure together later on. These groups, near 
 one another and mixing together in this superficial way, 
 might be called hordes, yet it is certain that there was 
 in them no organization, nothing that limited the volun- 
 tary movements of the individual. 
 
 Man could only live in this free and peaceful blood- 
 relationship, disturbed by no serious strife save that for 
 the possession of some women, so long as it was possible 
 for him to satisfy his needs naturally and without 
 labour. A change came over his relation to his fellows 
 when he was compelled to expend skill and trouble in 
 protecting himself against cold and want. Then he 
 realized the possibility of making them useful. His 
 indifference gave way to a desire for their services. 
 Earlier, the mating instinct alone had brought him into 
 relation with them. Now the desire to subjugate them 
 and save himself trouble by their exertions arose. The 
 original sex instinct was now reinforced by the instinct 
 of mastery and exploitation. The satisfaction of this 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 185 
 
 second instinct was accompanied by a pleasure compar- 
 able in strength and kind to that of the mating instinct. 
 The strong man felt a proud satisfaction in mastering 
 the weak, making him his possession and his thing, 
 disposing of him as he pleased, and making a profit 
 out of him, analogous to that of compelling a woman 
 to the satisfaction of his desires; the selfish joy felt by 
 his manhood in attack and conquest was rooted in the 
 sex instinct, and drew from it its strength. At the 
 beginning of the struggle for existence the two instincts 
 mingled together. Man sought in woman not only the 
 means to this pleasure, but a slave to do his work. 
 Woman, as the weaker, was naturally the first sacrifice. 
 The smallest expenditure of strength and energy was 
 required for her exploitation. Thus the family, created 
 by the necessity of the life force, offered for centuries 
 the easiest opening for parasitism, and does to-day in 
 many cases. The power given by Roman law to the 
 husband and father is the natural rule of all nations; 
 it prevails, although in a weakened and modified form, 
 under the most advanced civilization. 
 
 At the lowest stage in civilization the head of the 
 household seeks to have as many wives and children as 
 possible, since they represent the earliest form of wealth 
 — i.e., slaves. When the female children grow up, and 
 can no longer be retained by their parents, he sells them 
 to a wooer in exchange for goods that increase his pos- 
 sessions. The Greek myth of Kronos devouring his 
 own children symbolizes accurately the primitive re- 
 lation of the head of the house to his family. The 
 Greek story says nothing of the retribution of the chil- 
 dren who escaped being devoured. But it is the regular 
 
1 86 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 custom of many savage peoples. When the parents 
 grow old and weak, they are forcibly put to death by 
 their children, who, in some Australian and Malayan 
 tribes, then eat them. Gentle ethnographers excuse the 
 murder of the parents on the ground that it proceeds 
 from a praiseworthy desire to free them from the 
 burden of existence. But such tenderness is hardly to 
 be expected from barbarians. It is far more probable 
 that, when the children become the stronger, they re- 
 venge in this brutal manner their earlier subjection, 
 and thus indulge their own parasitic instinct at their 
 parents' expense. 
 
 In the course of development land became valuable, 
 first as hunting-ground, then as pasturage, and finally as 
 tillage, and was coveted accordingly. As the younger 
 members of the family grew up, and found their native 
 spot too narrow for them, they beg^n to spread into the 
 neighbouring territory. If it was already occupied, a 
 death-struggle ensued. In primitive times the van- 
 quished were horribly tortured, killed, and eaten. Not 
 till much later were prisoners taken and used as domes- 
 tic slaves. 
 
 The earliest form of parasitism was exercised by man 
 towards his wife and children, so long as they would 
 suffer it. Next came war, under the spur of stern 
 necessity, and with improvement in the condition of 
 life as its object. Those who had not were driven to 
 make war on those who had. Soon, however, it was 
 not only the man who had neither flocks nor herds who 
 attacked the rich, to take from him what he needed and 
 had not, but the rich man who attacked his neighbours, 
 without the excuse of need, in order to increase his own 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 187 
 
 possessions, or even merely for the ardent pleasure of it. 
 In battle a man realized his personality and its possi- 
 bilities to the full. Victory heightened his egoism to 
 a kind of rapture, and afforded it an incomparably keen 
 satisfaction in high-handed dealing with the vanquished, 
 whom he tortured, mutilated, murdered, and plundered 
 at his own good pleasure. In these primitive times 
 there was nothing symbolical in the exertions and 
 ardours of battle and victory; there was nothing abstract 
 about it or its consequences. The plans were not laid 
 nor the advantages secured by leaders alone. It was 
 all in the highest degree concrete, and the gain imme- 
 diate and tangible. Each combatant fought hand to 
 hand with his opponent, grappled his body to him, 
 gripped and wrestled with him, threatened him wildly 
 with look, mien, and gesture, with horrible distortions 
 and hideous cries, throttling, tearing, and then slaugh- 
 tering him. The conqueror enjoyed the fruits of vic- 
 tory on the spot, slaking his thirst for blood and his 
 greed for plunder. In those days battle was the prepa- 
 ration and the price of the veritable orgy of victory, and 
 a man who had once revelled in it was filled with a per- 
 petual, ardent desire for more. So the old Germans 
 held war as the noblest and most worthy occupation for 
 a man, promised an eternal abode in Valhalla to the 
 fallen warrior, and looked upon a peaceful death as a 
 disgrace. 
 
 Probably man is not a warrior by nature. Coward- 
 ice is much commoner than courage, and the natural 
 fear of death that underlies our consciousness is only 
 transformed into a contempt for it by the power of 
 example, education, the influence of moral ideas and 
 
i88 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 standards, and the force of a passion that obscures the 
 consciousness itself. Early man probably only at- 
 tacked when he was certain of his superiority, and the 
 risk of battle seemed small in proportion to the prize 
 of victory. Hobbes's famous saying that man is a wolf 
 to man must be accepted with the limitation that he is a 
 wolf that attacks sheep, and makes off when he meets 
 with resistance. 
 
 When the Greeks raised their heroes to the rank of 
 demigods, and traced their descent from the gods on the 
 side of father or mother, they came nearer to the truth. 
 There seemed something more than mortal in a con- 
 tempt for death and the reckless encountering of risks 
 bound in human calculation to be fatal, something that 
 could only be explained by kindred to the immortal gods. 
 Pride and idealism can act upon civilized men so 
 strongly that they will dare the extremity of danger 
 without blanching, and even face certain death. But 
 primitive man was no hero. Such heroism as he showed 
 came from sheer ignorance of danger. It was only 
 when he saw no danger that he became bold and enter- 
 prising. Thus, weakly individuals, groups, hordes, or 
 tribes, could not long live side by side with stronger 
 ones, to whom their weakness was a permanent tempta- 
 tion that left them no rest short of destroying or sub- 
 jecting all those weaker imembers who had not saved 
 themselves by flight. Each tribe thus spread the fear 
 of itself over an ever-widening circle, until it came upon 
 another stronger than itself. The individuals, then, 
 being more or less on an equality, each side could only 
 obtain the more or less certain superiority necessary 
 to stimulate attack by the possession of larger numbers 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 189 
 
 and greater readiness to serve. Thus, war could not 
 be suddenly undertaken out of hand. It was no Jonger 
 a single combat between two men or the wild hand-to- 
 hand tussle of two families. Preparations were neces- 
 sary, -alliances and exercises. Individuals must gather 
 round some leader, who had either been chosen or had 
 forced himself upon the others by the force of person- 
 ality. A plan of action had to be prepared. Those 
 who hung back had to be fortified, those who opposed 
 to be silenced or compelled. Weapons and provisions 
 had to be got ready. In a word, organization was 
 needed. A campaign then assembled a number of 
 people, taught them to exercise foresight, to act to- 
 gether, and submit to command, to conceive of larger 
 purposes, and to regard themselves and their com- 
 panions as a unity brought together for a common 
 project. If the war ended in victory, the organization, 
 its advantages obvious even to the dullest, survived 
 the cause that had brought it into existence. The 
 leader, who had felt the joys of command, been re- 
 warded by the lion's share of the spoil and of the 
 pleasure of violating, torturing, and executing a very 
 large number of captives, was not likely to wish to give 
 up his position on the conclusion of peace and to return 
 to his former obscure mediocrity. Cincinnatus was 
 certainly a very unusual phenomenon in primitive his- 
 tory. The warriors whom he had led to victory were 
 strongly and often passionately attached to him by the 
 recollection of common dangers and exploits, unless the 
 division of the spoil had created hatred and strife. En- 
 riched by booty, he was in a position to bind his war- 
 riors permanently to him by presents or some sort of 
 
I90 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 pay, and could strengthen the tie between them and 
 himself by a continual succession of further fortunate 
 campaigns and conquests.^ 
 
 Thus the commander is the centre round which the 
 common life crystallizes. The origin of the State lay 
 not in the family, not in the horde, but simply and solely 
 in the camp. There was nothing in the circumstances 
 of a horde of related groups, used to living casually side 
 by side, nothing in the relation of man and wife or of 
 parents and children, that could In any way compel the 
 formation of institutions which confined the freedom of 
 individuals within hard-and-fast, limits, divided those 
 who were born equal into rulers and ruled, and imposed 
 upon the individual the fixed forms of a common life 
 which he could not afterwards shake off at will. Only 
 war provided this compulsion. War created the bond 
 which linked the individual to the community. The 
 beginning of the State was not sympathy, but the desire 
 for blood and plunder. It was not any gregarious 
 instinct that brought men together, but the perception 
 that they were more likely to get possession of their 
 neighbour's 'goods together than alone. It was not in 
 peace, but in the stress and danger of battle, that the 
 idea of solidarity arose. In the early stages of civiliza- 
 
 ^ Tacitus, " Germania," xiv.: "Magnum . . . comitatum non nisi 
 vi belloque tueare; exiguunt enim principis sui liberalttate ilium bella- 
 torem equum, ilium cruentam victricemque frameam. nam epulse, et 
 quanquam incompti, largi tamen apparatus pro stipendio cedunt; 
 materia munificentise per bella et raptus" (A great train can only be 
 maintained by war and violence; they expect from the liberality of 
 their leader the war-horse, and the victorious. Banquets that, though 
 rude, are abundant are a form pf pay: war ^nd plunder prpvide the 
 means for generosity.) 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL igr 
 
 tion free individuals never willingly united for any 
 fruitful creative work, nor could they have been per- 
 suaded to join together in any civilizing task. Violence, 
 destruction, and plunder, for which union was an in- 
 dispensable condition of success, alone gathered them 
 round a leader. Only the stern command of a leader 
 compelled them to common exertion. 
 
 War, an acute and exclusive form of parasitism, was 
 alone the cause of the formation of the State, and for 
 long its only, even to-day its principal, object. The 
 army is everywhere regarded as the most important 
 instrument of the State's power. Theoretically, its pur- 
 pose is loudly proclaimed to be not attack — that is, 
 murder, robbery, and conquest — ^but defence; although 
 defence would obviously be unnecessary, there being 
 nothing to defend, did not every State discern in every 
 neighbour the permanent intention to attack it, for no 
 other object than that of murder, robbery, and conquest. 
 The highest branch of the public service is considered 
 to be diplomacy — the symbolic embodiment of the war 
 power of the State. The mere presence of a diplo- 
 matic representative is a continual reminder to neigh- 
 bouring States of the army at his back that gives weight 
 to his utterances. He Is the menace for war, amicably 
 disguised. It is his duty to spy out the intentions and 
 armaments of neighbouring powers, to aggrandize his 
 own State at the expense of those that seem to him 
 weaker, and enforce his demands on them by the threat 
 of war and the suggestion that it will be more ad- 
 vantageous, and involve less sacrifice on the part of 
 the State in question, to accede than to resist it. Lat- 
 terly, the efforts of diplomacy have been directed to the 
 
192 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 avoidance of war; sometimes it has even gone so far 
 as to consider the possibility of a commercial treaty on 
 a basis of mutual advantage. In earlier times such an 
 action was unknown, and would have been despised. 
 Diplomacy, in its nature and origin as much an instru- 
 ment of war as an army, is a military development on 
 the line of least resistance. Its object is to obtain 
 satisfaction for the selfishness and greed of the State by 
 the mere spoken or silent indication of the existence of 
 force, without recourse to the sword. It would never 
 have been needed had each State remained within its 
 own limits, and demanded nothing of others, except 
 on the basis of mutual exchange. 
 
 The mere existence of an army involved the necessity 
 of maintaining it, and providing the necessary means for 
 that purpose, and for its more and more complete de- 
 velopment. Originally the general paid his men from 
 the private property they amassed for him on plunder- 
 ing expeditions ; but where the general became the head 
 of a great land and people, and war ceased to be the 
 permanent condition of the community, the army, no 
 longer able to rely upon booty, had to be supported by 
 the community itself. Taxes were levied: at first, ex- 
 traordinary taxes for a special purpose : so long, that is, 
 as the army was only levied for a certain time to per- 
 form some definite task, and could then be dismissed, 
 with the exception of a bodyguard ; later, when standing 
 armies arose, regular taxes, which formed a permanent 
 obligation on the part of every inhabitant. The ex- 
 istence of an army made taxation necessary and possible. 
 The State's need of taxes compelled it to see that the 
 citizens were able to pay. A foreign conqueroT might 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 193 
 
 take all that he found, without caring for the ruin of 
 the people. The founder of a State and his successor, 
 unless stupid, frivolous, and profligate enough to echo 
 the Pompadours' "After us, the deluge!" must take 
 heed for the future, cherish the hen that laid the golden 
 eggs, and see that the taxpayers were able to fill the 
 coffers of the State. They therefore endeavoured to 
 develop institutions that might enable the hard-working, 
 productive citizen to grow rich undisturbed, and insure 
 the security of his life and property. Wiser rulers 
 avoided the excessive impositions that left the subject 
 no stimulus to a labour of whose fruits he was deprived, 
 and penalized the poor man who worked for the sake 
 of the idler: as is the case in ill-governed States, where 
 the people are simply ground down by the government. 
 They assisted trade and industry by such well-meant 
 regulations as import dues and commercial treaties. 
 Like Henry IV., they wished that their subjects might 
 have a fowl in the oven on a Sunday, not merely that 
 they might be well fed, but because more can be asked, 
 and got, from well-to-do subjects. 
 
 From this consideration all the beneficial institutions 
 in the State arose, even such as do not at a first glance 
 appear to have any connection with an increased taxable 
 and rateable capacity. The State laid roads, rendered 
 rivers navigable, and built harbours in the first instance 
 for the army, but in the second for trade. The names 
 of all subjects were inscribed in official registers, and 
 thus brought within the administrative net, available 
 when any contribution was required. Schools were 
 founded, and every subject forced to rise to a somewhat 
 higher stage of intellectual development, because the 
 
194 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 State can do more with brains into which some ray of 
 enlightenment has penetrated than with those that are 
 totally dark. A code of law was established, without 
 which there would have been a standing war of all 
 against all, that would have prevented the productivity 
 of labour and made welfare impossible. 
 
 These traits that seem to present the friendly face of 
 culture are revealed to the more penetrating gaze as 
 those of the fierce man of war. All the departments of 
 the State, that have crystallized so firmly and developed 
 in such subtle variety in the course of centuries, emanate 
 from one centre, and this centre is preparedness for war. 
 
 Such has been the harsh course of the organization of 
 men into societies and States. So long as nature satis- 
 fies their wants, they feel no inclination to combine, but 
 live apart in separate families, in which they are bound 
 by the attraction of the sexes and by brotherhood, itself 
 a form of adaptation of this strongest of all instincts. 
 With the necessity of making exertions to support life 
 parasitism appears. The motive that impels man to 
 seek out his fellows is not a gregarious instinct, as has 
 often been maintained, though without proof, and con- 
 trary to all probability and to all psychological evidence, 
 but the profit to be made from them by force or fraud. 
 As long as he can keep the members of his family in 
 subjection he exploits them; then he attacks his neigh- 
 bours with ravage and slaughter. Victory and its 
 advantages provide him with a devoted following, which 
 makes depredation possible on a wider and more effec- 
 tive scale. The leader understands that he must keep 
 the instrument of this parasitic system in a state of con- 
 stant efficiency, and creates institutions for that purpose. 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 195 
 
 He collects the largest possible group of men under his 
 control, and abstracts from them the largest possible 
 share of the fruits of their labour, compelling them to 
 supply him with soldiers, whom he supports by con- 
 tributions forcibly levied on his other subjects. In so 
 far as he is wise enough to profit by the teachings of 
 experience, he endeavours in various ways to secure, in 
 the subjects who enable him to be a parasite by their 
 service in war and at their expense in time of peace, a 
 certain level of satisfaction in their lives and work, and 
 a certain readiness to pay. 
 
 The absurdity of Rousseau's idea that society origi- 
 nated in, and now rests upon, a free contract between 
 equals has long been patent. And the same applies to 
 the notion, that lies at the base of all Socialist theories 
 and systems, that men formed themselves in communi- 
 ties for the execution of great works of social utility 
 which were beyond the powers of individuals. In a 
 future that is certainly not yet in sight men may attain 
 such a height of mental and moral development that 
 they will voluntarily, as the outcome of conviction, 
 undertake some common task in which the profit accru- 
 ing to any individual from his personal exertion is not 
 at the first glance obvious. The past affords no ex- 
 ample of free co-operation of this systematic kind. 
 Work got done by means of severe discipline, or com- 
 pulsion exercised by men or by institutions representing 
 the crystallized will-power of former men. Everyone 
 evaded work where he could, and shifted the burden of 
 it on to his neighboirr. The foundation of the State 
 was neither a contract nor a recognition of the value of 
 rational co-operation : it was organized parasitism, the 
 
196 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 exploitation of the weak many by a ruler and the 
 mediate and immediate servants of his power; the ex- 
 ploitation of weak neighbours by war or by treaties 
 imposed upon them by war, or the explicit or implicit 
 threat of war. 
 
 Descriptions and explanations of the State are legion. 
 One jurist and political philosopher sees in the State 
 " the organization of the male population of a country 
 to form an independent person directing the common 
 life " ; another sees in it " the total resident population 
 within a certain territory united to form an organic 
 moral personality under a supreme power directing the 
 common interests." To quote more of these pleonasms 
 seems to me superfluous. The second definition is a 
 masterpiece of phrase-making. AH that has to be 
 proved is assumed, and the impudent assumptions then 
 combined to form a picture, not of the reality, but of the 
 idea which jurisprudence and political philosophy wish 
 to spread. According to it, the State is a totality 
 united " under a supreme power directing the common 
 interests." This is what the supreme power has always 
 tried to make out, since people began to ask for some 
 justification of its claim. History, however, teaches 
 that it never has directed the " common interest," but 
 first and foremost the interest of some individual or 
 family, and then that of the necessary instruments of 
 its power. In the course of development the circle 
 of these instruments widens. In countries under Par- 
 liamentary government it embraces not only the army 
 and the Ministry, but the meftibers and their con- 
 stituents. Even so the supreme power is always in- 
 vested in a small minority, to which the majority is 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL ig^ 
 
 sacrificed, as is proved by the advantages enjoyed by 
 the landed interest in the shape of import duties and 
 in direct taxation, etc. All that can be said is, that 
 the supreme power always represents the measures 
 passed for its own advantage as being for the general 
 good. Well-intentioned professors teach that they are 
 so, and the stupid many believe it. Again, it is only 
 by doing violence to the truth that the State can be 
 said to unite the community in an " organic moral per- 
 sonality." " Organic personality " is a meaningless, 
 senseless phrase which corresponds to no idea. The 
 State is a concept, not a personality. It is not an 
 organism in the sense in which that word can be applied 
 to a living thing, but a collection of biologically inde- 
 pendent individuals, whose mutual dependence is en- 
 tirely due to human compulsion. 
 
 Moreover, the little word " moral " has been very 
 cunningly smuggled into the definition. Morality plays 
 absolutely no part in the formation of the State. It has 
 proceeded simply and solely with a view to the advan- 
 tage of the supreme power. The famous saying, " My 
 country, right or wrong," recognizes this with cynical 
 frankness. " My country" — that is, the supreme con- 
 trol in the State, which has throughout centuries taught 
 its subjects that it is synonymous with their country: 
 that it should be dear to them : that they should love it, 
 feel its hard compulsion like a caress, and make the 
 sacrifices that it relentlessly demands of them in no 
 spirit of hatred and imprecation, but with feelings of 
 enthusiasm and delight. The supreme control, then, 
 may commit all the enormities in the shape of massacre, 
 robbery, and fraud that mark every invasion — such, to 
 
198 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 take a few concrete examples, as marked the partition 
 of Poland, the wars of the first coalition against France, 
 the campaign of France against the Roman Republic 
 in 1848, the French war against Mexico, or England's 
 attack on the Boer States; yet, because it does all this 
 in the soul-stirring name of country, it is held to be the 
 duty of every subject, even, by the abuse of an honour- 
 able idea, his sacred duty, to acclaim these base actions, 
 to support that power that performs them through 
 thick and thin, even to be proud of it. Such is the 
 morality of the " organic moral personality," which 
 the State is supposed to represent. 
 
 The name " legal State " is, like the " organic moral 
 personality," a mere servile invention of phrase-monger- 
 ing professors. The purpose of the State is said to be 
 to secure an equal law for all, in place of mere despot- 
 ism, and so to protect individual rights. This is only 
 true so far as it concerns small interests and differences 
 among subjects themselves. In such cases there is 
 usually no cause for the supreme power to take one 
 side or the other. It can view the strife with perfect 
 indifference, decide it according to the citation of the 
 law, and see that the individual neither do violence to 
 his neighbour nor seek to protect himself against at- 
 tempted retribution with his fists. It must, of course, 
 prevent any disorder that would be inimical to the gen- 
 eral weal, and hinder the State from disposing of the 
 whole people for its own advantage. Whenever the 
 question at issue is an important one, or the interest of 
 the subject come at all in conflict with that of the 
 supreme power, the law is powerless. The picture of 
 a legal State evaporates, and the State once more ap- 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 199 
 
 pears as a power organized in the service of parasitic 
 self-aggrandizement. The difference between the des- 
 pot of the East and the Western community, with 
 its constitutions, codes of law, rules of legal procedure, 
 and questions of appurtenances, is only a difference of 
 form. The despot simply takes the property of his 
 subject and strikes off his head if he is discontented; the 
 legal State compels him, by process of expropriation, to 
 subscribe to a levy, that must in all cases be paid by the 
 other subjects, some possession that all the gold in the 
 world would not have induced him to part with. The 
 despot answers a subject who speaks of his rights with 
 the stick or the axe; the legal State uses its courts to 
 show him his own helplessness, and its government de- 
 partments to prove the sovereignty of the State, and 
 then, if he make a nuisance of himself by citing the 
 laws, shuts him up in prison or in an asylum. In the 
 " legal " State force is called law, but it is as irre- 
 sponsibly exercised under this fine name as under despot- 
 ism. It is small comfort to the helpless individual to 
 have the supreme power going through the hypocrisy 
 of citing articles and paragraphs before violating his 
 right, instead of doing it without such formal pre- 
 tence. 
 
 The touching little story of the miller of Sans Souci 
 is always quoted to illustrate the majesty of the law in 
 a legal State. Here we have a great King and a petty 
 dispute. But had the King been petty and the dispute 
 great, the miller would have found there was no judicial 
 court for him in Berlin. On innumerable occasions 
 States have gone bankrupt, refused to pay interest on 
 their loans, repudiated definite treaties, and appropri- 
 
200 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ated private property. The State can make its sover- 
 eignty the excuse for overriding any law binding on all 
 its subjects. Even when it is not itself concerned, the 
 legal State will refuse all assistance in a dispute between 
 a powerless subject and an exceptionally powerful one. 
 The famous suit brought in 1674 by the cabinet-maker 
 James Percy, in which he claimed the title and posses- 
 sions of the house of the then Earl, now Duke, of 
 Northujnberland, was dismissed, although there was no 
 evidence against it. It would go in just the same way 
 to-day. In the course of the last century there has 
 come up again and again the plea of the heirs of a 
 certain Martin to the recovery of their inheritance, a 
 great sum of money deposited in the State Bank at 
 Venice, and appropriated by the French officials in the 
 taking of Venice in 1797. The plea has been as often 
 rejected by the French judicature, merely because the 
 State would be otherwise compelled to hand over the 
 many millions it has unjustly appropriated. 
 
 The phrase for which Bismarck has been so sharply 
 criticized, although he never used it ^ — " Might before 
 right" — is perfectly accurate, not as a principle accord- 
 ing to which action should proceed, but as a statement 
 of the manner in which it does proceed. Nowadays, 
 of course, the cry of the common good is always raised 
 when the power of the State overrides the rights of sub^ 
 jects or of neighbours weaker than itself. The method 
 is the familiar one of Identifying the supreme power in 
 
 ^ Georg Buchmann ("Winged Words," eighteenth edition, Berlin, 
 1895, p. 481) proves that in the Prussian Senate, on March 13, 1863, 
 Count Bismarck expressly refuted the allegation made by Count 
 gcjivyerin th^t he h^d \)sed the phrase, "Might comes b^fgre right,'' 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 201 
 
 the State with the country, and the advantages of the 
 ruler or ruling class with that of the people as a whole. 
 Right without might is a word only; might can give its 
 arbitrary actions right. If it is strong enough and lasts 
 long enough, it no longer needs to make any actual 
 exertion to give effect to its will. Its will has become 
 right. Right is its symbol — a symbol that often con- 
 tinues to overcome all resistance long after the will 
 behind it has ceased to possess any effective power. But 
 when another will rises in opposition, and tests the 
 energy and resistance of this sublimated might, then the 
 right which has outlived its might dissolves into thin 
 air. 
 
 All the high-flown theories of a legal State, the State 
 as a moral being, the State as a living organism which 
 perceives the interests of the people as a whole, have 
 been invented by the quibbling rhetoricians, who devote 
 all the resources of their art to disguising the harsh 
 outline of facts as they are with a decoration of words. 
 They do this by assigning such causes and purposes as 
 are calculated to create reverence in the uncritical mul- 
 titude, and explaining everything to the advantage of 
 those who profit by the existing order. When Louis 
 XIV. said, " I am the State," he expressed the truth 
 with brutal brevity. It Is the shortest and tnost lucid 
 statement of the fact. The State is the government — 
 originally a ruler, then a class, a circle of families 
 united by relationship and similarity of interests, a 
 conquering race. Its own compelling necessity has led 
 the government to create every institution calculated 
 to insure it the permanent subjection, obedience, and 
 readiness to pay of the majority. The gradual rise of 
 
202 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the State machine in its present universal and complete 
 development has been, and is, directed to one purpose — 
 the exploitation of the many for the advantage of the 
 governing person or class — i.e., parasitism. 
 
 St. Augustine had a clear intuition of this when he 
 put, as the heading of the fourth chapter of Book IV. 
 in the " De Civitate Dei," " Quam similia sint latrociniis 
 regna absque justltia " — " now kingdoms remote from 
 justice resemble robber bands"; and continues: "If 
 there be no justice, what are kingdoms but great robber 
 bands? And what are robber bands but little king- 
 doms? " He then goes on to give the famous classical 
 anecdote of the pirate who was captured and brought 
 before Alexander the Great. When the King asked 
 him how he came to make the sea unsafe, he replied: 
 " Eleganter et veraciter " — " In the same manner that 
 thou makest the earth unsafe; but because I do it in 
 my little ship I am called a robber, and thou who dost 
 it in a great fleet art called Imperator." Thus the 
 Bishop of Hippo makes justice the sole dividing-line 
 between the State and the robber band, without per- 
 ceiving that when the State has reduced its robbery 
 to a system, and in the course of generations accus- 
 tomed to it those who are robbed, it calls the system 
 justice. 
 
 Fr. Engels ^ observes correctly that civilized society 
 is organized in a State which is " exclusively the State 
 of the governing class, always a machine whose essential 
 purpose is to keep down the oppressed and exploited 
 class." Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who, unlike Engels, is no 
 
 ' Fr. Engels, " The Origin of the Family, of Private Property, and 
 of the State," sixth edition, Stuttgart, 1894. 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 203 
 
 Socialist, says the same thing in more measured terms : ^ 
 " The State is an organism characterized by two activi- 
 ties peculiar to it and always present in it — the power 
 to compel all the inhabitants of a district to observe the 
 commands called laws or regulations, and the power 
 to compel them to pay contributions in money, of which 
 it disposes at its pleasure. The organization of the 
 State is thus based upon compulsion, and its compulsion 
 takes two forms — laws and taxes." 
 
 The outline drawn by the conqueror, warrior, and 
 oppressor is filled up in the course of historical develop- 
 ment in accordance with the standard of civilization. 
 The multitude acquires enlightenment and judgment, 
 and refuses to be plundered lawlessly. The beneficiary 
 of the government has to flatter the whims and humours 
 of the governed. He can no longer satisfy his own 
 desires without a thought of others. He must employ 
 at least a part of the means he has wrung from the 
 people upon objects that appear at any rate to be of 
 general utility, which can be said to do something for 
 the majority in the way of alleviating the struggle for 
 existence or adding some element of material or intel- 
 lectual well-being to their lives.. The circle of the 
 State's beneficiaries widens. It opens to include obscure 
 individuals who have made their way by inherent force 
 rather than by birth or social connections. To use the 
 threadbare political tag, meaningless enough in itself, 
 the State becomes democratic. The majority often 
 succeed in setting up an institution that establishes a 
 material solidarity of interests between themselves and 
 
 ' Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, " L'Etat Moderne et ses Fonctions," Paris, 
 1876, p. 40. 
 
204 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the favoured minority, and exploits the descendants of 
 former plunderers for the advantage of the majority — 
 for exatnple, the rising income-tax, State endowment 
 of Old Age Pensions, provision of every sort out of 
 the public funds. 
 
 But this partial change of content leaves the form of 
 the State and its methods of compulsion untouched. Its 
 origin in the violence of the warrior, and its purpose as 
 a permanent system of plundering enslaved subordi- 
 nates, is obvious in the whole and in every part of it. 
 
 Free men have always seen in taxes, the earliest form 
 of subject due, an intolerable mark of personal servi- 
 tude, and continually risen against them. The whole 
 of European history, from the migrations to the French 
 Revolution, is occupied by the contest of territorial 
 chiefs, great or small, who refused to recognize the 
 " legal State," " the moral organism," or " the supreme 
 power controlling the interests of the whole," against 
 the King, who was resolved to break the power of the 
 feudal lords, and subdue them to his will, to put an 
 end to their control of the lands and lives of their 
 dependents, and reserve the exploitation of subjects to 
 himself alone. The State affords no proof of a primi- 
 tive gregarious instinct in man. Its origin is not due 
 to any instinct to combine and live in a society; its 
 development was not conditioned by the love of neigh- 
 bours or the sentiment of solidarity. On the con- 
 trary, it was invented by selfishness, and carried out by 
 force as the machinery of parasitism. It is upheld by 
 the advantages of order and a general division of 
 labour, by the adaptability of man, by the power of 
 habit, which gradually forms and transforms everything 
 
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL 205 
 
 it touches, and even interpenetrates the emotional life 
 of man, and by the fact that while the majority are 
 dull, utterly incapable of comprehending the causal 
 connection between a number of effects, cowardly and 
 indisposed to effort, the minority, on the contrary, are 
 parasites, filled with a lively sense of their own ad- 
 vantage that sharpens their reason on the practical 
 side, and makes them fertile in expedients for carrying 
 out their ends. They are fully aware of their superior- 
 ity, and occasionlly even incautious enough to boast of 
 it — as, for example, when the Minister, von Rochow, 
 forgot himself so far as to let slip the words, " the 
 limited intellect of subjects." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 
 
 All political and social institutions government, the 
 payment of taxes, service, obedience, law and its en- 
 forcement, compulsory attendance at school, and the 
 mechanism of trade, as well as the State itself, represent 
 the gradual manifestation of a single force, provide the 
 necessary means by which a strong personality exploits 
 Its fellows for its own ends. But there is another 
 order of phenomena, whose aim was not originally 
 parasitic, and which did not arise out of violence: the 
 religious feelings, their expressions, and the positive 
 creeds, ceremonies, and priestly orders into which they 
 have crystallized. 
 
 The religious feelings are, like the tendency to para- 
 sitism, deeply and subtly rooted in the instinct of self- 
 preservation, but they early pursued an independent and 
 separate growth. The instinct of self-preservation in 
 man was not forced into the parasitic channel until 
 natural conditions, becoming unfavourable and even 
 positively hostile, imposed upon him the painful neces- 
 sity of labour. The religious feeling, on the other 
 hand, was undoubtedly active In primitive man, even 
 while nature abundantly satisfied his wants. Even had 
 the Ice Age never supervened to threaten him with 
 death by cold and starvation, it would have developed 
 
 ao6 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 207 
 
 and differentiated. Ignorance alone can account for 
 Volney's childish assertion that religion was invented by 
 priests, or for the question whether there are peoples 
 who have no religion. Such people cannot exist, since 
 religious ideas are formed as the result of biological 
 necessity. To make this plain, the true nature of the 
 religious feelings must be discerned. 
 
 I have said that the religious feeling is deeply 
 grounded in the instinct of self-preservation. This in- 
 stinct expresses itself, on the one hand, in a hunger for 
 knowledge; on the other, in a clinging to life. The 
 desire to investigate the nature of its environment is 
 proper to every living thing whose development has 
 gone beyond a merely passive tropism, in which internal 
 movements and changes proceed in response to external 
 physical and chemical influences, without any apparent 
 intervention of consciousness or will. It is the condi- 
 tion of that differentiated life which no creature can 
 attain without active investigation into environment, 
 and the endeavour to obtain from it a variety of sense 
 impressions which are there compared, combined, and 
 interpreted. 
 
 It is only through the constant activity of curiosity 
 that the knowledge of actuality possible at any stage of 
 development is acquired by. the living creature, and with 
 it the art of discovering such conditions as are useful, 
 and avoiding such as are dangerous to it. In this way it 
 learns to protect itself against all the harms that 
 threaten its existence, and to provide all that is neces- 
 sary for its maintenance, including all sorts of pleasures. 
 As the living thing develops, and its needs become more 
 complex, its knowledge must become more various and 
 
2o8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 delicate, and the curiosity, of which that knowledge is 
 the fruit, stronger and more constant. At the lowest 
 stage of consciousness curiosity can include form and 
 content in the simple question "What?" The living 
 thing wishes to know the properties of the phenomena 
 that enter the field of its consciousness. At a higher 
 stage the question becomes "How?" It is no longer 
 satisfied to perceive the qualities of phenomena through 
 the senses; it seeks also to know the relations of these 
 qualities to one another, the order in which the 
 phenomena occur, the connection perceptible between 
 them, and the extent to which they are interdependent. 
 Finally, at the highest stage the question is "Why?" 
 The living thing no longer solely wishes to know what 
 lies before it, and the manner in which phenomena are 
 observed to pass before experience; it seeks to discern 
 their cause, and to understand the reason which com- 
 pels everything to be as it Is and prevents it from being 
 otherwise. 
 
 The question "What?" can be answered by the 
 senses, expressing themselves through the centre of per- 
 ception. But the answer to the question " How? " can- 
 not be given by mere perception. It transcends the im- 
 mediate evidence of the senses. For it, the Images 
 stored in the memory must be called up and associated, 
 former impressions compared, sifted and selected, and 
 the judgment thence acquired must then be tested by 
 comparison with reality — ^that is, with new sense per- 
 ceptions. This premises the existence of higher centres 
 of association and co-ordination. A satisfactory solu- 
 tion to the question " Why? " Is not to be obtained from 
 the immediate perceptions of the senses. The reason of 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 209 
 
 things lies outside of sense experience. It is not imme- 
 diately perceptible. It can only be divined or deduced. 
 Such an intuition, such a supposition, such knowledge of 
 it as is possible at all, must be the work of the intellect, 
 which creates from the material available in perception 
 something new, not actually existing — a concept. An 
 intellectual representation of the relation that does or 
 may subsist between each phenomenon and those that 
 have gone before or follow after it can only be obtained 
 through the concept. Experiences, when thus grouped 
 under concepts, form orders of ideas that include all the 
 concepts relative to the phenomena whose regular con- 
 nection has to be investigated. Those concepts that are 
 obviously incompatible will be eliminated by the con- 
 sciousness, if sane and attentive. This task is intel- 
 lectual, and it is only rendered possible by the develop- 
 ment of the faculty of abstract thought. 
 
 Error as to the "What" is hardly possible. The 
 organism has only to determine such concrete charac- 
 ters of phenomena as the development of its percep- 
 tive apparatus permits, and unless this is in some 
 way diseased, it will not refuse its oiEce — that is, 
 give inaccurate information or none at all, fail 
 to respond, or produce hallucinations. In that case 
 only will the living thing fail to obtain the pos- 
 sible and necessary information about its environ- 
 ment. 
 
 But the answer to the question "How?" is more 
 liable to be false. Let but one link in the chain of indi- 
 vidual phenomena under observation be overlooked 
 through fatigue or carelessness, or underestimated by 
 the attention. A fruitful source of error, too, is found 
 
2IO THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 in the tendency to argue by analogy. There is often no 
 concrete connection even between wholly external 
 phenomei;ia : the passage of an electric current along a 
 wire, or the sounding of a distant bell in response to 
 pressure on a knob near at hand, cannot be immediately 
 perceived by our senses, but have to be guessed at and 
 explained by comparison with other phenomena that do 
 fall within the field of direct observation. The analogy 
 may easily be fallacious. A false or misleading inter- 
 pretation of external features may suggest a similarity 
 where none exists, and lead to the interpretation of the 
 unknown by a known that has nothing in common 
 with it. 
 
 To take only one example. Leibnitz was aware that 
 an impulse of the will, developed in the brain, passes 
 along the nerves, and sets up muscular contractions. 
 How does this take place? At that time the only in- 
 stance known of the transmission of energy to a point 
 far removed from its source was that of a mechanical 
 connection set up by a pull or pressure. The standard 
 instance of this system is a bell-pull. You pull a handle, 
 a wire or cord carries on the movement, and a bell at 
 some distance connected with the cord rings. On this 
 plan Leibnitz then explained the action of the will upon 
 the muscles. The will gives a pull in the brain, the 
 nerves transmit it like a wire, and the muscles vibrate 
 like the bell. Later the theory of electricity was de- 
 veloped. The words " electric stream " and " electric 
 current " appeared. A new analogy suggested itself : 
 that of a system of pipes conveying a fluid, as in the case 
 of an aqueduct or canal. Since the physiologists in the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century regarded the ac- 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 211 
 
 tivity of the nerves as a manifestation of electricity, 
 they all spoke of the nervous fluid, and conceived of the 
 energy of the will as being transmitted from the brain, 
 along the nerves, to the muscles, in the manner in which 
 a message is forwarded by the telegraphic apparatus 
 along the wires to the receiving station. Nowadays the 
 analogy of the telegram is dismissed with a smile, like 
 Leibnitz's notion of the bell, the tendency being to 
 suppose that chemical changes take place in the nerves, 
 and are transmitted from one end to the other at th^ 
 rate of about ten metres a second. This suggests the 
 mode of ignition exemplified by a lampwick or a train 
 of gunpowder. Probably this analogy is no more ac- 
 curate as a description of what goes on in the nervous 
 system than the bell-pull or the telegraphic wire. Thus 
 the answer to the question "How?" though often in- 
 exact, will satisfy the questioner in the absence of known 
 facts which invalidate it. 
 
 In the question " Why? " the senses can give no help 
 at all. It is all supposition, guesswork, matter of 
 opinion. Yet we have a persistent desire to know not 
 only how, but why, thinj;s are as they are. The experi- 
 ences of our consciousness, which presents events to us 
 as conditioned by one another, and therefore as causally 
 connected, enslaves our thought to the notion of causal- 
 ity; the conviction is permanently imposed upon us that 
 every phenomenon has some necessary and suiEcient 
 cause in a preceding one ; we cannot rest without some 
 idea of the nature of this cause. As to the adequacy 
 of this idea, we are hardly ever in a position to decide, 
 since we cannot investigate a connection that lies outside 
 the senses. It is developed from the knowledge at our 
 
212 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 disposal, and we are content if it is not contradicted by 
 any part of it. 
 
 Every organism within the limits of its capacity asks 
 "What?" for unless it could and did perpetually in- 
 vestigate the character of its environment, it could not 
 maintain its existence for a moment. Curiosity as to 
 " How " belongs at least to the higher vertebrates. 
 Comparatively complicated phenomena, like a trap or 
 the mystery of a closed manger-door, do certainly fall 
 within their observation. But the 4ggire to know ^jjjy 
 is the privilege of man alone. It is, I must add, a priv- 
 ilege hitherto entirely profitless ^ For all his investiga- 
 tion and thought, all his observation and guesswork, 
 man has not advanced by one hj^ir's-b readth ; we are no 
 nearer knowing the real cause of a single phenomenon 
 than our ancestors in the first Stone Age. The endless 
 search for the cause pf t hings may have had a heuristic 
 value, but even so much is not certain. It is quite pos- 
 sible that we should have all the knowledge we now 
 possess had we been content, instead of searching for 
 the cause of things that must for ever elude our search, 
 carefully to observe their order , their mutual r elation so 
 far as it can be perceptible by the senses, and the quaH- 
 tative and quantitative mechan ics of their interaction. 
 This assumption seems the more probable since such 
 knowledge as we do possess has been, as a matter of 
 fact, attained without the c ognizance of a single cause — 
 or, we may say, of the single cause, since probably there 
 is only one. All our knowledge but goes to prove that 
 we have been able to establish all sorts of ^cte, 
 and to test their_ exactitude by useful inventions, 
 without the slightest suspicion of the cause , even in the 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 213 
 
 case of those that are under our control. Our results 
 therefore serve us, although we do not know their cause, 
 and, indeed, as far as we can judge, we sijffer in no way 
 from our i gnoranc e on this point . Without knowing 
 anything of the cause of magnetism in the earth we con- 
 structed the compass, which made navigation secure. 
 Without knowing the cause of the relation expressed in 
 Camot^s s^econd formula, we have built steam-engines 
 of the most perfect kind, on the principle that mechan- 
 ical power is created by a warm body acting upon a cold 
 one. Kepler knew nothing of attraction, yet he discov- 
 ered his three laws which enabled tjbe m ovements of the 
 planets to be c alculat ed exactl y without explaining them 
 at all. Soon afterwards Newton discovered the law of 
 gravitation, again without any idea of the nature of 
 attraction — that is, of the cause of the phenomenon 
 which he had reduced to an algebraic expression. Ob- 
 servation of natural phenonena is a necessity of our ex- 
 istence, but knowledg e of the cause of p henomena is not 
 necessary for this observation, and the desire for it is 
 not biological in its origin, not an expression of the 
 instinct of self-preservation at all. It is the logical out- 
 come of the nature of our consciousness, and the fact 
 that our thought is governed by the law of causality. 
 Only the dullard can fail to draw the conclusion from 
 its premises, and trace a result back to the assumptions 
 on which it rests. The highly civilized man does not 
 resist a tendency which becomes a positive compulsion 
 in the select few. To-day advanced and strictly ration- 
 alistic thinkers compel themselves to resist their natural 
 tendency to conform to the l ogical habit of seeking for 
 final c auses . They have arrived at the conclusion that, 
 
ai4 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 since this final cause lies outside human experience, and 
 beyond its comprehension, reflection upon it must be 
 fruitless/ It is, moreover, only a survival of an old 
 delusion to speak of the final cause only as eludin g our 
 int elligenc e ; the adjective may go : the first and nearest 
 cause of phenomena is as unattainable, as incompre- 
 hensible, as the final. Indeed, as I said above, there jg 
 only one cause , at once the first and the last, that has 
 operated from all eternity, and will operate to all eter- 
 nity. We only imagine that we may be able to discover 
 and understand a first cause because philosophers, as 
 well as uneducated, home-taught thinkers, confuse the 
 cause of phenomena and their concrete concomitants. 
 We are satisfied with saying, " The reason why this 
 glass breaks is that it was pushed off the table "; "The 
 reason why that dog howls is that someone 'trod on his 
 tail." But in such a statement we fail to distinguish the 
 mere succession of events and their occasion from the 
 reason of their occurrence. The reason why the glass 
 breaks is not the push which sends it off the table, but the 
 law of gravitation, which determines its movement in 
 space, together with the conditions of the molecular 
 composition of the two bodies — namely, the hardness 
 of the ground and the insufficient resistance of the glass. 
 And beyond this there lies the further question of the 
 constitution of matter . Thus we are, all unaware of it, 
 confronted with the riddle of the universe, and unex- 
 pectedly find ourselves face to face with that final cause 
 
 ' Auguste Comte, " Systerae de Politique Positive," Paris, 1851, vol. 
 i., p. 134: " Research sjeeks to discover the how, never the why; to 
 discover laws, not causes. . . . The word ' cause ' must be banished 
 from the vocabulary of true philosophy." 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 215 
 
 which even the home-taught thinker sees to be unat- 
 tainable. It is the same, too, with the howling dog, 
 which raises the whole question of life and sensation, or 
 with any phenomenon whatever. The reasonable course 
 therefore would be to abandon speculation as to final 
 causes. That, however, is now perhaps not within our 
 p ower . Certainly it was not within the power of 
 earlier men, who had not learned to examine the con- 
 tents of their consciousness with care and distinguish 
 sharply between concepts. They could not escape the 
 com pellin g idea t^a " Why? " They had to seek for 
 the cause of things, and since it is agonizing to leave un- 
 answered a question that is always coming up and al- 
 ways present to the consciousness, the answer was such as 
 the stage of their knowledge permitted them to find or 
 to invent. 
 
 The readiest explanation was that known as the hy- 
 pothesis of the Demiurgos, which Plato has developed 
 with great expenditure of rhetoric. Primitive man 
 could not clothe his vague ideas in the polished language 
 of the Athenian philosopher, but his arguments were 
 much the same as Plato's. When he saw an Implement 
 of stone, he knew that someone must have made it, even 
 though he had not been there to see it done. Generaliz- 
 ing this theory, he deduced from it that all that exists 
 must, like his implement, have been made by somebody. 
 By whom? By some unknown creator, craftsman, or 
 artist — a Demiurgos. Plato failed to see the fallacy of 
 this generalization; how should it have been perceived 
 by primitive man, whose unpractised thought generally 
 proceeded by a series of leaps? He did not see the 
 horns of this dilemma — either everything that exists 
 
2i6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 must have a creator, a Demiurgos, in which case the 
 Demiurgos must have one, and the creator of the 
 Demiurgos, and so on for ever in an endless chain too 
 ludicrous to be conceived ; or, not everything that exists 
 must have a creator — there can be something that has 
 existed for all time, uncreated. In this case the assump- 
 tion of the Demiurgos is unnecessary. The universe 
 itself may be the eternal, uncreated — an idea no more 
 and no less impossible than that of an eternal, uncreated 
 Demiurgos. The extraordinary thing is that Plato 
 provides his Demiurgos with material that has existed 
 for all eternity, of which to make the world, and then 
 deduces from the existence of this world, that he has 
 himself declared eternal, the necessity for a creator, al- 
 though, by his own assumption, the creator need create 
 nothing, merely adapt what exists. 
 
 Primitive man did not thus criticize his own effort to 
 understand the cause of the world. He satisfied his 
 search for the why of the universe by the answer: " The 
 world exists because a niaster - craftsman created and 
 maintains it." He made an idea of this creator for 
 himself . As a rule he imagined him in human form, 
 but sometimes as a huge beast before whom he went in 
 fear. The greatness of the works of the unknown 
 creator proved him to be of huge strength and power. 
 Man's anthropomorphism was easily satisfied with a 
 world creator in human form; his wretched conception 
 of the Demiurgos proves the poverty of his imagination. 
 He simply gave it the attributes, on an immensely exag- 
 gerated scale, of man, of terrifying wild beasts, or 
 astonishing natural phenomena. The chief in whose 
 territory he dwelt provided him with his type. The 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 217 
 
 features of the Demiurgos were those of a prehistoric 
 ruler and conqueror. He was stronger, more courage- 
 ous, fiercer, and more cruel than other creatures. He 
 demanded unconditional obedience. All must be sub- 
 servient to his will. He was only to be approached with 
 the mien of a bject humility prope r to the vanquished , 
 trembling for his life and suing for mercy, hands up- 
 raised to show that they bore no weapons, body kneeling 
 or prone upon the ground, ready for the lord to set his 
 foot upon the neck or strike it with the deadly stroke. 
 He was jealous, s uspiciou s, angr y, in calculably mood y, 
 g reed y, and vain. To keep him in a good humour it was 
 necessary to load him with gifts, and offer him the most 
 cherished treasure one possessed. He could be most 
 effectually propitiated by human sacrifice. Prayers, en- 
 treaties, or grovelling flattery might soften his wrath, 
 and he was never weary of noisy and fulsome praise. 
 Barefaced flattery, unworthy adulation, and slavish sub- 
 servience were the most hopeful means of turning aside 
 his blood-thirsty wrath, and even of obtaining favour 
 and protection against enemies, and his assistance in any 
 plan of war, plunder, or reprisal. The godhead s of the 
 earlies t mythology p reserv e the traits of the prehistoric 
 and primitive chief. When we have studied the sacri- 
 ficial rites, the incantations, prayers, hymns, and cere- 
 monies of religion, we have as complete a picture of 
 the r elation s between our r emot e a ncestors and their 
 chiefs as if we had seen them with our own eyes. One 
 observation, that seems strangely enough to have 
 escaped the sociologists, should be made at this point. 
 The traditional i deas of the creatoi; throw upon the 
 dark background of the past an extraordinarily vivid 
 
2i8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 picture of the primitive warrior, conqueror, and ex- 
 ploiter of the weak. They do more than that. They 
 cast a strong light on the primitive constitution of 
 human life, and afford an overwhelmingly powerful 
 witness to the fact that men, instead of originally form- 
 ing a horde of equal beings with equal rights, led to 
 battle by some strong man, but ruled by no one, must, 
 as far back as the memory of the species goes, have been 
 unequal in might and right, ordered in ranks, and con- 
 trolled by authority. This authority may have been at 
 first the head of the family. Before long it was as- 
 suredly the violent, plundering conqueror and despot, 
 who subdued to his service all he could reach by the 
 might of his arm or overcome by his warrfors. His 
 subjects trembled before him in perpetual, abject fear 
 of death, much as the people of Dahomey must have 
 done before their king, previous to the French conquest. 
 
 How could men who lived free and equal in hordes 
 that shifted from place to place at their own sweet will 
 ever have found in their experience the idea of a mighty 
 God whose frequent anger had to be propitiated by cur- 
 rish fawning, supplication, flattery, and sacrifice, who 
 could be quieted by threats and circumvented by deceit? 
 — an idea q uite natural to a pack of slaves , who imag- 
 ined their God in the image of the despotic ruler who 
 cracked the whip above their heads. 
 
 This model has prevailed down to the present day. 
 Man did not C Lgate God, to use Feuerbach's well-known 
 ghrase, in his own i m age, but in the image of a certain 
 human type, the chief or king. He always believed in 
 a monarchical government and creation of the world. 
 The development of the i dea of Go^ proceeded along 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 219 
 
 the lines of the development of monarchy. The canni- 
 ^ monster of p rehistori c and primitive times gradually 
 bec am e the civilized ruler. Instead of butchering slaves 
 and striking off heads with his own hands, wading in 
 blood and claiming every woman in his domain for his 
 harem, he sets before himself an ide^l of goodness and 
 wisdorn , recognizes duties to his subjects, watches over 
 justice and order within his territory, and finds pleasure 
 in performing the office of a natural Providence so far 
 as to bring unlooked-for happiness into the lives of 
 individuals. So the God of human imagination ceased 
 to resemble a greedy, cruel, and coarsely sensual negro 
 chief, and gradually became an enlightened being, all 
 gentleness and love, like an Augustus, whom the Syrian 
 Q reeks called Smt^p, the Saviour; a Marcus Aurelius, 
 whose stoicisni has influenced sixty generations of 
 thoughtful men, and influences them to-day; an Alfred, 
 on whom love and veneration conferred the name of 
 Great, or St. Louis, reverenced as the embodiment of 
 justice. The world-ruler was surrounded, on the model 
 of an earthly being, by a court of nobles and worthies, 
 the archangels and saints, and a bodyguard of angels. 
 The Greek gods carried on wars, and won glorious vic- 
 tories over rebellious giants. Later religions conceived 
 of neighbouring rulers and rival kings carrying on 
 inherited feuds (Ahora Mazda and Ahriman), or 
 rebels, who were overthrown and condemned to eternal 
 incarceration in subterranean dungeons ( Lucifer ) . The 
 source of all these fantastic images was the same — the 
 necessity to co-ordinate and explain phenomena in a 
 single cause, the desire to know, which is the instinct 
 of self-preservation on the intellectual side. The idea 
 
220 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of God is the earliest answer given by the species, with 
 the knowledge then at its disposal, to the constant ques- 
 tion as to the why of the world and of life^ and it is the 
 answer that the majority of the species still finds satis- 
 factory.^ 
 
 But the desire to know is not the sole expression o£ 
 the instinct of self-preservation. There is another, 
 stronger and more immediate — the desire for life, the 
 fierce, almost desperate, clinging to existence. This 
 desire for life is the second psychological root of reli- 
 gious feeling. Man must very early have awakened to 
 the aspect of life that presented itself to the Buddhai 
 Siddharta in the well-known encounters on his walk 
 through the gardens of Kapilavast u. He passed in turn 
 a broken and decrepit old man, a suffering sick man, and 
 a funeral procession. His fourth encounter is not rele- 
 vant here. He r ecogniz ed the eternal enemies that for 
 ever threaten and finally destroy the comfort, happiness, 
 and life of man — age and its i nfirmk y, disease, and 
 most fearful of all, death . Man, like the Sakya Muni, 
 has always been troubled by these enemies, which have 
 caused most painful reflections in thoughtful minds. 
 
 He has probably submitted with least resistance to 
 the doom of growing old. It comes on slowly, almost 
 
 ' Beda Venerabilis (" Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, book 
 ii., chap, xiii.) gives a charming concrete ejarnple of the desir e to know 
 in mam and the childish credulity with wmch any would-be explana- 
 tion is accepted. Before King Edwin's council an English nobleman 
 recommended that the religion brought by the Papal Legate Paulinus 
 should be accepted, on the ground, " Here below the life of man 
 seems tolerable, but of what comes after and what has gone before 
 we know naught. If the new teaching have some tidings thereof 
 to give us, I think we shall do right to accept it." 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 221 
 
 unperceived. Since the decay of the faculties corre- 
 sponds to an ebb in all the needs and desires for which 
 they are necessary, its gradual progress is not vividly 
 present to the consciousness. At the dawn of reflection, 
 old age was perceived to be the law of life, subject to no 
 exception. Human thought is habitually satisfied with 
 things as it has always known them, and does not go 
 further to ask whether they must always be so. Never- 
 theless, even the law of age does sometimes meet with a 
 dull resistance, especially in those cases whgre any feel- 
 ing outlives its n atura l means of satis faction. Man 
 longs for eternal youth. He can find no more wonderful 
 and enviable attribute with which to endow his Gods. 
 His desires are revealed by the fairy-tales of the foun- 
 tain of Youth, the philosopher's stone, or the magic 
 herbs of Medea — ^proof of the pleasure he finds in 
 dreaming of delights denied to him by nature. 
 
 Of s jcknes s. he was rnuch mor e i mpatient . His habit 
 of thought led him to see an analogy between his bodily 
 sufferings and the wounds and bruises that he got in 
 hunting or at war. He knew the cause of these injuries 
 to be the armed foe or wild beast, and imagined a 
 similar cause for his internal and cutaneous diseases. 
 They must be the effect of an attack from some enemy 
 or evil being who was not human. The enemy who 
 brought such infirmities upon him was the more uncanny 
 from the fact that he was invisible to his prey, who 
 could form no idea of his nature, his weapons, nor the 
 time and place of his attack. This extraordinarily cun- 
 ning foe inspired him, because unknown, with a far 
 greater terror than the warrior he met in the open field 
 or the wild beast that fell upon him with teeth and 
 
222 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 claws, horns and hooves. It naturally occurred to him 
 to try to pacify the enemy, against whom he could not 
 defend himself, by presents, sacrifices, and prayers. The 
 suggestion of wise men, or those whom he thought to 
 be wise, that he should oppose the unseen foe by a 
 stronger foe of the same order, accorded well with his 
 habits of thought. He tried then to secure this all-wise, 
 invisible ally and protector, and imagined everything 
 that was incomprehensible, mysterious, and dark, such 
 as magical incantations, extraordinary rites, and every 
 kind of hocus-pocus, to be the appropriate means to that 
 end. 
 
 Before death man was helpless^ . His reason could 
 not comprehend that he must cease to be and disappear, 
 leaving no trace. His feelings struggled feverishly 
 against such a doom. Although constantly faced with 
 the spectacle of death and corruption, he persuaded him- 
 self that this condition did not imply an end of existence. 
 He concluded, from the extremely superficial resem- 
 blance between the sleeping and the dead, that death 
 was a kind of sleep from which there was an awakening, 
 only that the sleep was deeper and the awakening longer 
 in coming. His^ rearn-life, in which he saw those who 
 had died, mingled and spoke with them, suggested to 
 him that the dead continued to exist, returning at night 
 to visit the living, while during the day they resided in 
 some place unknown. He pondered how the dead man 
 whom he had seen buried, decomposed or consumed by 
 fire, came to visit him in his dreams, sound and whole, 
 even younger and more comely than in life. Naturally 
 enough he invented the notion of a second being, in 
 which the principle of life itself resided, which inhabited 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 223 
 
 the human body, could live on in separation from it, and 
 appear to the living man in dreams. Further develop- 
 ments of this same invention are the Egyptian idea of a 
 spiritual double, reappearing in the astral body of con- 
 temporary occultism; the Hellenistic conception of a 
 shadowy existence in the under-world; the belief in the 
 migratory soul, perpetually reincarnated, which is found 
 among many primitive peoples^ and is widespread, 
 especially in India — which occurs even in Schelling, and 
 is found where one is almost horrified to discover it, in 
 a thinker generally so lucid as Lessing ("The Educa- 
 tion of the Human Race ") ; and, indeed, me general 
 conception of the existence of the soul, of immortality, 
 of Heaven, and of Hell. No single fact supporting any 
 of these hypotheses — the existence of the soul, its im- 
 mortality, its sojourn in a supra-mundane realm — has 
 ever been cited in a material or intellectual form 
 capable of analysis by a thinker worthy of being called 
 one. Nevertheless, the majority go on persuading each 
 other without any thought of proof. They are satisfied 
 with assurances and assertions. The argument con- 
 stantly reiterated by theologians, and even by philoso- 
 phers,^ is enough for them. " We have such an im- 
 perious desire for immortality, and so strong an inward 
 conviction of existence of our spiritual personality after 
 death, that we cannot possibly be deceived about 
 it." 
 
 Were anyone to say, " I am quite certain that I shall 
 one day be rich ; I have an intense desire for it, and a 
 
 ' Popular philosophers, it is true. The argument quoted above 
 appears in M. Mendlessohn's "Phaedo; or, The Immortality of the 
 Soul." 
 
224 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 secret voice whispers to me that my desire will be real- 
 ized," he would be laughed at, and his conviction cer- 
 tainly not credited. Yet this secret voice, this intense 
 desire, are considered sufficient security for personal 
 immortality. That is to say, we wish to be convinced. 
 We are angry with a level-headed critic who tries to 
 dissipate the dream of immortality. All our dread of 
 death makes us cling to the idea of escaping it by some 
 fabulous privilege. Yet, all the time these pleasant 
 and comforting ideas are being built up by our eager 
 d esire for continued e xistence , and co-ordinated into a 
 system that formally satisfies the logical demand of our 
 consciousness up to a certain point, the life-instinct re- 
 mains constantly aware that all thgse dreams of a soul, 
 immortality, and the h ereafte r, are but c obwebs . Their 
 specious defiance of death falls to pieces before its un- 
 conquerable horror of it. The idea of immortality may 
 have made death easier to many who found comfort in 
 it. But the thought of his own death fills the most 
 convinced believer with a terror that is meaningless if 
 the grave be really the door into a new, eternal life, no 
 longer shadowed by the fear of death. 
 
 The desire to know, appearing in the consciousness as 
 a perpetual question, " Why? " produced the invention 
 of the Demiurgos as an adequate living cause of all 
 phenomena, while the life-instinct , unable to do away 
 with the inexorable fact of death, has invented person al 
 immortality. These two systems of ideas, centering in 
 the belief in God and immortality, necessarily coalesced. 
 Alike divorced from perception and observation, resting 
 upon no basis of fact, including no element of experi- 
 ence, pure products of the i magination , stimulated by 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 225 
 
 an emotional desire, they take their rise from and de- 
 velop in the same circles of thought and feeling, and 
 inevitably combine. 
 
 The way in which men picture God and their own 
 immortal essence depends upon and varies with the 
 general knowledge and views of the time. In pre-civ- 
 ilized times God was conceived as a violent tribal chief- 
 taip ; later He became a constitutional ruler, a judge, a 
 loving father. The definite form and outline of the pic- 
 ture became blurred; its colour faded away, and the 
 whole melted to a shadowy image compatible with any 
 view, even with that of science. Spinoza regarded God, 
 whom he stripped of personality and its most import- 
 ant attribute, consciousness, as synonymous with the 
 universe; Schelling made Him an Absolute, which con- 
 veyed no idea at all to himself or anyone else; others 
 excluded Him from the world, and left Him only an 
 incomprehensible existence outside of Being ^ in some 
 sphere of pure spirituality (whatever that may be), 
 entirely disconnected from the sphere of phenomena. 
 Finally ^ the use of a_ jargon, remote alike from thought 
 and from reality, gave currency to the phrase, so often 
 repeated in the last decades, t hat faith has n othing to do 
 with knowledge , that they occupy distinct provinces in 
 the realm of thought. Certainly a knowledge that rests 
 upon the verifiable basis of experience has nothing to 
 do with a faith whose content, even when dignified by 
 the name of " inward events," is really from beginning 
 to end nothing but s ubjective in vention . The formula 
 
 " Frederic de Rougemont, " Les Deux Cites," two volumes, Paris, 
 1874, vol. i., p. I : " Eternity dwells outside of time and of space. 
 Pure spirit exists nowhere. Immutable, it is always the same." 
 
226 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 is, however, inadmissible, becauses it suggests that faith 
 and knowledge, though different from and independent 
 of each other, possess equal value. To assume this is to 
 put dream, chimera, and delirium on the same level as 
 the results of strict observation and the evidence ob- 
 tained from the senses after careful examination and 
 experiment. Where that is done, the desire for knowl- 
 edge is still instinctive and obscure. It has not sub- 
 mitted to criticism, tested itself by actual facts, and 
 risen to a desire for truth. 
 
 The process which has refined and spiritualized faith 
 in a Demiurgos almost out of existence was extended to 
 the idea of the soul and its immortality. The ideas are 
 naturally connected. From the very first the assump- 
 tion of the presence in the body of another substance, 
 not identical with it, but of a finer essence, suggested 
 that this substance survived the death of the body. 
 Originally this idea was crude and childish, like the 
 belief in God. Primitive man thought of his soul as the 
 shadow of his body ; it was uncanny like anything vague 
 and unknown. He imagined it possessed of super- 
 human power, but also full of malice, cruelty, and all 
 other evil qualities. As a rule, he had little doubt of its 
 intention of torturing the living and doing them all 
 possible harm. Only where ancestor worship was in- 
 troduced was the reasonable conclusion drawn that 
 parents and ancestors at least had no reason to be evilly 
 disposed towards their children and descendants, so long 
 as they paid them due honour and allowed them to want 
 for nothing; that their souls, instead of being fearful, 
 might be looked to for kindness and protection. But 
 apart from this special case, the departed spirit was 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 227 
 
 either, as the Greeks imagined, a poor, pitiable shadow 
 that dragged out a joyless existence in the chill dark- 
 ness, glad of a drink of warm blood, and powerless to 
 help itself or the living; or, as all races that live in a 
 state of nature believe to this day, and most races doubt- 
 less believed before they were civilized, a wild and fear- 
 some ghost, happily only permitted to rage at night and 
 in certain spots, against which there were various 
 means of defence. The spirits could be propitiated, like 
 their more powerful and terrifying God, by sacrifices, 
 secret words, magic formuls and incantations, and kept 
 at bay and baffled in the execution of their fell intents 
 by rites and amulets, whose symbolism lies outside the 
 limits of this work. 
 
 This imagery presented no difficulty so long as the 
 earth was conceived of as a hollow o rb, and the hj^vens 
 as a crystal roof above it. There was convenient room 
 for an under and upper wor^d, peopled respectively with 
 ghosts and demons, Gods, angels, and saints. Con- 
 fusion arose, however, when the Copemican theory 
 taught that the world was a ball, rotating on its axis, 
 and swinging free in space. The fancied Paradise and 
 Hell had to be removed. The under-world, instead of 
 being under the earth, was placed in its unknown in- 
 terior; the upper world was transferred from the un- 
 imaginable ether above the visible arch of heaven to 
 other heavenly bodies remote from earth — the sun, and 
 stars. This idea, far from being confined to the senti- 
 mentality of ignorant people, is found in Schelling 
 among others. There are professional exponents of the 
 worship of words who take his confused and meaning- 
 less verbosity for philosophy, even for science ! Accord- 
 
228 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ing to a more subtle interpretation, whicH skilfully 
 eliminated from the idea any kernel of meaning, the 
 soul, having no extension, is an effluence from God, into 
 whom it is resumed on the death of the body. By 
 means of this senseless formula the need of any place 
 for its abode is got rid of. But even thus sublimated, 
 the soul retains the trace of its descent from the crude 
 spook of primitive man, and its origin in the repugnance 
 of the consciousness to its own annihilation. 
 
 Such is the natural history of religion, apart from the 
 mysticism in which the whole of this important province 
 of biology and psychology has been smothered. It 
 arose from the desire for knowledge, which is a form of 
 the instinct for survival, and immediately from the 
 instinct for survival itself.^ These two roots are firmly 
 fixed in consciousness and subconsciousness. Man will 
 always desire knowledge. His thirst for it can only 
 cease with the realization of one of two highly improb- 
 able hypotheses — omniscience, or dull resignation to 
 
 ' Lucretius's famous statement, quoted by Feuerbach, " Primus in 
 orbe Deos timor fecit " — " It wa^s fear that first, made Gods upon 
 the earth '' — is highly superficial, and fails to reach the psycmc 
 sources of the phenomenon described. The whole of the admired 
 Fifth Book of the " De Rerum Natura " is merely the expansion of 
 this notion that belief in Gods arose from the terror aroused by 
 the vast spectacle of nature (" Unde etiam nunc est mortalibua 
 insitus horror," etc. . . . "cui non animus formidine divum — Con- 
 trahitur, cui non conrepunt membra pavore — Fulminis horribili 
 quum plaga torrida tellus — Contremunt," etc.). But this fear is only 
 a special case of the general law of the life force expressed negatively 
 in the fear of death. Thunder and lightning , did not suggest that 
 Gods existed: it was the fear of death which was brought before man 
 by the thunder and lightning, and threatened him in them, that sug- 
 gested such thoughts. Moreover, the fear of^ death is but one sourc e 
 of faith. It also arose from curiosity to know the reason of things. 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 229 
 
 ignorance. He will, moreover, always cling to life. 
 Apart from the rational recognition of the worth of 
 existence resulting from reflection, the life-process dif- 
 fuses through all the cells of his being a constant sense 
 of pleasure, which he could not renounce or even con- 
 ceive of renouncing without a kind of horror. In old 
 age the pleasure of existence declines as the life-process 
 in the cells loses its strength and regularity. When 
 it is no longer the dominant note in the kina:sthe- 
 sis of the body, the desire for life is gradually extin- 
 guished, and gives way to an indifference that be- 
 comes a need for repose and even a positive desire for 
 death. 
 
 The permanent pleasure of existence may again be 
 overthrown or extinguished by the bodily and mental 
 distress caused by sickness or moral disaster, and in that 
 case desire is transferred from the preservation to the 
 annihilation of life. These exceptions, however, apart, 
 the desire for life is always present, and the idea that the 
 extinction of personality can neither be avoided nor de- 
 layed is intolerable alike to consciousness and feeling. 
 Therefore, man will always try to explain phenomena, 
 reflect on the cause, or at least on the connection and 
 order of events, revel in the joys of existence, and 
 shudder before the horror of death; for the religious 
 feeling within him inexorably forces these questions 
 upon him and he must listen to his own soul. That his 
 strongest emotions are associated with it is obvious from 
 its very nature. Strong emotions are aroused by any- 
 thing that affects the deep roots of life, whence both 
 consciousness and personality grow and draw their 
 strength. The laws of association, moreover, explain 
 
230 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 how an extraordinary emotion, even if it originate in 
 some other source, will rouse the basic emotion that 
 vibrates between life and death, and gather force from 
 it. Therefore a religious note sounds in the deeper 
 notes of great love, profound passion, desperate fear, 
 and the mighty impression produced by the beautiful 
 and the sublime; and since thought is influenced by 
 sentiments, even to some extent polarized by them, it is 
 clear that any religious excitement that penetrates the 
 soul with a sense of the mystery of life and its im- 
 pending doom will occupy the consciousness with this 
 question of eternity, and cause the ideas to group them- 
 selves into fantastic inventions, suppositions, surmises, 
 dreams, or ordered systems. Religious emotion leads 
 the thoughts away from reality and experience into a 
 world of dreams. There is something of a religious 
 character in any dream that draws the consciousness 
 away from the region of natural percepts and judgments 
 to wander over the boundless ocean of imagination. It 
 is very pronounced when the brain is engaged in artistic 
 invention or any of those aesthetic functions that are 
 biologically connected with the emotions of sex. Joy, 
 wonder, excitement, agitation, longing, devotion — all 
 these spring from the same subconscious root as the 
 religious emotion. When the religious mood is height- 
 ened, as it may be, to enthusiasm, ecstasy, or transfigura- 
 tion, the different elements are almost indistinguishably 
 fused. 
 
 Religious feeling arose in man when his intellectual 
 development led him to ask the question " Why? " and 
 forced the fact of death upon him. It is an open ques- 
 tion whether it will be extinguished when man finally 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 231 
 
 realizes that it is quite useless to seek to know the causes 
 of phenomena, and directs his desire for knowledge to 
 other attainable ends, and when his instinctive repug- 
 nance to the dissolution of his personality subsides, and 
 he learns to think with indifference of his inevitable 
 end. Even then, in all probability, the old longings and 
 anxieties of primitive man will break atavistically upon 
 the reason at its task, like snatches of some distant 
 melody that will seem beautiful and lofty and worthy of 
 being fostered by art. This notion was expressed by 
 Dr. F. Strauss ("The Old Faith and the New: a 
 Confession"), by M. Guyau ( " D'Irreligion de I'Ave- 
 nir ") , and by myself (" Conventional Lies of Our Civ- 
 ilization ") . We found ourselves in agreement in hold- 
 ing that in the civilization of the future, art would take 
 the place of faith, and concerts, plays, exhibitions, and 
 sesthetic celebrations of every sort, that of the Church 
 service. Certainly the ideas originally called up by the 
 religious sentiment will lose their connection with it, and 
 gradually fade away. 
 
 A sentiment so strong, deep, and general as the re- 
 ligious naturally could not fail to influence the mutual 
 relations of mankind; but its influence has been enor- 
 mously exaggerated. Dozens of would-be philosophic 
 historians have, with an air of great wisdom, repeated 
 Goethe's very arbitrary statement that all wars have 
 been wars of religion. Schelling saw in religion the 
 real content of history. Bunsen regarded it as its 
 earliest and strongest motive force. All the facts are 
 against them. It was not frpm religious motives that 
 the Romans first attacked and defeated their neighbours 
 in Central Italy, then conquered Italy, and finally the 
 
232 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 whole world, but from the desire for profit and mastery 
 — i.e., from the parasitic impulse. 
 
 Religious motives are far to seek in the migrations by 
 which the European States were formed. The Mongol 
 invasion in the Middle Ages certainly had nothing to do 
 with religion, and only far-fetched sophistry of the most 
 specious kind could discover any religious motives in the 
 revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. There are so many 
 political, economic, and social causes to be taken into 
 consideration even in those wars that appear to have 
 been fought on religious grounds, such as the seven 
 hundred years' struggle of the Iberians, Romans, and 
 Goths against the Moors in Spain, the Crusades, and 
 the Thirty Years' War, that a closer examination dimin- 
 ishes the part played by religion even there. The real 
 truth is that any emotion common to men draws them 
 together, and the religious emotion, being the strongest, 
 does this most of all. Those who have laughed or 
 cried together are no longer strangers. How much more 
 powerful, then, than the superficial emotions of a chance 
 and transitory feeling of mirth Is the bond created by 
 similar views of the world and of life, here and here- 
 after, and above all, by a worship of the same God or 
 Gods! Not only primitive man, but the cultivated 
 believer of to-day, feels that here is something more 
 than a mere abstract philosophy. It has a practical sig- 
 nificance, as securing the favour of supernatural powers. 
 And if the godhead be an all-powerful conqueror and 
 king, whose enmity is deadly, his good-will an un- 
 equalled protection and security, one must feel it to be 
 of the greatest importance that he should be universally 
 worshipped, and regard oneself as personally endan- 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 233 
 
 gered by anyone whose refusal to do honour to the na- 
 tional divinity may bring down his rage upon the people 
 as a whole. The self-righteousness natural to man, and 
 his instinctive aversion to anything different from him- 
 self, subversive of his habits, or opposed, in a manner 
 that he feels to be provocative, to his mode of thought 
 and feeling, afford sufficient explanation of the fanatical 
 hatred of different beliefs — a hatred, however, that has 
 more often caused the persecution of minorities at 
 home than war abroad. 
 
 No one who wished to gain ascendency or influence 
 over mankind could overlook or neglect a feeling so 
 universal, mighty, and deep-rooted as religion. There 
 soon arose a class, differentiated from the multitude, 
 which claimed to know more than they did of super- 
 natural powers, to stand in a closer relation to them, 
 and to possess a greater influence over them. It as- 
 sumed a monopoly of the highly advantageous position 
 of go-between for the gifts that accompanied the sacri- 
 fices and prayers of the faithful, and the favours 
 accorded them in return by Gods, ghosts, and spirits. 
 These mediators, who lived by faith, and claimed for 
 themselves the possession of supernatural knowledge 
 and power, formed either a class recruited from indi- 
 viduals, like the Griots among the West African 
 negroes, or the medicine-men among the North Ameri- 
 can Indians, or a caste. This caste might be, like the 
 Indian Brahmans, descended from conquerors, who had 
 won by the sword the privileges they now tried to main- 
 tain, without exertion or danger, by means of the 
 prestige of terrifying legends; or like the Priests and 
 Levites, when the Jews were an independent people, 
 
234 THE INTERPRETATION OF HI3TORY 
 
 members of a more intellectual class, who knew how to 
 assume the role of the favourites, confidants, and minis- 
 ters of supernatural powers. 
 
 This priestly parasitism was not always the cool and 
 calculated deceit that it appears on a shallow interpreta- 
 tion. Actions that are rooted in the subconscious mind 
 of man, and extend back to its prehistoric and primitive 
 past, are rarely entirely self-conscious. The latter-day 
 priest, face to face with an old, often an immemorial 
 institution, a Church on firm foundations, with dogmas 
 and rites crystallized by long tradition, does not trouble 
 himself about its origin, authenticity, or ultimate mean- 
 ing. Possibly he believes the doctrines he has learnt and 
 has to teach. To him the priesthood is a dignity, an 
 office, like any other. It seems to him right and fitting 
 that it should afford him a regular income and certain 
 moral advantages. But his enjoyment is disturbed by 
 no reflection, save perhaps for an occasional qualm as to 
 whether he really gives believers a fair return for their 
 money. Once a career is regularly recognized by so- 
 ciety and the State, people enter upon It without any 
 higher consideration than that of personal advance- 
 ment. They feel that they have done their duty if they 
 fulfil the tasks prescribed, and attain the external 
 positions to which It leads — ^preferments, dignities, and 
 benefices, etc. So, It is quite possible for a man to be 
 a priest to-dayj and yet a thoroughly honest, upright 
 man. He may never call in question the character of 
 his profession, or see that it is an exploitation of the ab- 
 surd ideas of mankind in general. It is possible that 
 the Roman augurs could not look at one another with- 
 out laughing. Nevertheless, there must have been 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 235 
 
 plenty of haruspices who conscientiously Interpreted 
 the liver of the sacrificial beast as they had learned to 
 do from the templum, whence the priesthood acquired 
 their Instruction In the significance of animal entrails. 
 An astrologer who had drawn a perfectly regular horo- 
 scope — ^no easy matter, but one involving considerable 
 astronomical knowledge — ^was certainly on good terms 
 with his conscience. 
 
 The government could not afford to allow religion to 
 be outside Its control. The advantage, even the neces- 
 sity, of establishing relations that would place It in the 
 service of the State was soon perceived. It was easily 
 done. Since men imagined God as a king, the king 
 could play the God. The great Asiatic despots and the 
 Egyptian kings assumed god-like honours; Cesarean 
 Rome permitted altars to the ruler to be set up in the 
 temples. When the ruler was not God Himself he was, 
 like Alexander the Great, the Son of God, and of god- 
 like descent, like the Japanese dynasty or the old Norse 
 and pagan Germanic ruling houses, which claimed to 
 spring from Thor or Odin ; or at least ordained by God, 
 as is maintained to-day by all rulers by the grace of 
 God. The State was created and Is maintained by the 
 power of the ruler and the fear of the ruled. The ruler 
 soon saw how great an economy of strength would be 
 involved if the fear aroused by his weapons could be 
 strengthened by the fear of supernatural powers, and 
 he tended this fear as carefully as the other. His war- 
 riors and attendants were adorned with magnificent 
 garments, decorations, and symbols, so that their as- 
 pect might strike terror to the hearts of his subjects, 
 and fill them with wonderment, respect, and fear. And 
 
236 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the impression of his power was further heightened by 
 the magic of supernatural descent and relationship. 
 The crown became more impressive when surrounded 
 by a halo. Faith became a pillar of the throne, and so 
 long as the king assured the priest of his privileges, he 
 was his trusty bodyguard. 
 
 The subject learned in church the theoretical doctrine 
 of obedience that was practically enforced by the armed 
 agents of the royal will. The advantage for the ruler 
 was so great that he maintained the Church as a public 
 institution only second in importance to the army. Any 
 attack upon the Church was regarded as an attack upon 
 the ruler, who put at its disposal full powers of perse- 
 cuting and exterminating critics, enemies, or recusants. 
 The entire intellectual discipline of the people was 
 handed over to the Church, whose doctrines were as- 
 signed priority in the education of the young and the 
 intellectual life of the people as a whole: and this 
 although its unproved assumptions formed the sharpest 
 possible contrast to all the rest of the teaching of the 
 schools which the State endowed. "The faith of the 
 people must be maintained," is merely another way of 
 saying, " The submission of the people to their rulers, 
 and their readiness to pay dues and taxes, must be main- 
 tained." 
 
 The ruler provided for the protection of his own 
 interests by using the authority of the State directly and 
 indirectly to secure that faith, piety, and resignation to 
 God should be esteemed and inculcated in schools, from 
 the pulpit, in literature and art, and stamped with gen- 
 eral official recognition, and to. impose a moral value for 
 these qualities upon public opinion. No State in histori- 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 237 
 
 cal times has ever anywhere failed to avail itself of the 
 religious feeling and faith to strengthen and support 
 its power. The first instance of separation of State 
 and Church is that of the French Republic. There is 
 no other example of such a thing. There have been 
 States that recognized no official religion, and per- 
 mitted their citizens the free exercise of any, but no- 
 where in the past, or with the exception of France in 
 the present, can a State be found which has expressly 
 severed Itself from the visionary ideas of faith, does not 
 use it In its ordinances for the spread and maintenance 
 of its power or the furtherance of its own ends, or 
 assign it any value. The French innovation is a bold 
 attempt to build the State on reason and power alone, 
 in the belief that the citizens, seeing the necessity of 
 State regulation, and rationally accepting force as the 
 means for carrying It out, will obey the laws and accede 
 to the demands of the State. The boldness of the at- 
 tempt is its newness. , As a matter of fact, with the ex- 
 ception of the Jews, and perhaps of the Tibetans, the 
 State, even when ruling with the help of faith, has 
 never relied upon religion alone. It has never trusted to 
 the fear of God to induce the subject to pay his taxes, 
 shed his blood, or obey his superiors. The Church has 
 always had the canteen behind it, the priest the gen- 
 darme to enforce his sermons with punishment, im- 
 prisonment, and the gallows. The real difference 
 between the worldly and the sacerdotal State is much 
 less than the theoretical. But it is significant that one 
 State should shake off an immemorial and still con- 
 venient fiction, should refuse to embellish practical 
 violence by a theory of Divine ordinance, should 
 
238 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 decline a supernatural origin for purely utilitarian 
 human arrangements, and refrain from uplifted eyes 
 and unctuous tones when making demands of its sub- 
 jects. 
 
 As civilization advanced, the religious feeling, repre- 
 senting as it does the instinct of self-preservation in its 
 twofold aspect, the desire for knowledge and the fear of 
 death, naturally produced various types of positive 
 religion, from crude fetish worship to the refined hair- 
 splitting of " enlightened " monotheism, as reduced to a 
 philosophic system. It is superfluous to ask whether a 
 phenomenon that seems an inevitable incident of de- 
 velopment is useful.^ Nevertheless, since the age of 
 enlightenment the question has often been raised 
 whether religion is useful to man, and answered as a 
 rule in the affirmative, even by the emancipated. They 
 credit religion, if not with creating civilization, at least 
 with hastening its advance. They allow that it has 
 developed man's moral nature, subdued his ferocity, 
 taught him gentleness and love for his fellow-men, and 
 comforted him in distress.^ These are very generous 
 admissions. Not one of them can be regarded as 
 proved. Civilization has not developed thanks to re- 
 ligion, but in spite of it. Religion has not exercised a 
 
 'Voltaire ("Essai sur les McEurs et I'Esprit des Nations," part ii., 
 p. 205 ) answers the question in a decided negative: "Religion is the 
 chief cause of all the sorrows of humanity. Everywhere useless, it 
 has only served to drive men to evil, and plunge them in brutal mis- 
 ery. ... It makes of history ... an immense tableau of human 
 follies." 
 
 ^J. J. Rousseau, " Emile," I., iv. : "[Christianity] has certainly 
 made it [government] less blood-thirsty. This can be proved by 
 comparing it with ancient [pre-Christian] governments." 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 239 
 
 favourable Influence upon it, but it upon religion. 
 There is an amazing want of logic in attributing the 
 amelioration of manners to religion. As a matter of 
 fact, this amelioration exercised a softening and human- 
 izing effect upon religion, which was at first bloody and 
 fearsome wherever it was found. 
 
 The first harmful effect of religion was that it satis- 
 fied man's desire for knowledge by means of a perfectly 
 arbitrary invention. The average man is so constituted 
 that any assertion confidently made and stubbornly 
 maintained has an Immediate effect, and carries more 
 complete conviction than a careful and sober proof to 
 which he is not able to give the sustained attention It 
 requires. To man's Inquiry as to the cause of things, 
 this reply was given by those who invented the religious 
 fable and Its later professional exponents, the priests: 
 "The world was created by the Gods, who can free 
 you from suffering and death; your souls are immortal," 
 etc.; and the timid questioners believed It, as children 
 believe the answer their m'lther gives them, in a tone 
 of conviction, when they ask whence they came : " The 
 stork brought ye." Man asks for the bread of knowl- 
 edge ; religion gives him the stone of a fairy-tale, which, 
 though indigestible, fills the stomach, gives a false 
 satiety, and arrests the wholesome hunger that impelled 
 them to seek salutary food. It was easier to give man a 
 fictitious than a true answer to the questions about 
 eternity that troubled him, but the effect was fatal, in 
 so far as it led him to imagine that he had the knowl- 
 edge he sought, and so arrested his natural impulse to 
 win, through effort and mistakes, a real Insight into the 
 connection of phenomena. It is no reproach to religion 
 
240 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 that it invented fabulous explanations of the world. It 
 arose inevitably at the stage when the mind of man was 
 capable of the play of imagination, but incapable of 
 serious observation, critical examination, or rational 
 interpretation. At the same time, it cannot be said to 
 have assisted his intellectual advance. It stereotyped 
 a childish phase because of the practical interests 
 bound up in it — the interests of the priesthood, of the 
 government, of all those who profited by a public sys- 
 tem in which the majority are induced to submit to 
 exploitation with patience by the belief in a visionary 
 hereafter that promises a choice between dazzling 
 honours and recompenses or punishment and tortures. 
 There have always been individuals who saw that re- 
 ligion was a mere fiction without the smallest kernel of 
 truth. They could and should have taught the less 
 instructed majority to see the senselessness of their 
 faith. They might have hastened the process of prog- 
 ress and anticipated the dawn of science by centuries. 
 Religion closed their lips, and prevented them from 
 rousing the many from their stupid dreams. Religion 
 has employed every means for the destruction of its 
 critics, from the poisoned cup forced on Socrates for 
 trumped-up reasons of State, that were really reasons 
 of religion, to the stake at which Giordano Bruno and 
 Michael Servetus were burned. And yet it has been a 
 factor in intellectual progress ! Such an assertion is 
 incomprehensible. 
 
 The .eulogists of religion gladly turn from the point 
 of view of human development as a whole, in which 
 they are not at home, to record its services in narrower 
 fields. In Ireland and Germany it was, the monks who 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 241 
 
 cleared the primeval forests and turned up the soil with 
 the plough; In France It was they who repeopled the 
 wilderness after the migrations had swept over them. 
 All over Western and Central Europe the monasteries 
 were the first seats of peaceful labour and teaching set 
 up In the wilderness. Down to modern times It has been 
 the clergy who founded and maintained schools and 
 cared for books. All this Is true. But the medieval 
 monks cultivated the soil for their own use, or to pro- 
 vide themselves with satisfaction, power, and riches. 
 Religion was their excuse, the claim upon which the 
 possession of property was based; it had no more to do 
 with their civilizing activities than with the productive 
 settlements founded by the emigrants who cross the seas 
 to-day. Thus, the schools founded by, the Princes and 
 Orders of the Church served (primarily) the purposes 
 of the Church. Primarily trained a priesthood, and, in 
 the second place, implanted in the minds of the youth 
 of the ruling classes the views and opinions useful to 
 the Church. In these schools the teaching of the formal 
 elements — reading, writing, and grammar — and of the 
 subjects that made up the trivlum ^ and the quadrivlum 
 of the medieval curriculum, was used as a means of 
 Instilling the most irrational stories and dreams, and 
 served, Instead of wakening the Intellect, to lull it to 
 sleep. There is no doubt that men's minds would have 
 been clearer and more intelligent, their desire for knowl- 
 edge and their powers of discovery greater, had they 
 then, instead of learning what was taught in the ecclesi- 
 astical schools and by the ecclesiastical teachers, grown 
 
 ' The trivium included grammar, dialectic and rhetoric ; the 
 quadrivium arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. 
 
242 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 up without any instruction at all, like the Redskins be- 
 fore the whites settled in America. 
 
 Religion is said to have subdued the ferocity of man, 
 and taught him gentleness and the love of his fellow- 
 creatures. This claim is as unfounded as that of ad- 
 vancing education and civilization. That all primitive 
 religions demanded human sacrifices can be established 
 with practical certainty from the cultus rites surviving 
 in historical times. At the exodus from Egypt the Jews 
 were enjoined by their religion to destroy the whole 
 population of Canaan root and branch, with their cattle, 
 and their houses, and their goods. Islam bade the 
 faithful wage the holy war on the races within their 
 reach, and offer them a choice between conversion and 
 slaughter. Without pity, often with the most appalling 
 cruelty, did the Christians persecute the Arians, Albi- 
 genses, Waldenses, and the other medieval heretics — 
 Jews, and the Protestants of the Netherlands. When 
 the French Huguenots got the upper hand, they did not 
 fail to take a bloody retribution on the Catholics. 
 What trace of the softening influence of religion Is 
 there In this long course of butchery and slaughter, ex- 
 tending over thousands of years? 
 
 It has provided a basis and sanction for morality — 
 that Is true. The religious teacher or believer has no 
 difficulty In answering the question : " What is good, 
 what evil? Why should I do good, and avoid evil? 
 What will happen to me If I do evil, and neglect 
 good?" He answers with unction: "Good is that 
 which Is commanded by God or the Gods, and pleasing 
 to them; bad Is what they hate and forbid. It is my 
 part to make known the will of God or of the Gods. 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 243 
 
 Thou must do good in order to win the favour of the 
 Gods, and avoid evil to escape their displeasure. If 
 thou hast sinned, thou wilt be punished on earth or here- 
 after; if thou art virtuous, the Gods will reward thee 
 now and for evermore." The average man, with no 
 strong passions, has no doubt often been governed by 
 such phrases so long as he believed them. But with the 
 awakening of his critical faculties he turned aside, with 
 a shrug of the shoulders, from the childish promises of 
 religious morality, and acted according to the dictates 
 of his own habits, passions, or views ; as, indeed, he had 
 always done, even when he believed, in any case where 
 his own inclinations and desires were stronger than the 
 restraints inspired by the idea of the anger and threats 
 of the Gods. Thus the moral effect of religion was. 
 non-existent, not only, as is plain without proof, for the 
 unbeliever, but even for the believer. Crimes were 
 never more frequent or horrible than in those dark 
 epochs of antiquity and the Middle Ages when men 
 believed in the immediate vengeance of the Gods, as 
 displayed in the cases of Niobe the Atreidae, in the 
 Erinyes and in the eternal torments of Hell. Evil-doers 
 thought nothing of selling their soul to the devil, or of 
 securing God's indulgence by prayers and vows. Rob- 
 bers and murderers to this day sometimes purchase 
 candles and offerings before committing a crime, pray 
 in church for its success, and give thanks for a lucky 
 conclusion to the supernatural powers to which they 
 imagine it to be due. 
 
 As a matter of fact, what is really an effect is always 
 spoken of as a cause. It was not religion that furthered 
 education, softened manners, and gradually formed a 
 
244 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 moral sense in man, but education that endeavoured as 
 it progressed to introduce, in many cases with pain and 
 difficulty, some degree of rationality into the crude 
 childishness of the religious legends. The softening of 
 manners gradually removed the cruelty and lust of 
 blood originally associated with religion. Man's moral 
 aspirations affected his visionary faith, and impressed 
 on it something of their own character. 
 
 Human development is determined by needs, giving 
 rise to observation, and through it to knowledge. The 
 influence of knowledge gradually moulded intellectual 
 life, and modified the most fixed and deeply-rooted 
 habits. At the same time, as the direct outcome of 
 needs, a form of adaptation is going on alongside of 
 this, but for the most part automatic and subconscious 
 — the life of instinct. The lonely wanderer of primitive 
 times was only attracted to his fellow-men by desire, 
 and to a much less pronounced degree by the con- 
 veniences of habit. Morality he neither needed nor 
 possessed. But with society these needs arose. If he 
 wished to live on tolerably peaceful terms with his 
 neighbours, and avoid continual wrangles, violence, and 
 danger of death, or at least of expulsion, he had to 
 learn regard for others, and exercise self-control, even 
 self-sacrifice, in order to make himself pleasing to them. 
 This habit of considering the effect of any action on 
 others was the empirical origin of what was later known 
 as morality. It is therefore an immediate product of 
 society, and the consequence, not of theoretical reflec- 
 tion, but of adaptation to the conditions of a common 
 existence. The idea ever present in man's conscious- 
 ness, "What will the others say to this? " became the 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 245 
 
 voice of conscience, the inward reflection of public opin- 
 ion. The relation between the inward monitor and the 
 external surroundings that it interprets became gradu- 
 ally obscured until conscience, separated from the dim 
 social conception in which it arose, appears finally as a 
 normal constituent of personality. 
 
 The most characteristic function of the conscience is 
 to check. Its action is negative ; it arrests the impulses. 
 " Do it not ! " it cries, and in an undertone, often in- 
 audible: " Society would be against you! " Conscience 
 acts positively with a small minority of people of lively 
 imagination and delicate sensibilities; with them it in- 
 cites as well as checking, commands as well as forbid- 
 ding. Instead of only saying "Do it not! " it says, 
 " Do it ! " It grows out of a mere fear of wounding 
 our companions into an active desire to win them over, 
 and fill them with joy, love, and wonder. Cold, cautious 
 consideration for others becomes a warm and active 
 love, an altruism whose psychic root is the capacity to 
 imagine the sufferings of another, and suffer personally 
 from a vivid picture of distress. Altruism, therefore, 
 is protection against actual pain; conscientiousness the 
 idea of possible discomfort, and a protection against 
 potential pain. Only in the few does the development 
 of morality thus proceed from the negative to the posi- 
 tive stage. In most it is negative at best; in many It is 
 distorted or entirely wanting. Persons suffering from 
 hypertrophy of the ego, or a sense of power which is 
 developed to excess, have no consideration for others. 
 They consider themselves so vastly superior that the 
 hate or enmity of others is a matter of indifference. On 
 persons of violent impulses and weak mentality the 
 
246 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 idea that they will rouse others against them has abso- 
 lutely no effect in restraining them from actions that 
 must bring them into collision. Such men commit' 
 crimes from violence or weakness. But whether you 
 take the criminal, the man who keeps on the right side 
 of every social usage, or the warm-hearted altruist, the 
 things he does and the things he leaves undone are the 
 outcome of a perpetual balancing of psychic states, of 
 checks against impulses, a series of duels between or- 
 ganic instincts and the idea of society. Convenient 
 labour-saving formulae have been invented for this idea. 
 Regard for neighbours is expressed in the ten tables of 
 Moses, in the Commandments of Manu, later, in the 
 legal codes. A Divine origin has been assigned to the 
 most ancient formula, as to everything remote and im- 
 memorial in origin, whether it be an invention or a form 
 of social institution. Morality, which arose out of 
 society, was referred to the commandment of God. 
 To men's superstitious minds, the fact that their actions 
 were seen by their neighbours suggested that they were 
 watched over by supernatural powers. 
 
 It is possible, but not certain, that moral checks may 
 have been strengthened by the absorption of mystical 
 ideas, and the wholesome fear of the gendarme by a 
 belief in its supernatiiral origin. Certain, however, it 
 is not. The state of morality in the times when faith 
 was most fervent and superstition most rampant makes 
 it very doubtful. Anyhow, morality neither needs nor 
 is strengthened by a religious basis. It remains the 
 same when stripped of all supersensual attributes. It 
 arose from the necessities of that social life of which it 
 is the condition, and it will last so long as men live in 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 247 
 
 societies. Faith will never restrain criminal natures 
 from ill-doing; society has always had to protect itself 
 against them by force, and will always have to do so, 
 whether they believe or no. What is done and what is 
 left undone by the average man of negative morality is 
 determined, quite apart from the question of his belief 
 or unbelief, by considerations of public opinion, law, 
 and custom. And the positive morality of the altruistic 
 minority springs from pity, from a heightened sensi- 
 bility, not from the dogmatic precepts that must be, for 
 them, even were their own organization different from 
 what it is, but a dead letter. Religion has never had 
 any influence on the origin and development of morals 
 any more than on their active exercise. It has never 
 done anything more than incorporate in its system the 
 principles arrived at by morality through the operation 
 of the forces that brought it into being, and strengthen 
 that system by expressing these principles in the form 
 of dogmas. 
 
 Religion no doubt has brought comfort to many. 
 That this is so is not, however, at all to its credit. The 
 practical utility of untruth is a cynical defence that all 
 liars bring forward. No doubt the assurance of im- 
 mortality robs the idea of death of its terrors. The 
 promise of future reunion helps the mother to bear the 
 loss of her child; the thought that eternal justice will be 
 dealt out to good and evil deeds pours balsam in the 
 wounds of the weak, down-trodden, and ill-used who 
 have succumbed before the pride of the mighty. But 
 the means by which these tortured spirits are soothed 
 are unhealthy and- immoral in^ the extreme — invented 
 tales and arbitrary assertions which cannot stand a 
 
248 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 moment's critical examination. The merit that belongs 
 to the consolation of religion must be granted to every 
 superstition — the amulet that averts the evil eye, spells, 
 the interpretation of cards and dreams, the raising of 
 spirits. All this hocus-pocus has lightened dark hours 
 for millions who believed in it, given them confidence 
 and self-reliance, lifted heavy burdens from their souls, 
 and reconciled them to the hardness of their lot. More- 
 over, p h y s ical sedatives, like opium, morphia, and 
 alcohol, must be assigned an equal value with religion. 
 They, too, console; they, too, bring temporary oblivion 
 of care and suffering; they, too, give an artificial sense 
 of pleasure. And if it be at the price of health, the 
 same holds true of religion when it takes the form of 
 mortification of the flesh and self-inflicted tortures. 
 The ancients, recognizing this, regarded intoxication as 
 a blessing for which they rendered peculiar thanks to 
 the Gods.^ 
 
 Not one of the services that religion claims to have 
 rendered to man can be substantiated. It nas retarded, 
 not advanced, civilization. It has injured knowledge. 
 It has had no share in the softening of manners. It- 
 did not create morality; it has appropriated without 
 elevating it. Its powers of consolatio n are c onfined to 
 individuals in whom the sense of a ctuali ty is d eaden ed or 
 
 ' Frederic de Rougemont, "Les deux cites: la philosophic de I'histoire 
 aux differents Sges de I'humanite," Paris, 1878, vol. i., p. 187: 
 " Digtosius c omforts mortals in all their sorrows. The son of 
 Semele puts an end to the profound misery of humanity (Penthos) by 
 giving men knowledge of his vine. There was a time when the 
 Greeks believed that God himself had given them wine that they 
 might forget their pain. They looked upon intoxication as a sacred, 
 divine ecstasy." 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF RELIGION 249 
 
 undevelojged. Everywhere it is but an epiphenomenon 
 of that universal development upon which it has had 
 either no effect or a detrimental one. D evelopme nt 
 goes_ on as the outcome of increasing knowledge and 
 more delicate adaptation to the conditions imposed 
 upon human existence by nature and society, and re- 
 ligion, with its ideas, dogmas, systems, and cults, fol- 
 lows in its train. Rejigion never v oluntari ly changes its 
 doctrines. It only does so when those who believe 
 threaten to desert it, because it is plainly contradicted 
 by common knowledge. Thus religion, despite its re- 
 sistance, is slowly driven on by the g eneral course of 
 i ntellectual d evelopmen t, which it in vain endeavours 
 to arrest. 
 
 Since man became capable of abstract thought he has 
 been tormented by the riddle o£ eternity- He has 
 always found the thought of death, the complete de- 
 struction of his personality, intolerable. He has always 
 been crushed by the feeling of his nothingness in the 
 midst of the vastness of the universe, his helplessness in 
 face of the powers of nature, which go on their way 
 without regarding him or troubling about him at all. 
 The invention of religion was the simplest and least 
 troublesome way of providing an answer to the ques- 
 tions that tortured him, protection against death, a less 
 humiliating position in the universe, a support against 
 the cruelty of nature, a link with its terrifying powers. 
 The need which gave birth to religion still exists, and 
 wiir exist, in all probability, as long as men think and 
 feel. But it cannot always be satisfied with fables and 
 visions. So much is certain, however difficult it be as 
 yet to form any clear idea of any other means by which 
 
250 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the growing intelligence of average humanity, the scales 
 once fallen from its eyes, can satisfy the instinct of self- 
 preservation in its twofold aspect — ^the desire for knowl- 
 edge and the fear of death. An attempt to do so will, 
 however, be made in a following chapter. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES OF HISTORY 
 
 Popular charts of the sky, that combine bodies im- 
 measurably distant and entirely unconnected with each 
 other in a single star, under a single name, may be 
 picturesque; they do not advance the knowledge of the 
 universe or of the laws of astronomy. In the same way 
 the spectacle of human existence on the earth is not 
 illuminated by projecting into it an arbitrary system of 
 phantoms, and persuading oneself that they represent 
 the life of the species, not the reflection of one's own 
 imagination. The dreams of a deductive philosophy of 
 history do not forward our knowledge of events by one 
 hair's-breadth. To forget that the words used, 
 " humanity," " society," " nation," are but convenient 
 ways of expressing abstract conceptions and vague 
 generalizations of a comprehensive kind, is to get out 
 of touch with reality, and prevent oneself from seeing 
 or comprehending it, because to do thus is to set up 
 between it and oneself an anthropomorphic image of 
 one's own creation — a man of straw. The only reality 
 is the individual who lives, acts, and suffers. In him 
 alone the events of history have an existence, even the 
 mass movements in which a bird's-eye view cannot 
 distinguish individual action or bearing. He plays 
 all the parts in the drama of history, from the hero to 
 the walking gentleman. An accurate idea of the inner 
 
 251 
 
252 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 structure of the historical life of mankind as a whole 
 can only be obtained by a study of individual charac- 
 teristics, of thought and reactions^ — in a word, of 
 individual biology and psychology.^ Medicine could 
 really know nothing of sickness as long as the abstract 
 concept, sickness — in which a mass of concrete phenom- 
 ena and conscious states was included — ^was regarded 
 as a material thing, although it might conceal its 
 ignorance by juggling with all sorts of portentous and 
 unmeaning words like " genius morbi," " dyscrasia," 
 etc. Real insight was first acquired when the cell, the 
 primary constituent of the organism, was recognized as 
 the seat of the life-process, and its normal course and 
 deviations from that norm studied there. Individual 
 psychology is to history what the pathology of the cell 
 is to medicine. Even this is an excessive concession to 
 the analogic habit of thought; the independence of the 
 individual within the people and within humanity is 
 far greater than of the cell within the organism. 
 Goethe's phrase expresses the right method: 
 
 " Wouldst draw strength from the whole? 
 See in smallest part the perfect soul." 
 
 All individual members of the species have certain 
 fundamental characteristics. Feeling, thought, will, and 
 
 ' Paul Lacombe, " De I'histoire consideree comme science," Paris, 
 1894, P- 52: " The primitj^ causes ^ history are the p ersistent mo- 
 tives of man and the pernj^jeijt habits qt.his nj^l^." Joh. Fr. Her- 
 bart, "Collected Works" (edited by G. Hartenstein), passim (vol. 
 v., pp. 160 et seq.; vol. viii., pp. loi et seq., etc.), shows that the 
 analysis of the life of the individual soul is the basis of historical 
 science. Cousin says concisely : " The science of history is really 
 psychological." Fontana and Ferguson, among others, are of the same 
 opinion. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 253 
 
 action proceed in the same manner In almost all indi- 
 viduals — up to a certain point in all without exception. 
 This facilitates the study of human psychology by 
 simplifying its objects, but does not remove the necessity 
 of studying them in the individual. He may be selected 
 at will from the crowd, but he must be a concrete in- 
 dividual, not an abstraction. Positive results acquired 
 from a particular living being may be cautiously general- 
 ized, without any great danger of their being inappli- 
 cable to the species as a whole. On the other hand, if 
 the attention be diverted from the individual, and cast 
 down from some remote height upon the seething mass 
 in which personal physiognomies are no longer dis- 
 tinguishable, the only portrait of an individual that 
 could be drawn from such an impressionist view, if I 
 may put it so, would be a fancy composition based on 
 preconceived ideas — an ideal being that might represent 
 a wish, but would certainly not correspond to any human 
 being of flesh and blood. It is obvious that the his- 
 torian's humanity, composed of such beings, must be 
 wholly unreal. 
 
 Man shares with all other living things the instinct 
 of self-preservation. This makes it necessary and pos- 
 sible for him to adapt himself, actively or passively, to 
 given conditions of existence — passively by organic re^ 
 sistance to injurious circumstances, actively by trying to 
 escape from them or to alter them and render them 
 favourable. Passive adaptation came first. It is a 
 chemical and mechanical process. It Is the work of the 
 vegetative organs. If they refuse, the Individual 
 perishes. Every individual that survives proves, by 
 his very existence, that he has been able to maintain 
 
254 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 himself against all the forces incessantly at work for his 
 destruction. He is heir to all the capacities, forms, 
 and inward arrangements acquired by a series of an- 
 cestors in the truceless struggle for existence. Proof 
 of the magnitude of the organic effort involved even 
 in passive adaptation, and of the profound changes 
 in the organism that it can produce, is afforded by the 
 waxen covering of the acid-proof bacilli; the arrange- 
 ments possessed by Alpine plants to protect them against 
 cold and want of water, by desert plants against 
 drought; the way in which fish, whose watery home is 
 liable to be periodically dried up, breathe alternatively 
 through lungs or gills; and the hibernation of those 
 warm-blooded animals who have regularly to go for 
 months without food. This great work, productive of 
 the most decisive consequences, was proceeding through- 
 out the organs and tissues of the living body before the 
 smallest ray of common consciousness arose. After 
 the development of that consciousness it ceased, and. 
 plays no further part. 
 
 Active adaptation appeared much later than passive. 
 Instead of being a purely biochemical, biomechanical 
 function, the independent response of cells, tissues, 
 organs to external stimuli, it is a unified co-operation of 
 all the organs and the whole system in carrying out a 
 plan developed in the consciousness, and present to it as 
 an idea, before it can be translated into act by nerves 
 and muscles. This higher, more developed, and in- 
 direct form of adaptation premises the existence of con- 
 sciousness, able, by means of its fundamental attribute, 
 memory, to work out ideas, to arrange them in order, 
 to associate them with other subconscious ideas re- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 255 
 
 sembling or related to them in space and time, or as 
 belonging to the same object, and to draw conclusions 
 and form judgments from them. A description of 
 psychology would be out of place here. It must suffice 
 to recall its main points. 
 
 Consciousness is the first fact of psychology. It is a 
 datum that cannot be explained. It perceives the im- 
 pressions conveyed to it by the sensory nerves. From 
 these perceptions it composes an image of the causes of 
 these impressions of the sensory nerves, as far as they 
 are known by experience and constant examination or 
 can be guessed from analogy, and this image is an idea. 
 
 By the juxtaposition and combination of ideas the 
 consciousness acquires a view of the conditions or events 
 of the external world, whether present, past, or future. 
 This view is a judgment. The exactitude with which 
 the ideas of which the judgment is composed correspond 
 to the perceptions, and the delicacy with which the per- 
 ceptions repeat the sense impressions, determines the 
 accuracy of the judgment, the degree of definiteness and 
 truth with which it reflects an actual or potential reality 
 — a condition or process that is, was, or under certain 
 hypotheses could be. 
 
 When the judgment includes ideas that personally 
 affect the judge, in which he is himself actively or 
 passively concerned, these ideas arouse more or less 
 powerful feelings, and set up certain muscular move- 
 ments, or at least, foreshadow them, that is to say, 
 they rouse the activity of the will. Will is a short and 
 conveniently simple description of a very complicated 
 psychic process, whose main features are as follows: 
 Some external sense stimulus — a perception of some 
 
256 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 kind, or an inner organic need — hunger, thirst, desire, 
 fatigue, or discomfort — calls ideas into consciousness. 
 If the idea stands alone, or is from the first of such 
 intensity that no others can form themselves beside it, 
 it excites the motor centres, the muscles become active, 
 and the organism carries out an act which, under the 
 given conditions, corresponds to the stimulus or satisfies 
 the need — that is, a serviceable act. Muscular activity 
 when accompanied by no idea Is reflex. If, on the 
 contrary, consciousness has previous knowledge of the 
 muscular act, forms an image of It and of Its purpose 
 before it is realized, it feels it to be volitional — an act 
 of will. But in most cases the Idea either does not 
 stand alone, or does not prevail Immediately on Its 
 appearance. Several Ideas present themselves at once, 
 and each tries to crowd out and suppress the other, to 
 occupy consciousness and Initiate muscular movement 
 by Itself. In the contest victory rests with the idea 
 supported by the strongest organic Impulses, desires, and 
 inclinations, by the expectation of the most alluring 
 pleasure and the apprehension of the most dreaded 
 pains. It drives the others from the field, excites the 
 motor centres, and causes appropriate actions. In such 
 a case the consciousness is sensible of a psychic effort, 
 a contest of will, and a victory of will over resistance. 
 Will Is then, in the last resort, the liberation of co- 
 ordinated, purposive, muscular movements by the in- 
 fluence of an idea, or the prevention of such an influence 
 by means of an opposing Idea, which suppresses it — 
 that Is, by an inhibition or check. 
 
 One condition of the regular operation of the con- 
 sciousness is attention — that Is, such an adjustment of 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 257 
 
 the psychic apparatus that all the sense impressions 
 perceived, and all the ideas brought up from the sub- 
 consciousness, serve the one end of giving the greatest 
 possible intensity to the particular complex of ideas at 
 that moment dominating the consciousness, and secure 
 the duration of that complex by ignoring — that is, pas- 
 sively resisting — all foreign conceptions, ideas, and recol- 
 lections. But for attention consciousness would be 
 given up to inconsequence and reverie; ideas would 
 never be interpreted into clear, sharply-outlined images, 
 and could not maintain themselves or issue in systematic 
 movements — that is, in acts of will. 
 
 Attention may be natural or artificial. It is natural 
 when the psychic apparatus is adjusted in immediate 
 response to some organic impulse. Under the impulse 
 of its desire for prey the cat watches the mouse-hole. 
 All its senses are concentrated on its purpose. When 
 it sees the unsuspecting mouse venturing forth, it is 
 blind to all else. Attention is artificial when the psychic 
 apparatus is not adjusted to an immediate organic need, 
 but to an idea of some satisfaction desired or pain to 
 be avoided, of other than a directly organic kind. In 
 spite of his repugnance, the schoolboy forces himself 
 to learn grammatical rules by heart, and suppresses the 
 ideas of pleasant loafing, because the idea of the un- 
 pleasantness of failing in his examination so regulates 
 his psychic adjustment that, for the moment, the gram- 
 matical rules have sole possession of his consciousness. 
 The man of science, whose gaze is riveted on his micro- 
 scope and the images which it reveals, has his senses 
 and his consciousness preserved from distraction from 
 the object of his observation directly through his scien- 
 
258 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tific curiosity, and indirectly through the idea of the 
 pleasure of acquiring new knowledge. 
 
 A diseased form of attention is mono-ideism, when 
 the consciousness is permanently possessed by one ex- 
 clusive idea, which all perceptions and associations only 
 serve to feed and strengthen. When other ideas suc- 
 ceed in entering the consciousness, without driving this 
 central idea out, so that the consciousness is perceiving 
 sense impressions, turning them into ideas, then form- 
 ing judgments, and so acts of will, while all the time 
 the original idea remains like a foreign body, unmoved 
 in the midst of the burning tide of ideas that stream 
 continually through the consciousness, the state is de- 
 scribed as obsession. But if the attention of the con- 
 sciousness, instead of being open to perceptions conveyed 
 to it by the sensory nerves, is claimed by inner organic 
 processes accompanied by sensations of intense pleasure, 
 then the consciousness becomes inaccessible to impres- 
 sions from the outer world, all its ideas are referred 
 only to sensations of pleasure, and it falls into a state 
 known as ecstasy. 
 
 When the attention is thoroughly aroused, the con- 
 sciousness recognizes the ideas that have by experience 
 been proved to be incompatible, and avoids uniting 
 ideas that are mutually exclusive to form one judgment. 
 It is sensible of the absurdity of the judgment, " Angels 
 are beings consisting of winged human heads," because 
 it knows from experience that, since the human head has 
 a mouth connected with a windpipe and digestive canal, 
 a mouth without this canal leading to lungs and stomach 
 has neither meaning nor purpose, while no head could 
 live without breath, circulation, or nourishment. When 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 259 
 
 attention flags, and permits vague ideas to appear in 
 the consciousness, judgments may arise composed of 
 mutually exclusive parts, and therefore absurd — op- 
 posed, that is, to the truth as known to human ex- 
 perience. The same result is brought about, even 
 though the attention does not flag, when the conscious- 
 ness unites in one judgment, and places in one category, 
 ideas that have been acquired by personal experience 
 and ideas that, having been taken over ready-made 
 from the consciousness of others, have not been acquired 
 by experience or controlled by the senses, and are, as a 
 matter of fact, false. 
 
 The means by which ideas are conveyed ready-made 
 from one consciousness to another is language. Unless 
 the ideas combine parts that have been proved by ex- 
 perience to be mutually exclusive, their absurdity will 
 not appear. Language can transmit false ones as read- 
 ily as true without, indeed, perceiving any difference 
 between them, unless each individual idea thus trans- 
 mitted be tested by the senses and then by experience. 
 This is in many cases almost, if not wholly, impossible 
 — for example, in the case of assertions about events 
 that happened at some remote time or place. Lan- 
 guage is, therefore, with laxity of attention, the source 
 of false conclusions. Moreover, the majority of men 
 never do translate spoken or written images into ideas. 
 They remain in the consciousness mere sounds or signs, 
 which are either repeated or reproduced from time to 
 time, after the fashion of parrots or monkeys, without 
 any interpretation at all, or else interpreted in a manner 
 that removes them more or less from the ideas which 
 they must originally have symbolized. Thus, men who 
 
26o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 wish to pass as learned, and even as sensible — it is 
 not necessarily the same thing — have solemnly deliv- 
 ered themselves, as if they were uttering some pro- 
 fundity, of such nonsense as Hegel's, " The Roman 
 Empire is finitude raised to infinitude," or his, " The 
 sun is the thesis, the satellite and comet the antithesis, 
 the planet the synthesis"; or the description by the 
 mystical Father Boscowitch ^ of " the material point 
 that possesses mass without extension." The spoken 
 and the written word, which should transmit ideas, 
 produce as a rule nothing but psittacism and pithecism. 
 There is one activity of the consciousness in which 
 ideas exist side by side in the order in which they are 
 called up by association from the subconsciousness, and 
 are combined in judgments even when obviously mutu- 
 ally exclusive. This occurs in dreams, which unite 
 ideas in accordance with their associations in time and 
 space and their emotional resemblances, without any 
 sense of the unreality and absurdity of the images and 
 judgments thus formed. Fantasy, though a ^ waking 
 state, summons up and combines ideas by the same un- 
 restrained method of mechanical association found in 
 dreams. These ideas, being ultimately recollections — 
 reflections, therefore, of some real experience — are com- 
 bined in a manner that is wholly unreal. The difference 
 between dream and fantasy is that in the dream one 
 single bodily feeling or one emotion that dominates 
 the organism calls the ideas forth and combines them, 
 whereas fantasy is not determined by physical feelings — 
 except in the case of the sick, where they cause delirium 
 
 " Quoted by J. Paul Milliet, " La Dynamics et les trois ames," Paris, 
 1908, p. 2. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 261 
 
 — ^but by organic emotion combined with conscious 
 thought, that excludes any glaringly contradictory 
 ideas, and forms unreal judgments for the sake of their 
 charm, while perfectly aware of their unreality. 
 
 All processes of the brain and nervous system can be 
 quicker and slower, fainter or more powerful. These 
 differences of rhythm and intensity determine the differ- 
 ences of individual temperament. The contest between 
 ideas in the consciousness that ends in the subjugation 
 of the one and decided mastery of the other may go on 
 with more or less energy. The greater the energy with 
 which ideas appear and assert themselves and drive 
 other aggressive ideas out, the keener and more sus- 
 tained is the attention, the firmer is the will. The 
 energy with which ideas struggle for existence in the 
 consciousness is the measure of character. Character 
 and temperament are inborn characteristics, like stature, 
 or the colour of eyes, hair, and skin. They may pos- 
 sibly be increased by practice; they can certainly be 
 weakened and even destroyed by artificial means, by 
 alcoholic and other poisons, and deficient resistance to 
 the desire for pleasure. 
 
 All effort of brain and nerves, from the first phase to 
 the last, from differentiation of sense impressions, per- 
 ception, idea, judgment, down to the act of will, has one 
 single purpose — the adaptation of the organism to its 
 environment, the knowledge and utilization for its own 
 advantage of the conditions under which it has to main- 
 tain its existence, its protection and defence against the 
 harms and dangers threatening it. The necessities of 
 self-preservation have caused the differentiation of the 
 general sensibility of the body into various senses, and 
 
262 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the rise and development of specific sense organs. They 
 have fused the exceedingly limited consciousness prob- 
 ably inherent in every cell, every molecule of living mat- 
 ter, into a common organic consciousness, and then 
 developed and refined this consciousness, enriched it 
 by the power of associating ideas, taught it attention, 
 and developed an inhibitory system, which can insure 
 the permanence of any conscious state, defend it against 
 distraction, suppress reflex action, and co-ordinate voli- 
 tions. 
 
 The more distinct and numerous the sense impres- 
 sions ; the clearer the ideas and the fuller their reflection 
 in the consciousness of the states and modifications of 
 the external world ; the more numerous and accurate the 
 recollections that they summon from the subconscious- 
 ness; the more readily association completes the imme- 
 diate perceptions and interprets to the consciousness the 
 order, succession, and connection of external phenom- 
 ena, even where they are not wholly concrete; the 
 greater proportionate measure of reality contained by 
 judgments, and the acts of will, that result from the 
 influence of the judgment on the inhibitions and motor 
 impulses, the closer the correspondence with the interest 
 of the organism whether momentary or permanent, 
 and the better in proportion are its prospects of main- 
 taining itself successfully in the struggle for existence. 
 In a word, attention, knowledge, will, are all alike 
 forms of the struggle for existence. Every reaction, 
 conscious or unconscious, of the organism to the phe- 
 nomenal world is a form of adaptation, and the driving 
 and creative force behind the efforts and the develop- 
 ment of mind is the instinct of self-preservation. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 263 
 
 Men are by nature unequal, as even Rousseau ^ ad- 
 mits, although with singular logic he deduces from their 
 natural inequality the possibility — nay, the necessity — 
 of moral and political equality. Men are unequal in 
 stature, skull formation, and colour; they are no less 
 unequal in temperament and character. The proximate 
 causes of this inequality are mainly heredity, by which 
 the type is determined, and to a lesser degree unfavour- 
 able circumstances, which cause a morbid failure to 
 attain the full development of the type. The inequality 
 resulting from unfavourable circumstances can be easily 
 removed by an amelioration in these conditions. The 
 extent to which inequality resulting from heredity can 
 be influenced is as yet unknown; unknown, too, are the 
 remote causes of the appearance of different human 
 types. We do not know whether they represent sports 
 of a species originally single, or are the results of 
 originally different, although closely related, prehuman 
 animal species ; whether they can be modified and grad- 
 ually transformed into one another by external influ- 
 ences, or remain fixed so long as they are bred in, and 
 change only when breeds are crossed. One thing is 
 certain. As men are tall and short, dolicho- and 
 brachycephalic, strong and weak in muscular, so there 
 are men who think slowly and men who think rapidly; 
 
 ' J. J. Rousseau, " Discours sur I'origine et les fondements de 
 I'inegalite parmi les hommes " : "I conceive . . . two kinds of in- 
 equality: one which I call natural or physical, because it is estab- 
 lished by nature, and consists in the difiFerence of age, health, bodily 
 strength, and mental and spiritual qualities; another, which may be 
 called moral or political inequality, because it depends upon a sort 
 of convention, and has been established, or at least authorized, by 
 the consent of men." 
 
264 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 men in whom attention is fugitive, and men in whom 
 it is sustained; men whose character is vacillating, and 
 men who are firm ; men in whom will is slack, and men 
 in whom it is powerful. These characteristics are in- 
 dubitably the expression of the chemical composition 
 of the living protoplasm of the cell, which varies be- 
 tween man and man, species and species. 
 
 Observation establishes the existence in man of cer- 
 tain qualities which, in their main outlines, apart from 
 minor details, are reproduced with sufficient frequency 
 to allow a line to be drawn marking the average level 
 of development, above which only a small minority rise 
 at all, and only exceptional cases by any considerable 
 extent. Let us select from the crowd any individual 
 at random, a man who is in no sense outstanding, neither 
 above nor beneath the normal level, and examine him 
 as we should an average specimen of any other species 
 of which we wished to form an idea. This man, whom 
 I should like, in spite of the ill-repute into which the 
 word has fallen through incautious use, to call normal, 
 is in temperament and character the outcome of natural 
 and Inherited tendencies. The content of his conscious- 
 ness Is largely the product of education, of which the 
 alms and methods have been determined by society and 
 the State. Primitive man's whole knowledge of the 
 world must have rested on his own perception and 
 observation, however limited that may have been: it 
 was based upon personal experience, went back to actual 
 Impressions, and was transformed by him to an inner 
 vision. In a state of civilization the normal man owes 
 the smallest part of his Ideas and judgments to the im- 
 pressions made by his own senses, and the mode in 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 265 
 
 which they are developed by his own thought. For 
 the greater part they come to him, as written and spoken 
 symbols through the writing and speech of others, and 
 remain throughout his life mere sounds and signs, that 
 are either associated with no view at all, or with one 
 quite at variance with reality. A stream of words and 
 combinations pours in upon him from language, inter- 
 course, school, newspapers, and books, and some of 
 them remain in his memory as formulae. If he is pro- 
 vided with a good supply of such formulae, and can 
 produce one on any occasion that requires it, he passes 
 in his own estimation and that of his fellows as a cul- 
 tivated man. But his repetition of formulae is mere 
 psittacism, and his word-knowledge has nothing to do 
 with real knowledge. His consciousness contains a tiny 
 kernel of experience shrouded as often as not in a vast 
 fog of words. 
 
 Observation sharpens the sense of reality, and accus- 
 toms the consciousness to examine its ideas and criticize 
 the elements of perception of which they are composed. 
 It at once perceives the incompatibility between ideas 
 combined in a judgment, and dismisses as absurd one 
 composed of incompatible or mutually exclusive ideas. 
 
 But, on the contrary, when the consciousness, instead 
 of forming judgments from its own sense perceptions, 
 accepts them ready-made in verbal form from other 
 men, there is nothing to warn it of their meaningless- 
 ness. Words can be joined together to form a sen- 
 tence, even if they express the impossible, and unless 
 the written or spoken symbol is translated into an idea, 
 the impossibility escapes the consciousness. Now, the 
 ordinary man seldom translates his words into ideas, 
 
266 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 or only very partially. One repeats a judgment from 
 another, parrot-wise, a judgment to which no thought 
 is attached. He becomes so much accustomed to using 
 abstractions, whose content at the best is casual and 
 arbitrary, that his consciousness ceases to mirror the 
 actual world at all. The normal man neither observes 
 nor examines. He repeats mechanically what he has 
 heard said. He is not critical: he is credulous. 
 
 The capacity for attention is, as a rule, weakly de- 
 veloped. Even the natural attention, aroused and main- 
 tained by some immediate organic interest, some im- 
 pulse, desire, or passion, soon wearies, and the artificial 
 attention that lacks any such stimulus is still earlier 
 exhausted. Consciousness in the normal man is a mere 
 corridor, through which streams a rapid tide of ideas, 
 seldom pausing to place themselves so that they stand 
 out distinctly, maintain their hold, or calls up across 
 the threshold of consciousness the recollections whose 
 association might complete them. The result of in- 
 sufficient attention is that the immediate perceptions 
 remain isolated and fragmentary. Mere word-images, 
 that need have no real content at all, become combined 
 with sense perceptions to form ideas. False judgments 
 are thus formed, which are compelled by the poverty 
 and incompleteness of their associations to confine them- 
 selves to what is immediately given, without being able 
 to trace its proximate and ultimate causes or its imme- 
 diate and, remote effects. Thus, the normal man can 
 see no further into the connection of phenomena than 
 their concrete and temporal aspect, while he is unable 
 to anticipate the future, even in so far as it is conditioned 
 by the present. His knowledge is strictly limited. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 267 
 
 His petty and distorted picture of the world is almost 
 entirely out of touch with reality, because it is composed 
 to a very small extent of perceptions, and to a much 
 larger one of word-images, fantastically interpreted, 
 and of the products of a roving imagination. His 
 adaptation, for which consciousness exists, is extremely 
 defective. It leaves him defenceless against dangers 
 which he does not notice or whose cause he cannot un- 
 derstand, poor in the face of uncomprehended possi- 
 bilities which might enrich his life could he but grasp 
 them. 
 
 Consciousness strives, after the measure of its capac- 
 ity, to lighten the heavy task of adaptation. The 
 method at its disposal is habit. Recurring perceptions, 
 however casually or incompletely repeated, will start the 
 whole train of mental operations which was initiated 
 when they were first attentively and completely observed. 
 Without any fresh effort of thought or will, they 
 provoke the corresponding ideas, judgments, and acts. 
 All these activities are so organized in the brain that 
 one calls up the other, and the organism responds, 
 without fatigue, uncertainty, or hesitation, to the exist- 
 ing stimulus with the appropriate reaction. When the 
 habitual responses of consciousness to impression are 
 fully organized, the behaviour of the individual be- 
 comes instinctive, and his actions automatic. They do 
 not, indeed, take place entirely without activity on the 
 part of the consciousness, but it is wholly freed from 
 anything painful in the effort of thought, judgment, 
 or will. 
 
 It has been established by European observers that 
 negro children possess a lively comprehension and quick 
 
268 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 intelligence, and do not, when at school, fall behind 
 whites of the same age. This apparent equality of 
 endowment lasts up to a certain age, generally contem- 
 poraneous with puberty. Then a sort of numbness 
 supervenes. The little blacks can no longer follow the 
 instruction. They become incapable of receiving new 
 ideas, and fail, even if they have the will and make 
 the effort, to rise above the stage at which they have 
 arrived. This phenomenon has only been found 
 among negroes, because it has only been looked for 
 there. Its application is, however, not confined to the 
 black race, but extends to the whole human species, 
 without distinction of colour. The intellectual devel- 
 opment of the average man is not co-extensive with his 
 life. It soon ceases, and as a rule, as in the case of 
 negro children, with sexual adolescence. 
 
 Youthful man is liberally endowed with thirst for 
 knowledge or curiosity. New impressions give him 
 pleasure, and he seeks for them. He readily responds 
 to stimuli, assimilates thoughts, is seldom obstinately 
 fixed in his ideas, soon makes himself at home wherever 
 he may be, and cleverly accommodates himself to 
 change. However, even at this stage of youthful plia- 
 bility he finds it more agreeable, because less trouble- 
 some, to imitate foreign copies than to Invent rules 
 for himself, to repeat what he has been told than to 
 win personal knowledge by experience. But Imitation 
 comes easily and readily to him. As he grows older 
 the moment comes, earlier to some, later to others, when 
 the mind loses its easy pliability, and the consciousness, 
 so to speak, congeals to some extent. The desire for 
 knowledge gives place to dulness. Man avoids any 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 269 
 
 new experiences that penetrate below the surface. His 
 observation becomes cursory and superficial. He dis- 
 regards everything unusual ; he neither notices nor heeds 
 it unless it is painfully forced upon his attention. He 
 is set against new methods of thought; he dislikes a 
 strange circle in which he has to watch the lie of the 
 land and find his own way about. He is only happy 
 when following the well-worn path of every day, along 
 which he could go in his sleep, or with his eyes shut, 
 so well does he know it and the goal to which it leads. 
 He cannot be brought to change his mind. He sticks 
 to his ideas, even when they have been proved to be 
 errors. He struggles even against imitation, if the 
 copy be new. He will only repeat himself. He adapts 
 himself to changed conditions of life slowly and in- 
 completely, if at all. He is aware that his organization 
 is no longer equal to the task of dissolving the stereo- 
 typed combinations in his brain and forming new asso- 
 ciations, and enters upon it very timidly. The normal 
 man's hatred for anything new, what Lombroso calls 
 his misoneism, is a protective instinct, based upon bio- 
 logical reasons. It is a form of a protection against 
 harm. The man whose brain is petrified is right in 
 dreading anything new. It makes demands which he 
 could not meet. He prefers the often incredible misery 
 or even acute suffering to which he is accustomed to 
 the effort involved in freeing himself from a habit and 
 building up the new disposition that promises to relieve 
 or rid him of his pain. 
 
 Such is the normal man. His will is of moderate - 
 force and endurance, and therefore his attention is soon 
 fatigued, and cannot remain long at its full on one point. 
 
270 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 His perceptions in consequence are superficial and 
 fragmentary. He completes them arbitrarily by the 
 addition of recollections, more or less suitable, and 
 ideas, more or less analogous. The content of his con- 
 sciousness is meagre, and includes a little reality, a good 
 deal of illusion, and a number of purely verbal symbols 
 that possess for him no real meaning. His thought 
 is not energetic enough to carry to its logical conclusion, 
 its appropriate judgment, knowledge, or action any train 
 of ideas that is of importance to him at a given moment, 
 or assure it, when so employed, the sole possession of 
 consciousness by keeping away the perpetual stream of 
 ideas aroused by changing sense impressions, bodily sen- 
 sations, and accidental associations. Rather he prefers 
 to saunter along the easy path of semi-conscious reverie, 
 that needs no concentration and attention, no effort of 
 any kind, and leads to no clearness of view, no knowl- 
 edge, no serviceable expression of will. He cannot 
 comprehend the connection of phenomena, or trace even 
 a few stages in their near and remote causes and their 
 necessary effects. Within his own consciousness he 
 cannot differentiate a reflection of the truth from an 
 addition of the imagination. He is happy only when 
 following a routine, and shrinks instinctively from the 
 unknown, with Its demands on attention, observation, 
 rational interpretation, and personal judgment, action, 
 and resolution. Although the species has existed for 
 millions of years, man's power of adaptation is but 
 very moderately developed, and in the course of the 
 struggle to maintain himself against unfriendly nature 
 he has done no more than acquire a few useful apti- 
 tudes, which he hastens to employ, with the least pos- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 271 
 
 sible exertion, by organizing them as habits. The con- 
 ditions of his life demand that he should be ever on the 
 war-path against nature, but he evades the encounter 
 whenever he can by following a routine which consists 
 in a dubious peace or at least an armistice with his 
 hostile environment. 
 
 Above this average level there rises a minority more 
 highly developed and more efficient. The superior 
 man has a more perfect brain. The biochemical proc- 
 esses of its cell plasm are more energetic, and the brain 
 itself retains plasticity much longer, and in exceptional 
 cases even unto extreme old age. The consequences of 
 these anatomical and physiological premises are mo- 
 mentous. The temperament of the superior man is 
 vital, his character is firm. His feelings are strong, 
 and his will powerful and sustained. He acts, there- 
 fore, with decision and energy. His attention is not 
 easily fatigued. No distractions avail to divert it. 
 He is thus a keen observer of the aspects of reality 
 that are of importance for himself. His inhibitions 
 are swift and sure, and his Instincts completely subject 
 to his will. His will, guided by his judgment, restrains 
 automatism within narrow bounds, or suppresses it alto- 
 gether. Instead of allowing himself to be enslaved 
 to the convenience of habit, he adapts himself to every 
 modification of his environment. His reactions are not 
 mechanical. Every change elicits a new, appropriate 
 response. Perhaps his most striking peculiarity, and 
 the real cause of his superiority to the average man, 
 is the feeling for the concrete which Is the result of his 
 faculty of sustained and concentrated attention. 
 
 I must dwell for a little on this point. We are accus- 
 
272 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tomed to regard the power of abstraction as the peculiar 
 glory of human thought, which we conceive to be 
 superior to that of animals, limited as it is to the con- 
 crete, and incapable of general concepts. This is, how- 
 ever, probably an error in which philosophy has for 
 centuries been involved, and from which we should have 
 the courage to free ourselves. Abstraction is, of all 
 mental processes, the most delicate and uncertain. In 
 reality, phenomena follow one another in space and 
 time, and no two are ever identical. Our perception 
 becomes accustomed to neglect the less striking differ- 
 ences between them, and to dwell on the striking points 
 of resemblance; so gradually, we begin to regard the 
 resemblances as essential, and the differences as acces- 
 sory, and thus, on this basis of resemblance, we com- 
 bine all individual concrete phenomena in a single idea. 
 This synthetic idea is an abstraction. It is arrived at 
 in the same way as the composite photography of 
 Galton and Spencer, and has the same significance. It 
 is well known that Galton got his pictures by placing 
 before the photographic lens a number of photographs 
 of equal size, one after another, under the same con- 
 ditions as to exposure, distance, and light. The sensi- 
 tive plate took an equal impression of each. Features 
 common to some or all the photographs coipbined in the 
 negative, and came out strongly. Those which ap- 
 peared more rarely or only once came less prominently 
 or not at all. The finished portrait is the sum of the 
 individual likenesses. It has a distant resemblance to 
 them all without being like any. It is an ideal scheme 
 of all the photographs that composed it, but in no sense 
 an aspect of the real. Galton promised himself weighty 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 273 
 
 results from his method. It could not produce them, 
 for it permits the synthesis of all possible phenomena 
 possessing any feature in common, without stipulating 
 that this feature should be essential to any. A synthe- 
 sis uniting components thus arbitrarily selected is a piece 
 of foolery that may be amusing, but tells us nothing 
 worth knowing about the component parts. 
 
 In the same way, abstraction unites certain individual 
 features belonging to a series of concrete phenomena — f 
 features that need only be the most obvious, not the 
 most important. Abstraction thus arises from an un- 
 conscious selection from among the elements of any 
 phenomenon, by retaining this and neglecting that. It 
 is an interpretation: it involves a preconceived opinion 
 about the phenomenon, a judgment as to what is and 
 what is not important. It imposes upon perception 
 subjective requirements that must twist and mutilate it, 
 and are an incessant source of errors. 
 
 Biologically, abstract thought is necessary to spare 
 the brain much tedious labour, and permit it to acquire 
 from isolated perceptions a connected image of the 
 world possessing rational significance. But this advan- 
 tage is obtained at the cost of grave disadvantages. 
 Abstract thought is certainly a pleasing relief from the 
 concentrated attention involved in the effort to observe 
 and comprehend reality, but it loses in reliability what 
 it gains in ease. It departs too easily from the concrete 
 phenomenon, which alone possesses objective truth, and 
 creates subjective illusion in the consciousness instead of 
 knowledge. The more concrete a man's thought, the 
 greater his mastery of reality. Some of the most im- 
 portant discoveries have been due to that sustained 
 
274 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 attention to the minute differences of similar phenomena 
 with which abstraction thinks to dispense. By such 
 means Ramsay found argon, neon, xenon, and helium in 
 air ; Curie and his wife extracted radium from uranium ; 
 and Javillier ^ proved that one unit of zinc, of which the 
 significance in plant life was entirely unknown, will 
 produce a hundred thousand times its own weight in 
 the Aspergillus niger. 
 
 The distrust with which abstract reasoning should 
 be regarded applies still more strongly tO' reasoning by 
 analogy or intuition. Each of these methods is a source 
 of ideas and judgments in the consciousness which it 
 takes for knowledge. They are easy, comfortable 
 methods, but they lead too often to pathless quagmires 
 of error and delusion. Analogies, like intuitions, con- 
 tain a small kernel of usefulness. When there is a 
 partial resemblance between two phenomena, it is natu- 
 ral to refer this resemblance to some cause which the 
 two are supposed to have in common, and to assume 
 the existence of a connection between them closer than 
 the visible resemblance itself. In this way the known 
 may be the key to the unknown, and analogy may ac- 
 quire a heuristic value. But the greatest care must be 
 taken in the use of analogies. It must always be re- 
 membered that the dissimilarities of the phenomena 
 have their causes as well as the similarities; that the 
 difference between them and the fact that they are not 
 related is proved as surely by the one set of character- 
 istics as relationship can be by the other; and that it is 
 a logical error to identify phenomena on the ground of 
 
 ' Javillier, " Recherches sui la presence et le role du zinc chez 
 les plantes," Paris, 1908. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 275 
 
 certain resemblances, and overlook the simultaneous 
 existence of their differences. Moreover, it is in all 
 cases necessary to establish epistemologically that the 
 resemblance itself is not a mere deceptive appearance, 
 a subjective arrangement, amplification, and interpreta- 
 tion of phenomena based upon our habit of thought, 
 and proceeding from inaccurate observation. If two 
 phenomena appear to us to be similar because our ob- 
 servation has in each case been incorrect, or because in 
 each case we have introduced, from our own conscious- 
 ness, a subjective trait foreign to both, which is the 
 sole cause of their apparent similarity, we start from 
 an error; and we arrive at an error if we draw any 
 inference from one phenomenon to the other which is 
 based upon a resemblance which has no objective ex- 
 istence. Intuition, too, can serve as a guide ; for, after 
 aU, the sole phenomenon in the world that is seen from 
 within is our own consciousness. We surprise move- 
 ments in it that we can perceive nowhere else, and which 
 must remain eternally unknown to us everywhere else. 
 Could we, then, but connect the movements detected 
 in our consciousness with conditions and processes out- 
 side ourselves, we might obtain a knowledge of them 
 such as could be got in no other way. The great danger 
 is that it is seldom possible to examine the relation 
 between our intuitions, the strictly subjective move- 
 ments of our consciousness, and any objective proc- 
 ess in the world, and therefore we can never know 
 with certainty the objective worth of our subjective 
 intuitions. 
 
 The superior man is marked by realism. He hardly 
 knows the flattering delight of day-dreams. His fancy 
 
276 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 does not soar into cloudy regions, into a world remote 
 from space and time. His thought does not occupy 
 itself with any phantasmagoria of words, or with ab- 
 stractions which, being devoid of any concrete content, 
 can float aloft above the real. No feature of the phe- 
 nomenon appears unworthy of his attention; he lets 
 none escape him; he tries to understand or perceive 
 them all. He would rather admit the existence of 
 gaps in his knowledge than hide them by meaningless 
 words or arbitrary fancies. With careful assurance 
 he traces the concrete event back to its causes, and 
 thence infers the effects to which he can thus advan- 
 tageously adapt himself in advance. Thus he faces 
 nature like a skilful duellist who knows his opponent's 
 methods of fence, foresees and easily parries his strokes; 
 and in the battle of life he is as superior to the aver- 
 age man, whose thinking is made up of abstraction 
 and words without ideas, as an armed man with 
 the use of his eyes is to an unarmed man who is 
 blind. 
 
 It is, of course, understood that the species does not 
 really consist of two sharply distinguished races — the 
 average man, whose attention wanders, and the superior 
 man, in whom it is sustained. Between these two there 
 are innumerable transition stages, and the differences 
 only become striking when we take representatives 
 standing at the farther ends of the scale. The superior 
 man rises high above the average in proportion as his 
 attention, the first manifestation of the inherent energy 
 of his will, is concentrated and sustained, his conscious- 
 ness filled by concrete images, his judgment in close 
 touch with reality: as he succeeds, on the one hand, in 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 277 
 
 tracing phenomena back to their causes and in foresee- 
 ing their effects, and, on the other, in obtaining a rela- 
 tively complete comprehension of the determining fac- 
 tors in their development and mutual interaction — in 
 proportion as, instead of stereotyping his associa- 
 tions into fixed habits, he retains that capacity of 
 silent adaptation to all the modifications of the 
 external world which carries him on to ever new 
 resolves, and to the ever more forcible realization in 
 action. 
 
 These characteristics mark out the superior man as 
 master. He has what Hobbes calls " the natural 
 mastery of force — that is, of certain individuals, 
 impelled to command by the constitution of their 
 brain." 
 
 He cannot refuse the part, even if he would; it is 
 imposed upon him. He could only escape it if he lived, 
 like Robinson Crusoe or Timon of Athens, in isolation, 
 solitary and remote from his fellow-men, or among 
 individuals of his own type with equal natural endow- 
 ments — a condition seldom realized, since the type only 
 appears among the crowd and in isolated instances as 
 a rare exception. Average mankind may scorn the 
 thinker and the dreamer, they may entirely fail to 
 understand the profound speculations of the philosopher 
 or the creations of the artistic imagination, but they 
 at once recognize the man of will and judgment, whose 
 will reacts to every new phenomenon with a new reso- 
 lution, and bow their heads before him. If in a posi- 
 tion that requires new adaptation they discover among 
 them a man who knows how to command, they are 
 happy to obey him. They are so clearly aware of their 
 
278 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 own helplessness in the midst of constant change and 
 perpetual flux, of their want of knowledge, the slowness 
 and difficulty with whi<:h they find their way about, that 
 they turn eagerly and follow the man who goes through 
 the world and life with the certain tread of an old 
 traveller. His directions, his commands, are a welcome 
 relief from the necessity of forming their own judg- 
 ments and carrying them out into act. Anyone who 
 spares them this most troublesome form of cerebral 
 activity is blessed by them as a saviour. Any physical 
 effort, deprivation, hardship, or danger the commander 
 may impose upon them seems lighter and easier to bear 
 than the toil of self-determination, of making up their 
 own minds, and the dread of having to find their way 
 about the world without a guide. Thus the man of 
 action, who issues commands with absolute decision, 
 and In which no trace of doubt, delay, or hesitation Is 
 discernible, masters the average man at the first glance, 
 so to speak. Men have an absolute flair for him ; they 
 flee to him. This is seen In every sphere, narrow and 
 wide — in families, clubs, unions, corporations, societies 
 great and small. AU hasten to cast responsibility upon 
 anyone who Is willing to assume it. All are ready to 
 follow anyone who resolutely takes the lead. It Is only 
 necessary to step boldly forward to be recognized as 
 leader. The crowd do not inquire as to his objects; 
 they believe he knows, and that Is enough for them. 
 They will follow him Into morasses and up to precipices. 
 No doubt as to the wisdom of their trust is awakened 
 In them, even when they are being drowned and 
 smothered, or dashed in pieces against the rocks. If 
 death Itself comes, and they reflect upon its cause at 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 279 
 
 all, it seems to them the result of unlucky chance, to 
 which they are sacrificed by no fault of their leaders. 
 The wilder and more boundless the claims of a com- 
 mander, the greater the wonder and enthusiasm of his 
 followers. Immeasurable and incomprehensible aims 
 seem to them a special proof of his greatness. They 
 resent making small sacrifices ; but if the man they have 
 recognized as their master demand the last and utter- 
 most, they perform them with a sort of joy in which 
 there mingles a pride in the greatness of their own 
 achievement, admiration of selves in performing it, and 
 thankful devotion to the man who has raised them to 
 such a level of superhuman exertion. The average 
 man can often be made to do things that he would never 
 have carried out, never even have dared to dream of, 
 things that the world is not wholly wrong in placing to 
 the score of the ruthless commander, rather than of the 
 obedient instrument. 
 
 To the average man the man of will and deeds ap- 
 pears as a creature of a superior mould, outwardly 
 near, but inwardly impenetrably remote; trusted as an 
 equal, but incomprehensible as a God; a mysterious fire 
 from which fascination and terror radiate. He feels 
 towards him as his primitive ancestors felt in the pres- 
 ence of the fearsome powers of nature and the Insoluble 
 riddle of the world — horror, admiration, and an irre- 
 sistible impulse to humiliate himself and bow his head 
 in the dust before him. Hero-worship is a primitive 
 instinct in the human soul, and grows from the same 
 soil as religion; it is a form of religion, a deification 
 of that natural force before which man feels himself 
 pitiably small and strengthless. Every great man of 
 
28o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 will and deeds creates a religion, without wishing to 
 do so — a religion of which he is the God. He is a 
 God to those who submit to the compulsion of his will. 
 In thankful submission they accept the fate that he 
 imposes on them. Tyrants, conquerors, and com- 
 manders have aroused enthusiastic devotion in their 
 followers. They have accepted with ecstatic joy all 
 the evils laid upon them by their idols. The average 
 man naturally approaches the man who is sure of him- 
 self and knows how to command with folded hands and 
 bended knees. He does not distinguish between differ- 
 ent sources of energy of will. The madman, whose 
 ruthless will, checked by no restraints, is morbidly stim- 
 ulated to the point of delirium, will, so long as his 
 madness does not take a form in which it is easily 
 recognized by the ignorant, and sometimes even then, 
 rouse the same enthusiastic devotion and attract the 
 same fanatical partisans as the sanest and most har- 
 monious genius. One need only recall the examples of 
 John of Leyden, Charles XII. of Sweden, or the Argen- 
 tine dictator Rosas. Only the unconquerable resistance 
 of reality ^t last opened the eyes of some of the ardent 
 worshippers, and enabled them to judge whether their 
 idol had been directed by rational judgments or the 
 visions of madness. 
 
 The eager readiness of the crowd to submit to his 
 commands inevitably rouses in the superior man the 
 conviction that he has a natural right to use them for 
 his own ends. The only consideration that the crowd 
 demands or receives at his hands is careful and econom- 
 ical usage of a valuable piece of property. At the 
 most, he refrains from exhausting the soil, or killing 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 281 
 
 prematurely the hen that lays the golden eggs. The 
 whole bent of the mind of the superior man who is 
 born to command is egoistic, not altruistic. His will 
 is directed to his own advantage, not to that of the 
 crowd. Any good that accrues to them does so as the 
 by-product of acts solely directed to the purpose of satis- 
 fying his own needs. The celebration of conquerors 
 as benefactors, and the devotion often accorded to them 
 by the crowd, is a form of self-complacent anthro- 
 pomorphism, like the attribution to the sun, which sus- 
 tains all life on earth, of a conscious desire to gratify 
 mankind with light and warmth. Thus, the gratitude 
 of the crowd transfers its own sentiments to the mind of 
 the great man, whose plans and actions are as little 
 directed to their benefit as is the energy with which the 
 sun irradiates the earth. When Augustus gave peace 
 to the Roman world; when Charlemagne spread in- 
 struction and superintended law and government by his 
 missi dominici; when Henry IV. wished that every sub- 
 ject might have a fowl in his pot on Sunday; when 
 Frederick the Great called himself the first servant of 
 the State; and when Alexander II. emancipated the 
 serfs, the object they all had before them was in every 
 case the same — to make their own rule and command 
 easier and more productive, and therefore more pleas- 
 ant to themselves, by the perfection of their instrument, 
 the State, and its institutions, and by preventing con- 
 tumacy and increasing productivity on the part of the 
 crowd — in a word, by behaving like good landlords 
 who manure and weed their fields. 
 
 No doubt there exist, side by side with the men of 
 will and deeds, men whose hearts are full of love for 
 
282 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the world and dreams of universal happiness, whose 
 thoughts and actions are not directed by their own 
 egoism, but by the good of humanity as a whole, and 
 who find their highest satisfaction in sacrificing them- 
 selves for their fellow-men. It is painful to have to 
 judge these radiant figures, who must attract the most 
 profound love and admiration in all who behold them, 
 by the dry light of reason; but psychological analysis 
 must eschew sensibility, and no piety should compromise 
 Its results. There is something unnatural about a ten- 
 derness devoted, not to definite individuals, but to an 
 aggregate of unknown persons — an abstraction without 
 personality. Men whdse actions are animated by such 
 a feeling as this fall within the category of the abnor- 
 mal; they are mystics whose emotions are morbid and 
 their instincts more or less perverted. They sway be- 
 tween flight from the world and a-fierce desire to redeem 
 it by their blood. They are saints, reformers, revolu- 
 tionaries. They found holy orders, preach penance, 
 and create constitutions ; in more recent times they found 
 societies and speak in the streets and parks ; but they 
 also throw bombs and set conspiracies on foot. We 
 are only speaking of the genuine protagonist of the 
 gospel of brotherly love, whose passionate altruism is 
 alloyed by no conscious admixture of self. It is un- 
 necessary to point, out that they find clever imitators, 
 who gratify their greedy vanity or other sordid desires 
 behind the mask of love of mankind; such practised 
 cheats are outside our present scope. It is very rare 
 for the specific emotionalism, the organic premise of 
 self-forgetful altruism, to be combined with attention, 
 with a sense of reality, and with judgment. The eager 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 283 
 
 friend of man hardly ever knows the real needs of 
 mankind as a whole, or of the greater part of it; he will 
 sacrifice his whole life in the struggle to remove evils 
 that, though widespread, are incapable of cure, or that 
 occur seldom, and cause distress to very few. It is 
 much to have helped even these few without thought 
 of self. As a rule, however, the activity of enthusiastic 
 philanthropists is not directed to the removal of evils so 
 much as the provision of new possibilities of joy for 
 mankind as a whole. They strive to satisfy desires 
 felt by hardly anyone but themselves, which they have 
 observed, not in their fellow-men, whose benefactors 
 they wish to be, but in their own abnormal natures. 
 For one Dunant, who founded the Red Cross Order, 
 one PlimsoU, who put an end to the cold-blooded mur- 
 dering of sailors by sending them out in vessels that, 
 though heavily insured, were quite unseaworthy, one 
 founder of vacation schools, there are hundreds of 
 founders of Bible societies, missionary unions, ethical 
 movements, committees for decorating balconies and 
 window-boxes with flowers, associations for the aboli- 
 tion of the lifting of the hat, etc. — societies, that is, 
 of no possible utility save to their founders and a few ■ 
 persons of like mind. 
 
 Great altruists have no effective influence on the 
 average man. No crowd submits to their will. They 
 are not capable of rousing swarms of followers to ex- 
 ertion or extracting services from them. Their 
 thoughts and ideas become powerful only when they 
 are appropriated by the daring selfishness of some 
 egoist, who uses any means to gain his ends. Thus 
 hardened politicians, whose aims are directed to the 
 
284 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 interest of a ruling class, will carry out the schemes of 
 insurance against accidents and the Old Age Pension 
 conceived by the disinterested friends of the expro- 
 priated. 
 
 Compelled to adapt itself to unfavourable conditions 
 or to succumb, the species has developed its nerve- 
 centres until the brain has become capable of artificial 
 attention, of knowledge, of correct inferences as to 
 causes and effects, and of the conception and execution 
 of extraordinarily complicated actions directed by aims 
 that are present, not in a concrete, but an imagined 
 form. This faculty is present to a very different degree 
 in different individuals. The possession of a greater 
 supply of the associations acquired by attention or mem- 
 ory, more swiftness and more accuracy in combination 
 and separation of ideas, a more powerful control of 
 the will over the motor stimuli — that is, a higher general 
 level of energy in the nerve-cells — gives to the favoured 
 individual a superiority over those who do not possess 
 these faculties in the same degree, and inevitably makes 
 him their master. 
 
 Such are the psychological premises of all those social 
 relations of men whose establishment, maintenance, de- 
 velopment, and destruction determine the course of his- 
 tory: on the one hand a minority of superior, on the 
 other a majority of average, men. The former under- 
 stand, by virtue of their sense of reality, their correct 
 knowledge of cause and effect, and their penetration into 
 the regular connection of phenomena, that the easiest 
 and most profitable mode of adaptation for them is to 
 use, and, if necessary, to abuse, other men for their 
 own ends — that is, the method of ruthless exploitation. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 285 
 
 energetic parasitism. They possess the ability and the 
 strength of will to subdue the herd to their service by 
 flattery, deception, or command, as one or the other 
 method promises the best result.^ The latter — ^the 
 average men — submit consciously or unconsciously to 
 their superiors, and make efforts, often amounting to 
 self-sacrifice, to insure for them the most favourable 
 conditions of existence; their adaptation consists in 
 obedience to those who think, will, and decide for them, 
 who perform those highest and finest functions of the 
 brain for which they are themselves much less per- 
 fectly organized. 
 
 These relations, between the superior man who com- 
 mands and takes and the average man who submits and 
 gives, appear in a typically simple and luminous form 
 only under primitive conditions. In the beginning, 
 superiority must have taken the form of greater mus- 
 cular strength or skill and greater intrepidity. Then 
 the superior man's title to command had to be proved 
 with fist and club, by practised wrestling, hurling, and 
 shooting, bold attack, and successful stratagem; he had 
 to subdue the average man to his will by immediate 
 personal compulsion, later by the reputation for in- 
 vincibility. At a rather more advanced stage of de- 
 velopment the superior man no longer subdued the 
 average man by beating or strangling him, but by the 
 moral influence of attractive promises to be redeemed 
 at a distant date, terrible suggestions of supernatural 
 power — in a word, by illusions, which called up feelings 
 of pleasure and pain, and enslaved him by means of hope 
 
 ' Machiavelli, "The Prince": "The world must be governed by 
 force or fraud." 
 
286 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 or fear.^ In this phase the superior man is not a terrible 
 warrior, but a priest, magician, prophet, or demagogue. 
 
 As development proceeded, the family group ex- 
 panded to a race, a people, and society was formed, 
 conditions became more complex, and the influence of 
 the superior man upon the average, instead of being 
 effected direct from man to man, proceeded indirectly, 
 through instruments. T^ese instruments are traditions 
 and institutions, which, again, are but the petrified will 
 of former superior men. The law of least effort regu- 
 lates the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The 
 strong man wishes to economize effort as much as 
 possible, even in his parasitism. His method is to em- 
 ploy association of ideas and habit in the minds of 
 those whom he exploits. He influences the former by 
 symbols ; the latter enables him to build up and utilize 
 permanent institutions which make and keep the crowd 
 subservient automatically, and, 3S a rule, without any 
 exertion on his part. 
 
 Symbols take the place of the tangible methods of 
 violence, and call into the consciousness, by association, 
 the ideas connected with them. When the warrior has 
 brandished his club long enough with murderous re- 
 sults, he finds a symbolic weapon adequate to bring to 
 the recollection of the crowd the bloody deeds accom- 
 plished by the actual brand. Thus the battle-axe be- 
 comes the staff of office found among the oldest pre- 
 historic implements; thus the head-dress, which dis- 
 tinguishes the mightiest warrior in battle, to inspire 
 
 ' For the importance of the part played by illusion in history, 
 compare, among others, Georg Adler, " The Significance of Illusions 
 in Political and Social Life," Berlin, 1907. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 287 
 
 terror in the foe, becomes the crown ; and thus the ruler 
 exacts from the subservient crowd marks of honour 
 symbolic of the unconditional submission of the van- 
 quished. Obeisance, bending of the knee, prostration, 
 folding or raising of the hands, are all postures in which 
 the vanquished awaits,, unarmed, the death-stroke of 
 the victor, or the mercy which only his pity can conceive. 
 Since the appeal of the magician and the priest is essen- 
 tially to the imagination of the crowd, he has no 
 weapons; he needs symbols only, and these symbols are 
 more numerous, and play a more important part in 
 religion and culture than in the State. Since the differ- 
 ence between the superior and the average man is a 
 difference of degree or quantity, not of substance, and 
 since their intellectual life proceeds according to the 
 same rules, only with a varying degree of energy, it is 
 not surprising that in time the symbols have a powerful 
 effect on the ruler as well as on the ruled, and call up 
 trains of associated ideas in the former which they were 
 intended to arouse only in the latter. 
 
 The ruler is preserved, by that sense of reality which 
 we have learned to regard as his most salient character- 
 istic, from connecting with the external signs belonging 
 to the supreme power, with the lofty dignitaries of 
 State and of the ruling class, the vague ideas of trem- 
 bling veneration and the strong emotions accompanying 
 them — emotions which they were intended to evoke in 
 the subject; from valuing the symbols of subjection 
 almost as highly as the very practical and useful dues 
 that accrue from it. The primitive hero and conqueror 
 swings his club, and the threatening gesture provides 
 him with herds, wives, slaves, hunting-grounds, or what- 
 
288 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ever else he wants. The civilized ruler appears with 
 crown and sceptre, and is greeted with a homage that, 
 though purely symbolic, gives him hardly less pleasure 
 than the Civil List, not because homage premises the 
 punctual payment of the Civil List, but because it gives 
 him pleasure in itself. Kings respect the orders and 
 titles that they themselves confer almost as much as do 
 those upon whom they are conferred and the crowd 
 behind them. This feeling, far from being confined to 
 kings who are remote descendants of the founder of a 
 dynasty, and never could have risen to the highest place 
 by the force of their own right arm or their own brain, 
 is found even in men like Napoleon, who are the 
 authors of their own greatness. 
 
 We have seen that all civil institutions spring from 
 the parasitic desire on the part of a man of force to 
 secure his exploitation of the many. This is the origin 
 of retainers, bodyguards, a warrior caste, a privileged 
 or noble class, regular taxation, and the machinery for 
 carrying it out; legal, educational, and commercial 
 arrangements, etc. All these institutions survive their 
 creators, and the crowd which finds itself born into 
 them, and ignorant of any state of things without them, 
 becomes so completely accommodated to them, both 
 physically and mentally, that it feels them an inseparable 
 part of its conception of the world, which it could 
 not imagine without them. This habit on the part of 
 the crowd of living In and with the institutions into 
 which it has been born will long afford them a secure, 
 almost unassailable position. The continued existence 
 of any institutions which have already existed for a 
 certain space of time is secured by the early stage at 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 289 
 
 which habits become firmly fixed in the average man, 
 the misoneistic horror with which he regards any dis- 
 turbance of these habits, and the impenetrable obsti- 
 nacy with which he opposes any attempt to change 
 them. Without any knowledge of the psychological 
 mechanism of this phenomenon of adaptation, organ- 
 ized association, or misoneism, Aristotle perceived the 
 fact empirically, from observation of reality, and ex- 
 pressed it clearly in the words " To enforce obedience 
 law needs only the force of habit." ^ 
 
 The multitude have no historical sense; that has 
 already been indicated. They know nothing and care 
 nothing about the origin of things. It follows, from 
 their incapacity to detect underlying connections or to 
 trace back the causes and effects of phenomena beyond 
 a certain distance, that all existing institutions appear to 
 them as something given, whose origin is lost, like that 
 of humanity, of the earth, of nature itself, in the mys- 
 terious unknown. They may complain of them as they 
 do of the cold in winter, its hail and its storms, but they 
 accept them as they accept everything immutable. The 
 obscurity of their origin gives them' a mystic character, 
 with which religious emotions are connected by the 
 psychic process of analogy. Priests, who are, as a rule, 
 sedulous servants of the government, rarely its oppo- 
 nents, can easily describe existing institutions as or- 
 dained by God, invest them with a supernatural sanc- 
 tion, and demand that they should be loved and rever- 
 enced. A system of public instruction, where it exists, 
 will assist by bringing up the youth in the same views. 
 The necessity of existing institutions becomes an article 
 
 *" Politics," vol. ii., p. $• 
 
290 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of faith, which is either proclaimed as a dogma or 
 staunchly defended by specious sophistry. All the in- 
 tellectual influences to which the crowd is open unite 
 in fostering the idea that any criticism of existing in- 
 stitutions is blasphemous, stupid, ignorant, or mad, and 
 any attempt to alter or repeal them a crime against the 
 peace, security, and happiness of every individual. 
 
 The superior man reckons with the organized habits 
 of the average crowd. His egoism employs different 
 means for its satisfaction in an old, compact, and firmly 
 established State from those applicable to the simple 
 conditions of primitive barbarism. He no longer waves 
 his axe above the head of the individual whom he 
 wishes to subdue; he does not even permit armed 
 servants to spread terror before them; instead he mas- 
 ters the machinery of State, and thus acquires at a single 
 blow the .power that in an unorganized crowd could 
 only have been won by a series of acts of violence 
 directed against individuals. He disturbs the habits 
 of the multitude as little as possible; he makes them 
 useful. 
 
 The parasitic egoism of the strong man assumes the 
 most different forms, and passes, according to the de- 
 gree of energy it possesses, through every stage, from 
 the lowest desire for pleasure, through greed, vanity, 
 and ambition, to the hunger for power and that inability 
 to endure the thought of resistance, any limitation of 
 personal omnipotence, which is allied to the hypertrophy 
 of self that develops into megalomania. One is con- 
 tent with small satisfactions : he seeks to win his way to 
 political power by his pliancy and observation of the 
 idiosyncrasies of the men who are its guardians. He 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 291 
 
 is the typical opportunist. At school he acquires the 
 good graces of his teacher by flattery and obsequious- 
 ness ; at the examination he studies the little preferences 
 of the examiners ; when an official, he pays court to those 
 above him; by means of invitations, intrigues, and the 
 influence of women, he becomes an academician, obtains 
 titles and orders, and ends by dying as a pillar of 
 society and the State, respectable and influential, sur- 
 rounded by toadies, and envied by people in general. 
 Another looks higher: he would not receive but dis- 
 tribute honours. In an absolute monarchy he attaches 
 himself to the person of the ruler, studies him, and tries 
 to make himself indispensable to him — in other words, 
 he tries to master him and use him for the accomplish- 
 ment of his own will. Under a modern democracy he 
 comes forward at popular meetings; is at pains to ac- 
 quire an influence over the crowd and to win their votes 
 by appealing to their emotions and prejudices, by mak- 
 ing promises and juggling with illusions; at the pame 
 time he tries to force himself into the inner circles of 
 the leading people. Once in office, he continues his 
 activity until he has become a minister, party leader, or, 
 in a republic. President. Others, though these are 
 more rare, will not stop short of supreme power. 
 They do not employ, or not to any great extent, 
 the method of subservience, but rather that of force, 
 much after the fashion of primitive man — ^that of 
 mutiny, rising, military revolt, dictatorship, coup d'etat. 
 They are represented on a small scale by such men as 
 Nicola di Rienzi, Jack Cade, Masaniello; on a big 
 scale, and on the biggest, Oliver Cromwell, Washing- 
 ton, Napoleon I. and III., and Louis Kossuth. 
 
292 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 The instinct of exploitation that the man of will and 
 deeds retains enables him to display his organic superi- 
 ority in another sphere, in other fields of action, when 
 it is directed to the amassing of wealth by speculations 
 on the Stock Exchange, company promoting, the forma- 
 tion of trusts, cartels, and monopoly undertakings. 
 Mighty financiers manage average men in the same 
 way as do politicians, courtiers, and military despots. 
 They begin by conjuring up illusions and intoxicating 
 weak heads with their delights; then, as their power 
 grows, they intimidate some and rouse the cupidity 
 of the others by rewards and promises, purchase useful 
 allies by a cleverly graduated system of shares, and 
 so build up a human pyramid, on to the top of which 
 they climb over backs, shoulders, and heads. The 
 amassers of gold belong to the same family as the 
 demagogue, the party leader, and the king-maker; this 
 is not the place to enter into the psychic differences 
 between them. Member of the same family, but a 
 poor relation, an unsuccessful cousin, is the professional 
 criminal, who has to content himself with the poorest 
 and least remunerative form of exploitation, because 
 he only possesses the parasitic instinct, without the 
 intellectual equipment in himself, or the social forces 
 behind him, to enable him to satisfy it on a large scale 
 or in the grand style. 
 
 All these activities and careers conform to a single 
 type. A man who is richly endowed by nature in any 
 direction employs or misuses his superiority in order to 
 subjugate others to his will, obtain possession of the 
 fruits of their labour, or use them simply and solely 
 for his own profit or pleasure. According to the degree 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 293 
 
 and quality of his superiority, he makes them service- 
 able to himself by compulsion, fascination, illusion, or 
 gross deception. To take a few examples. The poli- 
 tician uses the parliamentary system as a ladder up 
 which he may climb from being a secretary to a mem- 
 ber, parliamentary reporter, or honorary secretary to 
 some political club, to member of a parliamentary com- 
 mittee, member of Parliament itself, party leader, and 
 finally minister. The scholar can use the organization 
 of the University or academy as a means to obtaining 
 a position and reputation Independent of the worth of 
 his scientific attainments. The financier employs the 
 mechanism of the Stock Exchange and the limited lia- 
 bility company to draw the small competences of the 
 many into his net and combine them into a vast fortune. 
 Even the criminal has arrangements at his disposal 
 which render his evil-doing less arduous, such as the 
 Mafia, the Camorra, the Mano Negra, and the unions 
 of thieves and burglars, with a far-reaching system of 
 division of labour, that exist In large towns and are 
 also international in their scope. 
 
 From the psychological point of view all Institutions 
 represent organized habits. They have been material- 
 ized by the human brain, and have no existence apart 
 from man. The superior man must therefore approach 
 men through habit, and try to turn it to his advantage. 
 He may either adapt himself to it or try to alter It. 
 The lower order of aspirant adapts himself. Rabagas 
 acquired reputation and Influence as a revolutionary, but 
 became reactionary when he attained the ministry. The 
 powerful personality alters It: Robespierre found a 
 loyal people, and taught It to convey Its king and queen 
 
294 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 to execution on a tumbril. Yet there are some habits 
 so deeply rooted and so strongly organized that no 
 individual can stand against them. Cromwell failed 
 to destroy the habit of loyalty in the English people, 
 which made the Restoration possible immediately after 
 his death. Napoleon could not overcome the habit of 
 religion in the French people, or avoid a concordat with 
 Rome. Were a negro of the highest genius to arise in 
 the United States, a Napoleon in generalship, a Cavour 
 in diplomacy, a Gladstone in eloquence, and a Bismarck 
 in strength of will, he could never attain the highest 
 position there, because the habit of race hatred would 
 ever be more powerful than his genius. In Russia to- 
 day it would be impossible for a Jew, whether he had 
 been baptized or no, to rouse a mass movement like 
 that led by Lasalle in Germany in the fifties and sixties; 
 or to rise to the premiership, as Disraeli did in England. 
 Each time that a personality endeavours to subdue 
 others to its ,will there is a clash between this will and the 
 habits opposed to it: the more deeply rooted, general, 
 and essential are their habits, the more powerful must be 
 the will that is to overcome them, until it reaches a 
 limit beyond which the power of a single will cannot 
 go. Napoleon was one of the most powerful person- 
 alities the species has hitherto produced. Yet he was 
 overcome by weak contemporaries like Alexander I., 
 Francis II., Frederick William III., and George III., 
 because they were supported by the habits of the whole 
 of Europe, with the exception of France, and could 
 demand and obtain from their peoples exertions which 
 even Napoleon's mighty intellect could not call forth. 
 It is necessary to guard against the possibility of mis- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 295 
 
 understanding. All the preceding examples show the 
 exploiter rising above his fellows in order to satisfy his 
 desires at their expense. Nothing has been said of the 
 nobler type of ambition, which strives for power and 
 influence for the sake of serving mankind, and is im- 
 pelled only by the desire of making the world better, 
 more beautiful, and happier. The reason for this ap- 
 parent omission is that the expression " superior man " 
 is used in a purely biological, not in an ethical, sense. 
 It merely represents the individual who is equipped with 
 organic energy above the average, especially in the 
 sphere of judgment and will. The superior man in this 
 sense uses his superiority selfishly for his own advantage, 
 not selflessly for the good of others. That this is so 
 is painful to anyone who seeks to see history as gov- 
 erned by a moral ideal ; but it is an observed fact which 
 admits of no exception. The selfless friends of man 
 are not opportunists. They have no ambition. They 
 are incapable of making incessant efforts to subdue the 
 many to their will. Their influence is confined to their 
 words and example. They spend their lives as settlers, 
 penitents, or teachers, like Buddha Cakya-Muni ; they 
 are crucified like Jesus, or, to take smaller instances, 
 burned like Savonarola, or hanged like John Brown, 
 the enemy of negro slavery. The influence of men who 
 wish to save their fellows is felt, as I have already 
 shown, through others — disciples, perhaps, of developed 
 will-power, who work for some reward, real or 
 imagined, earthly or hereafter; or rulers and politicians, 
 who find something in the doctrine of salvation which 
 they can use for their own selfish ends. Elaborate 
 psychological analysis would be necessary before the 
 
296 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 rare instances of the use of power by those in authority 
 for the good of their subjects could be ascribed to pure 
 altruism. Titus, " the delight of the human race," did 
 not seem so benevolent to all the people under his sway 
 as he did to the Romans. Alfred the Great was cer- 
 tainly a benefactor to his realm, but, in giving peace, 
 order, well-being, and education to his disordered State, 
 he was in the first instance working for himself. Joseph 
 II. is probably the best and most indubitable example 
 of a philanthropist on the throne. But it is very doubt- 
 ful whether his qualities were such as to have raised 
 him, by his own strength, above his fellow-men. He 
 was Emperor because born in the purple. He was 
 the inheritor, not the founder, of a dynasty. It is on a 
 materially lower plane that the altruists who combine 
 strength of will with love for their fellows are to be 
 found — St. Francis of Assisi, St. Vincent de Paul, Pea- 
 body, Dr. Barnardo, Dunant, perhaps General Booth. 
 But the men who scale the heights of power and make 
 their mark on history have been spurred on by selfish- 
 ness, and delayed by no backward glances at their 
 fellow-men. 
 
 At the lowest stage of civilization there is probably 
 little difference between the individuals composing any 
 race or horde. No one rises high above the others: 
 exploitation is confined to the family, the wife, and 
 growing children. The arrangements of life are de- 
 termined by custom — that is, by habit; such institutions 
 as there are exist, not to afford privilege to anyone, but 
 to economize effort by sparing the need for fresh de- 
 cisions; there are no leaders or rulers, or they possess 
 small dignity or power. Another case where mutual 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 297 
 
 exploitation within the race or people is impossible is 
 that of a body composed of individuals of remarkable 
 judgment and will-power, who are, to use the phrase, 
 a match for one another. Such a community is super- 
 ficially denominated a democracy; as a matter of fact, 
 it is a loose confederation of aristocrats who, impatient 
 of any overlordship, live side by side in proud and 
 jealous independence, remaining poor because each is 
 dependent on his own labour, and this in a primitive 
 State, under natural conditions, can provide the bare 
 necessities of life, but allow no one to become rich. 
 Such, according to Vico, was the condition of the 
 Quirites in the early days of Rome. History teaches 
 that this condition of things did not last long. The 
 gifted people overflowed its boundaries, first to plunder, 
 then to conquer ; it made itself master of foreign peoples 
 of less force, among whom it formed a ruling nobility, 
 and then carried out the exploitation made possible by 
 its organic superiority, first in the countries it had sub- 
 dued, then in colonies ; finally, with the help of the power 
 and riches thus acquired, in its own land upon com- 
 patriots who had been slower and less adaptable, and 
 had remained at home in poverty. 
 
 The limited extent to which the multitude are able to 
 free themselves from their habits, and direct their 
 thought and will along lines outside their organized 
 associations, not only makes it easier for the superior 
 man to master and exploit them with the aid of existing 
 institutions which they occupy and utilize ; it also renders 
 it possible for power to be retained by individuals who 
 are not themselves in any sense superior men, and never 
 could have risen above the crowd by their own strength. 
 
298 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Through his heirs, whether they be offspring or suc- 
 cessors, the strong man's superiority is continued be- 
 yond the grave. One generation of the multitude hands 
 its habits of obedience and servitude to the next, and 
 one generation of mediocre exploiters hands the usufruct 
 of this habit to the next. A conqueror secures the 
 crown and sceptre, and all the advantages insured by 
 their possession, to a long line of successors; and a 
 group of successful plunderers transmit to their remote 
 descendants the privileges of a noble class founded on 
 force. The crowd is so completely accustomed, to see- 
 ing power concentrated in the hands of the dynasty and 
 nobility that they regard it as a necessary part of the 
 arrangements of the world, without which they could 
 not imagine its going on. The dynasty, the nobility, 
 and the high official class — so far as they are not the 
 same — have long ago lost the faculty of swift, ready 
 adaptation, the keen sense of reality, and the power 
 of will and judgment that belonged to the creative spirit 
 of their ancestors; but they remain on their heights by 
 the habit of command, as the crowd remain in their 
 depths through the habit of obedience. They have no 
 doubt that they are born to rule ; they proceed with the 
 same confidence with which the crowd follows them. 
 The routine of government will often go on for a very 
 long time, and not appear inadequate, until natural 
 events, the progress of general development under the 
 influence of new knowledge, inventions, or discoveries, 
 or contact with some powerful and creative will, necessi- 
 tate judgment, resolution, action, that transcend the 
 traditional routine. Then the inadequacy of the ruling 
 class and the decrepitude of the institutions created for 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 299 
 
 their advantage alone stand revealed. The old order 
 collapses, and a new arises in response to the will or the 
 advantage of a new ruler and exploiter. 
 
 The symbol of power is sufficient so long as no actual 
 exercise of power is demanded of it. But when it is 
 required to prove its effectiveness against the resistance 
 of dynamic forces it refuses its office, and is revealed as 
 what it is — mere imagination. The mace that lies be- 
 fore the Speaker of the English House of Commons is 
 an excellent defence of the rights and dignity of the 
 chair, so long as they defend themselves and no one 
 attacks them. An irruption of soldiers, such as that 
 which took place in France on Brumaire 28, or an in- 
 cursion of the mob like that of February 24, 1848, or 
 September 4, 1870, would show that mace in its true 
 light — an old-fashioned bauble. The habit of the many 
 lends to the gestures of those in authority the force of 
 actual compulsion. Not until that force fails to over- 
 come decided resistance do they realize that it has no 
 existence outside their imagination. 
 
 All the institutions of the State and of society origi- 
 nally correspond to some definite practical purpose, as 
 to which no one is in any doubt, neither those who create 
 nor those who suffer from them. They naturally appear 
 rationally justified only from the point of view of those 
 for whose advantage they are created. Very soon, 
 however, they become a part of the general habit. No 
 one troubles about their origin or remembers what their 
 real object was. The result is that the institutions are 
 irrationally administered, used for purposes quite differ- 
 ent from those for which they were intended, or treated 
 simply as means to some selfish end. Everyone knows 
 
300 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 the story of the sentry placed beside a freshly-painted 
 seat to prevent anyone's sitting down on it, who was then 
 retained for many decades as part of the garrison, al- 
 though the seat had not only long ago dried, but actually 
 been removed, so that no one knew why a sentry should 
 be there at all. This story would epitomize all insti- 
 tutions if so adapted that an overseer, specially ap- 
 pointed and paid, were put to watch over the freshly- 
 painted bench instead of the soldier. This overseer 
 would realize for a few days that he had to warn 
 passers-by against messing their clothes against the wet 
 oil-paint. But when the bench dried he would cease 
 to trouble about it, and devote his attention to winning 
 favour with his superiors, and retaining his post. As 
 time went on he would quite forget the duty that he 
 originally had to fulfil, and only know that he got a 
 certain wage every month from a certain office. Later 
 on, if a new master were inclined to cut down this in- 
 comprehensible expense, the watchman would invent 
 some pretended activity, show the greatest zeal in the 
 execution of his office, and probably succeed in proving 
 eloquently and convincingly that to deprive him of his 
 salary would not only be doing him a grievous injustice, 
 but seriously undermining the foundations of general 
 security. 
 
 Private interests crystallize round every public in- 
 stitution, and then defend them with the greatest energy, 
 and, as a rule, maintain them long after they have 
 become useless, and, indeed, harmful in many directions. 
 Conflict arises when any institution is subjected to 
 rational criticism on the part of those who have nothing 
 to gain from it, are inconvenienced, disturbed, op- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 301 
 
 pressed, or humiliated by it, or simply take exception 
 to its purposelessness. Men, being slaves of habit, shut 
 their ears against this criticism as long as they can, and 
 even become irate because it disturbs them. Those 
 who profit by the institution in question accuse the critics, 
 with indignant contempt, of possessing no understand- 
 ing or knowledge of history, and show them, with an 
 air of haughty superiority, the advantage, necessity, and 
 justification of its origin. The rhetoricians and sophists 
 retained by the State for its defence in the person of 
 professors, members of academies, and Privy Council- 
 lors, employ an abundance of learned phrase to prove 
 the superficiality of the criticism and the insignificance 
 of the critics from a moral, political, or social point of 
 view. They are right, nevertheless; for when once 
 " reason has become nonsense and benefits a curse," as 
 Goethe said, reason in the past is no adequate excuse 
 for nonsense in the present; nor is an existing curse 
 rendered more tolerable by the assurance that it was a 
 benefit only yesterday. The alert rationalism of a 
 minority with a keen sense for reality is as a worm 
 gnawing at the foundations of the existing order, and 
 perpetually testing their strength. War is permanently 
 going on between the parasitic selfishness of beneficiaries, 
 and the immovable sloth and incapacity of the crowd 
 to trace the effects of an institution on the one hand, 
 and on the other the keen perception, comprehension 
 of the connection of complicated phenomena, hatred 
 of routine, and strength of will of the few. Victory 
 falls finally to those who display the greatest energy 
 in that fight. The worst institution has never perished 
 from its own Inherent badness; the most rational criti'. 
 
302 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 cism has never triumphed by virtue of its rationality, 
 unless it was incorporated in a personality able to bring 
 into the field an organic energy greater than that pos- 
 sessed by the defenders of the bad. Moreover, the 
 critic requires, not a slight, but an immense superiority 
 over the defender of the existing order, for an attack 
 on his own personal interests, his own income, his rank 
 and social privileges, rouses even in mediocrity an energy 
 and enthusiasm such as is only inspired in persons of 
 very lofty stamp and remarkable force by the unselfish 
 struggle for improvement. 
 
 The history of mankind is composed of the actions of 
 individual men, and individual men are roused to action 
 by a single instinct — by some strong and immediate 
 need, or, to use a more general and psychologically more 
 accurate expression, by some pain which they wish to 
 escape. The energy of their action stands in direct 
 relation to the violence of their discomfort : if the latter 
 rises to pain or to torment and intolerable agony, the 
 energy becomes violent, powerful, even heroic. There 
 is hardly any difference of opinion as to this human 
 mechanism among philosophers, historians, and sociolo- 
 gists from the earliest to the latest times. The fact is 
 more or less clearly seen, and expressed with more or 
 less vagueness or definiteness, in them all. Aristotle, 
 in his " Politics," determines the end of the State to be 
 the happiness, eudaemonia, of the citizens. According 
 to the Stagyrite thesis, all the activity of government 
 and society is directed to giving the citizens feelings of 
 pleasure. This is a mistaken substitution of positive 
 pleasure for the negative avoidance of pain, which is 
 the only benefit which is asked by the many of general 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 303 
 
 institutions or can be afforded by them. Apart from 
 a few hangers-on of the court, who would like to share 
 the plunder of the greater parasites, and obtain offices, 
 promotions, and privileges at their hands, the citizens 
 do not expect happiness from the sovereign; they are 
 well satisfied if he impose no hardship upon them, pro- 
 tect them against acts of violence, and at best assist 
 in times of undeserved distress out of the common 
 fund — in a word, if he protect them against suffering. 
 St. Augustine is involved in the same obscurity as 
 Aristotle when he speaks ^ of " happiness " as the fulfil- 
 ment — or highest aim — of all " desirable things," and 
 sees in it the lever of human action. No doubt every 
 man seeks for happiness, consciously or unconsciously. 
 In this general sense Aristotle's eudasmonism is an irre- 
 futable truth. But mere longing for some imaginary 
 state of bliss seldom, or very exceptionally, rouses him 
 to effort. The real incentive to action In him is not 
 an imaginary feeling of pleasure, but an immediately 
 realized sense of discomfort, which rouses him to defend 
 and free himself. Locke ''■ has expressed this with In- 
 comparable clearness: " The chief, if not the only, spur 
 to human industry and action Is uneasiness. . . . 
 What determines the will Is not, as is generally sup- 
 posed, the greater good in view, but some (and, for 
 the most part, the most pressing) uneasiness a man is 
 at present under. . . . The greatest positive good 
 
 1 111 
 
 '"De Civitate Dei," v., Prsefatio: " Quoniam constat omnium 
 rerum optandarum plenitudinem esse felicitatem." 
 
 "John Locke, "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," 
 twenty-fifth edition, London, 1824, book ii., chap, xx., p. 172, para- 
 graph 6; chap, xxi., p. 187, paragraphs 29, 31, 37. 
 
304 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 determines not the will . . . until our desire, raised 
 proportionately to it, makes us uneasy in the want of 
 it . . . because uneasiness alone is present, and it is 
 against the nature of things that what is absent should 
 operate where it is not." 
 
 This is true, and Roraagnosi ^ might just as well omit 
 the last three of his " four laws of civilization " — that is 
 to say, its four motive forces — " the spurs of need, of 
 conflict, of balance, and of continuity " ; for the last 
 three are meaningless. The spur of need is enough. 
 Herbert Spencer agrees with Locke that " necessity 
 alone conquers natural indolence in every sphere." 
 Other sociologists and economists describe the motive 
 force that dominates human action in different words 
 from those employed by Locke and Spencer, but their 
 meaning is the same. J. Lippert (" History of Human 
 Civilization ") regards the preservation of life as the 
 motive force in history. Ward calls the motive force 
 "desires," of which he enumerates five — self-preserva- 
 tion, sexual desire, the desire of beauty, of morality, and 
 of intellectual satisfaction. Yet all these instincts and 
 desires are but special cases of a single instinct or de- 
 sire — the instinct of self-preservation in its widest sense 
 — and only issue in action when they are powerful 
 enough to be felt as discomfort and an acute desire for 
 a change in any given condition. A. Wagner,^ content, 
 like Ward, to enumerate instances without proceeding to 
 general laws, finds among the motive powers that domi- 
 
 ' " Del' indole e dei f attori del incivilmento," quoted by R. Rocholl, 
 "The Philosophy of History," Gottingen, 1878, p. 241. 
 
 ' A. Wagner, " First Principles of Political Economy," third edi- 
 tion, Leipzig, 1892, vol. i., p. 33 et seq. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 305 
 
 nate human action the struggle for education (Ward's 
 Intellectual satisfaction) » for honour, for satisfaction of 
 the conscience, etc. Action, no doubt, does proceed 
 from these feelings, but only when any one of them 
 becomes an immediate need. Subject to this limitation 
 is Bentham's statement that " well-being is the object of 
 all human thought," and Simmel's, that " every conflict 
 for economic good is a conflict for the sensations of 
 comfort and enjoyment." " Well-being " and " sensa- 
 tions of comfort and enjoyment " cannot of themselves, 
 as Locke has shown, initiate action. Gumplowicz ^ 
 rightly recognizes need as the driving force in the con- 
 struction of society and of history to-day, without ob- 
 serving, as may be mentioned in passing, that he thereby 
 refutes his own theory that the construction of society 
 does not proceed from the individual. But it is obvious 
 that a need can only be felt by an individual, enter the 
 consciousness of an individual, and rouse an individual 
 to action. 
 
 This view is in no sense contradicted by Herbart's 
 statement,^ " The forces operative in history are in- 
 dubitably psychological in their origin " — a view shared 
 by Jouffroy, Auguste Comte, and others, and expressed 
 by Lacombe ^ in the sentence, " Needs appear in his- 
 tory, not as biological, but as emotional desires : human 
 behaviour reflects psychical and not biological needs." 
 This is true, but so self-evident that it need not be said. 
 
 ^ Ludwig Gumplowicz, " Principles of Sociology," second edition, 
 Vienna, 1905, p. 204. 
 
 ' " Herbart's Works," edited by Hartenstein, vol. vi., p. 33. 
 
 ' P. Lacombe, " De I'histoire consideree comme science," Paris, 
 1894, p. 32- 
 
3o6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 A need that does not become an idea in the consciousness 
 may excite reflex action, but not considered and co- 
 ordinated acts of will. It is mere play upon words to 
 express the fact that all human action proceeds from 
 needs, or, rather, from feelings of discomfort, in the 
 high-sounding phrase, " Men are only moved by spirit- 
 ual forces, by ideas." The two assertions are not con- 
 tradictory, but identical. Of course, the feeling of dis- 
 comfort must be an idea, the need must be an idea, 
 before it can initiate action. But it is the need, the feel- 
 ing of discomfort, that initiates action through the 
 medium of the idea. 
 
 The motive force of pain operates in accordance with 
 a prescribed form. The whole of life is a battle against 
 sensations of immediate discomfort; every action, con- 
 scious or unconscious, is the attempt to ward off some- 
 thing painful, or modify some uncomfortable condition. 
 Man, like every other living thing, up to a certain stage 
 endures the discomfort, tries to adapt himself to it or 
 put up with it as best he may, so long as he either sees 
 no means of escaping it at all, or only a possibility which 
 he judges to be beyond his powers, too dangerous, or 
 too uncertain of result. Such judgment is to a great 
 extent a matter of personal equation. The weakling, 
 the average man who hates everything new, and is 
 ossified by routine, will submit to suffering for a longer 
 time, and will offer less resistance to it than the energetic, 
 superior man, who is capable of new combinations. The 
 former timidly clings to Hamlet's view that 
 
 " Makes us rather bear those ills we have 
 Than fly to others that we. know not of," 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 307 
 
 or comforts himself with Pliny the younger (" Letters," 
 vi. 2) : " Mihi autem . . . leviora incommoda quod 
 assuevi " — " A discomfort to which I am used is less 
 troublesome to me." The strong man refuses to be 
 accustomed to his pain; fear of the unknown does not 
 reconcile him to the disagreeable known. A point 
 comes when even the most insignificant average man can 
 and will bear his misery no longer. As Heinrich von 
 Kleist puts it (" Penthesilea," Act XV.) : 
 
 " Impatiently man shakes from off his shoulders 
 A weight of suffering more than he can bear : 
 Beyond a point endurance cannot go." 
 
 When this unendurable point is reached the tortured 
 man has but one thought — to put an end to his suffer- 
 ings. But here the inadequacy of his brain comes in. 
 Every sufferer is distinctly aware of the fact that he 
 suffers, and the immediate cause of his suffering is 
 also known to him: he sees the beadle who threatens 
 and maltreats him; he sees the hangman who tortures 
 or executes the recusants, the agents of tyrannic power 
 ready to incarcerate or banish those who fall under their 
 displeasure ; he knows the Customs-house officer and the 
 tax-collector, who wring from him the fruits of his 
 labour or rob him of his possessions; he can account 
 for all who cause him anxiety and humiliation, oppress 
 him, disturb his habits, hinder his movements, offend 
 his sensibilities, or do him hurt of any kind. But this 
 is, as a rule, the limit of his comprehension. His in- 
 tellect is not capable of going behind the visible instru- 
 ment of his suffering to the power that wields it. He 
 does not perceive the connection existing between the 
 
3o8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 social and administrative system, the characteristics of 
 a ruler, of an all-powerful minister, of a privileged 
 class; the pressure of natural forces, and those who in 
 the last resort, without will or thought of their own, 
 carry a baneful command or law into execution. His 
 hatred and indignation are therefore hardly ever 
 directed against the real causes of his sufferings, but 
 always solely against the passive javelin with which, 
 themselves unseen, they pierce his body or his soul. 
 Direct concrete perception leaves him in the lurch. He 
 is reduced to imagining possibihties, to forecasting the 
 necessary effects of a given cause, to estimating all the 
 chances of carrying out what seems to him a useful 
 alteration of existing circumstances, in spite of existing 
 institutions and the powerful interests defending them, 
 and in opposition to the habits of the crowd. This 
 demands a highly developed sense of reality, the gift of 
 keen observation — that is to say, sustained and con- 
 centrated attention ; it demands the capacity to build up, 
 intellectually, a long chain of real and logically con- 
 nected deductions, and to eliminate from that chain 
 with unwearied watchfulness the arbitrary inferences 
 that the wandering fancy will always try to smuggle 
 in for the sake of convenience, although one such, if 
 left unnoticed, will vitiate the whole train by rendering 
 it arbitrary; it demands, in a word, all that the average 
 man does not possess. His efforts to free himself from 
 feelings of discomfort that have become intolerable 
 remain therefore, as a rule, fruitless. A people drained 
 dry by taxes will maltreat and drive off Customs-house 
 officials and tax-collectors, and burn their books and 
 desks. Starving peasants attack their landlord, and 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 309 
 
 reduce his castle to ashes. The people revolt, and fire 
 and destruction follow. The result of those misdirected 
 and spasmodic movements is, as a rule, that everything 
 remains as it was. The sole advantage gained by the 
 crowd is, at the last, that the burden is shifted from 
 one shoulder to the other. 
 
 A rising need not be concerted, nor planned, nor 
 organized. It is an automatic reflex action. It breaks 
 out suddenly, ravaging and laying waste, and passes 
 like a thunderstorm or whirlwind, whose path is strewn 
 by ruins and corpses. Even a rising premises the ex- 
 istence in the dull crowd of someone whose feelings are 
 stronger and his reactions more energetic than those of 
 the others. He is the first to raise his voice and fist, 
 and show the others the example without which they can 
 do nothing. He is a Cleon, Jack Cade, or Masaniello 
 — simple, thoughtless, ignorant, and at times no better 
 than a beast let loose, but obviously somewhat more 
 resolute and somewhat less ossified by habit than the 
 others are. 
 
 A revolution, on the other hand, needs leaders and 
 preparations. It can only be the work of superior men 
 organically equipped, in the first instance, to develop 
 new ideas and combinations, then to subdue others to 
 their will, and compel them to recognize them unhesi- 
 tatingly as leaders and rulers. The first premise, there- 
 fore, is strength of will; it is more important than 
 knowledge, prescience, independence of thought — in a 
 word, than intellectual superiority. Thus revolutions 
 are readily aroused by enthusiasts possessed by one idea, 
 or men who are decidedly off their balance, just because 
 this mental disturbance rouses wild impulses within 
 
3IO THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 them, blinds them to all obstacles, and induces them to 
 throw caution and consideration to the winds. They 
 gather enthusiastic crowds around them, who follow 
 them as unsuspiciously as the children did the Pied 
 Piper of Hamelin. It is only necessary that the masses 
 should be suffering, and the leader persuade them that 
 he will free them from their suffering. But the power 
 of command cannot long be exercised by a strong will 
 and a diseased brain. It must shiver at the resistance 
 of reality, upon which its possessor had not reckoned, 
 and which he can neither avoid nor overcome. 
 
 When power of thought is combined with energy of 
 will, the leader forms rational plans which he endeavours 
 to carry into execution. Then the revolution, instead 
 of stopping at destruction, issues in the creation of new 
 forms. A new state, new institutions and laws arise, 
 and their creators are proudly convinced that they have 
 converted suffering into pleasure, satisfied painful needs, 
 and given happiness to a section of mankind. Soon, 
 however, usually within one generation, and seldom 
 much beyond it, it appears that the reconstruction has 
 been based upon a subjective error, and fails in practice : 
 the needs of the many, far from being satisfied, still 
 exist, and are increasing; the painful feelings, if they 
 have slightly altered their character, have not ceased to 
 be : the hopes, the castles in the air, the dreams of bliss 
 that accompany any revolution or any personal en- 
 deavour to alter an existing state of things, have given 
 way to disillusionment, disenchantment, and discontent. 
 The crowd is ready for a new undertaking under some 
 leader of powerful will, who promises either to restore 
 the old conditions, which always seem fairer in recoUec- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 3" 
 
 tion than they were in fact, or to make them happy by 
 some new plan. Thus revolutions are, as a rule, but 
 halting stages on the path trod by suffering humanity 
 on the way towards new adaptations which are to make 
 its toilsome life easier and more agreeable: an endless 
 search for the right track, and an endless wandering 
 from it that cannot be avoided, though it brings the goal 
 no nearer, since to stand still with one's burden is 
 intolerable, and the notion that one is doing something 
 to relieve it really does for the moment give a deceptive 
 sense of relief. 
 
 Revolutions do not, as a rule, transform anything, 
 with the exception of the hierarchy of rank. Generally 
 they leave everything essentially as it is : the weak con- 
 tinue to be exploited, and the strong to exploit. New 
 modes of adaptation to what is disagreeable prolong the 
 endurance of what is endurable. Only, other individ- 
 uals and classes take the place of those individuals and 
 classes hitherto privileged to exploit. Revolution gives 
 to some what it takes from others. It is a practical 
 test of the symbols and prestige of. power, which are 
 tried and found wanting. It gives the strong the posi- 
 tion inherited by the weak man, who maintained it 
 simply because his strength was a tradition which had 
 never been tested. It destroys an appearance which 
 corresponded to no reality. But its effect does not last. 
 " Red men are white men on the way; white men are 
 red men arrived," as Alphonse Karr has said. A new 
 order soon becomes petrified to a new routine ; the new 
 real strength soon dissipates itself in new symbols; new 
 weakly heirs begin to live on the prestige of new strong 
 ancestors. A long period of time presents the aspect 
 
312 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of a succession of waves of more or less equal size. 
 The noisiest revolutions are very limited in their effect, 
 and do not go very deep. Tocqueville ^ declares that 
 " even the great French Revolution has had far less 
 influence upon the course of development of French his- 
 tory than is believed." Lotze ^ lets fall a stimulating 
 remark : " The unrest and variety manifest in constant 
 revolutions and reconstructions, for which a connected 
 meaning is sought, simply represents the history of the 
 male sex: women make their way through the storm and 
 stress, hardly affected by its changing aspects, renewing 
 with perpetual uniformity the grand, simple forms of 
 the life of the human soul." This needs one limitation, 
 however. History is not that of the male sex, but of 
 a small section of it ; what Lotze says of women is true 
 of the great majority of men. 
 
 We have been speaking of revolutions. It might be 
 objected that historical advance is not always, perhaps 
 not even mainly, due to revolution, but to at least an 
 equal extent to slow, tentative, and peaceful innova- 
 tions, limited in extent, directed by authority. The ob- 
 jection would be invalid. From a psychological point 
 of view there is no difference between the revolution and 
 the cautious, official reform. Every innovation breaks 
 in upon habit, and compels new adaptations. Even the 
 picture on a postage-stamp cannot be altered without dis- 
 turbing someone and overcoming some opposition. The 
 
 ' Quoted by Robert Flint, " The Philosophy of History in France 
 and Germany," Edinburgh and London, 1874, p. 313. 
 
 '^ Hermann Lotze, "Microcosm: Idea of a History and Natural His- 
 tory of Mankind — an Attempted Anthropology," vol. iii., Leipzig, 
 1864., p. 49. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 313 
 
 difference between revolution and reform or evolution is 
 not a difference of essential, but of mass, extent, energy, 
 rhythm. Revolution requires greater strength on the 
 part of those who rouse it than reform does, because 
 it has against it the weight of habit, the whole routine 
 of life, the interests of the powerful, the symbols con- 
 nected in the minds of the multitude with the ideas of 
 power, legality, order, and respectability: on its side, 
 only the superior will-power of its leaders, the sense of 
 discontent of their followers, and the adaptability of 
 the young, whose habits are not yet stereotyped, and 
 whose discontent is less patient than that of the older 
 generation. The advantage of reform is that it can 
 be undertaken with smaller powers. It is set going with 
 the aid of the whole machinery of society and the State, 
 which embodies the habits of the multitude. It there- 
 fore departs less from routine, offends fewer people, and 
 demands less new adaptation than revolution does. But 
 the same cause operates in both — the discontent that is 
 felt and understood as the need for change. 
 
 This need must be conceived in its most comprehen- 
 sive form. It may be of a physical or spiritual nature. 
 In the one case it is hunger; in the other some longing 
 or some aspiration arising from within. One demands 
 food and drink, warm clothing, and a comfortable place 
 to dwell ; another leisure and recreation, freedom from 
 care for the coming day ; yet another, beauty and luxury. 
 One suffers from not being allowed on all occasions to 
 speak his mother tongue ; another because he must obey 
 command ; the third that he Is not free to live according 
 to the belief that seems to him his most essential posses- 
 sion. Exceptionally powerful natures demand room to 
 
314 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 express their personality by overcoming and ruling 
 others, and imposing their own will and opinions as the 
 law governing the thought, feeling, and action of others. 
 This feeling and recognition of a subjective need that 
 demands satisfaction is the driving force behind the 
 conqueror and the creator of religions, the dictator and 
 party leader alike. It assumes every form — ambition, 
 the competitive instinct, the desire for pleasure, pride, 
 impatience, adventurousness, revenge; it is capable of 
 every degree, from the languorous trouble of the mere 
 longing reverie, which is satisfied with a vision or a sigh, 
 or at best exhausts itself in some artistic activity, to the 
 racking agony that seeks relief in violent deeds. 
 
 Human events, from the greatest to the smallest, fall 
 under the same formulae, which are always determined 
 by the same psychic laws. The fundamental character- 
 istic of adaptability is common to every living species, 
 and not confined to humanity. In the case of average 
 man, it is limited by the early age at which associations 
 are organized and stereotyped into habits : superior men 
 retain it longer and with more freedom, and are able to 
 dissolve old thought complexes quickly and easily, and 
 combine new. If these men combine unusual strength 
 of will with their power of personal thought, they are 
 the predestined rulers and leaders of the multitude, 
 whom they use as instruments for the satisfaction of 
 their needs, binding them to their service partly by 
 compulsion, partly by promises of lightening their lot 
 and satisfying their desires. Compulsion is exercised 
 by personal force or by the weight of existing institutions 
 which have been mastered; but in the last resort this 
 appropriation of the machinery of government is the 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES 315 
 
 victory of superior personality over the men who contort 
 the machine. All action proceeds from a strongly-felt 
 need; its direction and aims are determined by judg- 
 ment based on experience. The more scanty are men's 
 experiences, the more incompletely they are understood 
 and retained, and the more erroneously they are inter- 
 preted, the more unsuited will the resultant actions be 
 to satisfy the need. Thus human life is a strenuous 
 process of rushing from one painful condition to another 
 — a search, for the most part vain, for the satisfaction 
 of needs that are always stabbing the consciousness 
 afresh. But as ignorance diminishes and knowledge 
 increases, the possibility grows that, if not the average, 
 at least the superior men, and an increasing number of 
 them, may be freed from the sense of pain. Such free- 
 dom from pain has almost always been in the last resort 
 the result of a parasitic use of the exertions of others. 
 Whether this must always be so will be considered in 
 the following chapter. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 
 
 For centuries thinkers have raised jhe question whether 
 progress exists. Those who deny it are as numerous, as 
 eloquent, and as well supported by proof as those who 
 maintain it. The anciegts^ as a rule, did not believe in 
 it. They had a vague suspicion that the world proc- 
 esses eternally pursued the same course, which they 
 conceived of as a circular movement, perpetually recur- 
 ring to the point at which it started. This is the mean- 
 ing of the Orphic pictures and the mysterious teaching 
 of Linus, and it is the view expressed in their different 
 ways by Hesiod, Heraclitus, Democritus, Empedocles, 
 Plato, and Zeno. Aristotle says clearly : " Everything is 
 a cycle . . . the age of man, government, and the 
 earth itself with its blossoming and withering away." 
 Thucydides, too, rejects the notion of progress. Every- 
 thing, he teaches, will always be as it is, so lon^ as men 
 are what t hey are^an extraordinarily superficial way 
 of speaking, one must remark. Prp^ress safely consists 
 ^/inrneH-S not re maining a s they are; and the question to 
 xbe answered is, precisely, Are men as they were, and 
 </ will they always be as they are ? 
 
 The P ytha goreans, whose mystic astro-cosmology 
 placed everything under the influence of the stars, were 
 convinced that all the phenomena of the world and 
 
 316 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 317 
 
 human life must repeat themselves down to the smallest 
 detail whenever a precisely similar constellation ap- 
 peared in the heavens — an astrological form of the cycle 
 theory of the Greek philosophers. Cicero ^ Is literally 
 repeating the doctrines of his Hellenic teachers when 
 he speaks of the " wonderful cycles of political revolu- 
 tions and changes." In so far as the ancients admittedoc 
 the existence of change, they held it to be change for the x 
 worse. The Brahmlnical doctrine of the four Yugas, or 
 ages of the world, held the earliest Yuga, said to have 
 lasted for 4,800 years, to be the most perfect, the age 
 of truth, and the omnipotence of the gods. In the 
 same way the Greeks and Romans placed the golden age 
 of happiness and peace in the past. The passages in 
 Ovid (Aurea prima sata est aetas," etc. — " Metamor- 
 phoses," i. 89 et seq.) and Horace ("^tas majorum, 
 pejor avis, tulit — Nos nequiores, mox daturos, Pro- 
 geniem vitiosiorem " — " The time of our fathers, in- 
 ferior to that of our grandfathers, produced our In- 
 ferior race, to give birth to a progeny even more 
 despicable ") expressing this view are famihar to every- 
 one. 
 
 The moderns generally took a narrower view of the 
 problem of progress : instead of Including the world as 
 
 a whole, they limited it to the human race. Machia- 
 
 j _ « > ■ 
 
 vein confined himself to the moral Issue. " The 
 world," he says In the Preface to the second book of 
 his " Discourse on Titus Livlus," " has always con- 
 tained the same quantity of virtue and vice." Jean 
 Bodin fully shares the views of Machlavelll and the 
 
 ' " De Republica," i. 29 : " Miri sunt orbes et quasi circuitus in 
 rebus publicis commutationum et vicissitudinura." 
 
3i8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 ancients. Human transformations — " velut in orbem 
 
 redire videntur" — seem to recur in a cycle. He3oes 
 not believe in moral progress: the quantity of virtue 
 and vice always remains the same. On the other hand, 
 he is convinced that there has been material progress: 
 his own, the sixteenth, century, seems to him, especially 
 in the industrial sphere, to have surpassed all previous 
 ones, in proof of which he adduces the sole — to him 
 sufficient — instance of the new art of printing. Gioberti 
 will have nothing to do with the notion of progress. 
 At the close of the seventeenth century an active dis- 
 pute ^ went on between those who supported and those 
 who opposed the idea, turning, however, on both sides, 
 solely on the question of progress in the sphere of art 
 and poetry. It is noteworthy that even then many able 
 judges of undoubted taste upheld the superiority of the 
 moderns over the ancients, although but a small part of 
 the works that form the proud possession of mankind 
 to-day were then in existence. Goethe holds that " men 
 become cleverer and more intelligent, but not better, 
 happier, or more effective in action." 
 
 Another great poet, Lamartine, teaches that " the 
 notion of progress is a dream, a Utopia, an absurdity." 
 Schopenhauer opposes the notion of progress on a priori 
 grounds. " Since the world is eternal, the theory of 
 progress is necessarily false." This proposition postu- 
 lates what is not proved, and is incapable of proof — 
 the eternity of the world. If the postulate be admitted 
 — and it is impossible not to admit it — the proposition 
 
 * Perrault, "Parallele des anciens et des modernes," Paris, i688. 
 Cf. also Hippolyte Rigaut, " Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des 
 modernes," Paris, 1856. 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 319 
 
 is logically irrefutable. It applies, however, to the uni- 
 verse, and not to humanity, which does not share its 
 eternity. Lotze cleverly evades the obligation of de- 
 ciding for one solution or the other. He admits prog- 
 ress in the sphere of knowledge, in the sense of the slow 
 discovery of the unalterable laws that govern the world. 
 In other words, ^qgress^consistsjn the tficSgniihonjhat 
 there can be_ no prpg^ress.. In another passage ("Mi- 
 crocosm," vol. iii., p. 29) he is less cautious, and admits 
 frankly, " In history progress is hardly discernible." 
 Following Vico, who revived the cyclical theory of the 
 ancients in his " Ricorsi " — ^the constant repetition of 
 the same events — Odysse Barot teaches ("Lettres sur 
 la Philosophic de I'Histoire") that "progress is the 
 
 1% 
 
 swing of a pendulum, perp etuall y backwards and for^ 
 
 wards," and development " the ceaseless recurrence o^ 
 the same facts an d thoughts." Fontenelle finds "the 
 heart always the same, the intelle'ict perfecting itself; 
 passions, virtues, vices unaltered; knowledge increas- 
 ing." Fe nelon , that worthy optimist, will not evenV, 
 admit so much. He maintains, long before Rousseau, v 
 that " justice, wisdom, all the virtues, belong to the^o^ 
 semi-savage state : all the vices arise and develop with\ 
 civilization." 
 
 These testimonies could easily be multiplied. 
 Enough have been quoted. On the other side we have 
 Descartes decisively maintaining the reality of prog- 
 ress. Bacon ^ has no doubt of the superiority of the 
 moderns over the ancients — at least, in science. Leib- 
 
 '" Novum Organum," i., Aphorismus 84: "... a nostra aetate 
 (si vires suas nosset et experiri et intendere vellet) major multo quam 
 a priscis temporibus expectari par est. . . ," 
 
320 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 nitz ^ is not quite certain whether progress exists : " The 
 human race may possibly attain in the course of time a 
 higher degree of perfection than we can at present 
 imagine." The Abbe St. Pierre naturally believes in a 
 glorious unbroken progress, and so, which is more sur- 
 prising, does l ^derot . Condorcet boldly calls his sur- 
 vey of history and the philosophy of history a " view 
 of the progress of mankind," and draws a fascinating 
 picture of a future in which war will be unknown, the 
 universal brotherhood of mankind realized, communi- 
 cation carried on by a common lauguage, and the enjoy- 
 ment of life prolonged Indefinitely. Reason will create 
 a paradise for mankind. Condorcet, moreover, is only 
 developing, with superfluous additions, the views already 
 expressed by Turg ot_in his " Second Discourse on the 
 Gradual Progress of the Human Spirit." The point 
 of view of Turgot and Condorcet was shared by Kant 
 and also by St. Simon , whose dreams of the future carry 
 him to Paradise itself. Cousin declares, in the concise 
 and dictatorial manner he imitated from Hegel: " His- 
 T*> tory Is the development of humanity in space and time, 
 1^ and the conception of development Includes the notion 
 K of progress." Auguste Comte frankly admits the fact 
 of progress, with the reservation that It is no unmixed 
 blessing. Its tragic aspect, to his mind, Is the division 
 % of labor, which, while raising man above the animals, 
 S removes him from nature, and consigns him to depend- 
 ■^ ence on an organized society, which leads to exploitation 
 N and other evils unknown among animals. Michelet sees 
 the whole of history as a single, permanent progress 
 toward|,,,^edom^ Lubbock, Tyler, and J. S. Mill are 
 
 ' " Theodicee," iii., § 341. 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 321 
 
 likewise convinced of progress; Buckle disbelieves in it 
 in the moral sphere, but accepts it for science and knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 It appears from this hasty review that the belief or 
 disbelief in progress coincides with optimism and 
 pessimism. Robust and practical people like the ma- 
 jority of Englishmen, gay, self-satisfied children of the 
 world, masters of the art of life, like the French, in the 
 period of enlightenment, see the world au couleur de 
 rose; while phlegmatic dreamers and thinkers who live 
 in a time of political oppression or suffer from heavy 
 misfortunes of their own see it in a gloomy and hope- 
 less light. One must then believe that progress or stand- 
 still have no objective existence, but are mere subjective 
 experiences, dependent on the temperament of the ob- 
 server, his youth or age, sickness or health. Were this 
 correct, it would no longer be necessary to raise the 
 question whether progress exists. It would be enough 
 to establish that the constitution of human affairs ap- 
 pears to present different aspects at different times and 
 in different places, all of which may be subjectively- 
 correct, while all are illusions without any real exist- 
 ence. It remains to be seen whether it be not possible 
 to distinguijhc ertain object ive featurgsunjthe changes 
 of huma n condition, which would permit a judgment 
 apart from arbitrary subjectivity, and allow the estab- 
 lishment of a general law applicable to such changes. 
 
 Before trying to obtain a rational answer to the ques- 
 tion whether progress exists, it is necessary to be clear 
 as to what is understood by progress. Almost everyone 
 
 IWM—****"'" ■■■I'lM i_ll'ill"ll"lll""»"^*lll"ll''i ™ ''*' I'l'i^'IIPilLlil I "I I" 1" ' 
 
 who approaches the conception gives it a different mean- 
 ing, which accounts for their divergent judgments. As 
 
322 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 a rule, the word " progress" includes the idea of an 
 improvement. Paracelsus says, in the Preface to his 
 " Great Surgical Remedies " : "I dedicate this book to 
 those to whom' the new is worth more than the old, 
 simply because it is new." The assumption, far from 
 being self-evident, is in urgent need of proof. Why 
 should the new be necessarily better than the old? It 
 may very well be worse, and is, as a matter of fact, al- 
 ways considered by many to be worse. We have merely 
 got another judgment of value as an exclusively subject- 
 ive basis. We want to discover some objective mark of 
 progress about which there can be no difference of opin- 
 ion. Such a mark is found solely in the fact of 
 change — or development, as it may be called — 
 provided that development Is not — as, for example, 
 by Cousin — identified with progress, and therefore 
 given a higher worth. We may adopt Herbert Spencer's 
 y definition of develo Ement as the increasing differentia- 
 X tion of a thing through the inclusion of new elements 
 * (integration) and the creation of new and more various 
 X forms. The ^eationjofn^wjorms. need not be com- 
 bined with the inclusion of new elements ; it can accom- 
 pany dissolution, the exclusion of old elements. Disso- 
 lution is thus as much a part of development as 
 integration, and this should put us on our guard against 
 regarding development as synonymous with progress in 
 the sense of increasing worth. 
 
 The universe is never stationary; all is movement, 
 
 iravTa p ei. Heraclitus put Into words a fact always 
 
 known to man. The transition from the establishment 
 
 *f of eternal flux to the Idea that. In the eternally changing 
 
 V picture, the last condition must always be more excellent 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 323 
 
 and perfect than the former, is due to naive, unconscious X 
 anthropomorphism. Thg -xeal idea floating at the back 
 o f the notions of progress and development in the ordi- 
 nary mind, not only in the " common sense " so derided 
 by philosophers, but among trained students of mental 
 science, is something very remote from the Spencerian 
 interpretation of differentiation advancing through inte- 
 gration. The moti on is rather of an ideal form, an 
 archetype towards whjch culture is_de.yalgping. Did 
 any such goal of development really exist, were there 
 such an Idea, such an archetype, the question of prog- 
 ress would plainly be solved. We should have a 
 standard by reference to which we could immediately de- 
 cide whether one civilization stood higher than another. 
 We should esteem our civilization as complete, and 
 speak with certainty of its progress, in proportion as it 
 closely resembled the Idea towards which its develop- 
 ment was directed, and drew near to the ideal to which 
 it was destined to attain. But this notion of the arche- 
 type arose fro m observation of human behaviour, and 
 later of living matter as a whole. The child, small, 
 weak, and imperfect at its birth, was seen gradually to 
 grow, to develop, to blossom into young manhood or 
 womanhood, and attain the beauty of maturity. There 
 could be no doubt even in the rudimentary brain of 
 primitive man that the new-born child did not represent 
 a final form, but was predestined to grow to the full 
 stature of a human being. Here, then, was a recog- 
 nizable end, to which the changes of a definite creature 
 were directed. The grown-up was the virtually existent 
 model which the child gradually attained. Moreover, 
 there could be no question that the grown-up realized 
 
324 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 a higher and more perfec t typ e jhan the child. Objec- 
 tively he was more perfect, because he was in every 
 respect more effective and_.i ndependent ; formally, too, 
 because he s atisfied the log ical nee4 of thniifrht to see 
 any movement, whose beginning and whole course is 
 present to it in idea, carried to a determinate conclusion. 
 Any halt short of this goal, or any deflection from the 
 line thus laid down, causes disillusionment and revolt, 
 while there is pleasure in the conformation of idea and 
 realization. Here we have the schematic nni-in n nf 
 progress. Man saw an actual evolution. He knew that 
 It had a predestined goal. He was justified in regarding 
 each new stage in development as a step towards that 
 goal. Thus he naturally identified development with 
 progress, and progress with improvement, and intro- 
 duced into these conceptions a judgment of value. He 
 then applied the scheme, formed from observation of 
 human life, to animals and plants, to everything that 
 appears incomplete, grows and ripens. He had a cer- 
 tain right to do so, inasmuch as the idea of a develop- 
 ment that is at the same time a perfection does super- 
 ficially apply to all living things as well as to man. But 
 the apparently unexceptionable scheme contained fal- 
 lacies which the human intellect was not yet critical 
 enough to discover. The^_y£lQfLfflfiM^,oJ^h£ji;^^ 
 thing does not stop at maturity. It proceeds beyond 
 It, and downwards. It leads to decay and death. It 
 Is arbitrary to see the rise and not the fall of the curve 
 of development, the blossoming and ripening, and not 
 the withering and dying down. The one Is as regular 
 and essential a part of the whole as the other. There 
 is noJustificaiion_for_taldn^ the ar chetypal 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 325 
 
 condition, for life moves on, through bloom and matu- 
 rity alike, towards death. It Is as correct to maintain, 
 as Claude Bernard does without hesitation, that the goal 
 of all life is death; that the archetype towards which 
 every living thing is developing, which It is striving to 
 realize, is the senile being, who dies and decomposes 
 with the exhaustion of his vital forces. But a develop- 
 ment leading with inexorable necessity to destruction 
 cannot be identified with progress In the sense of per- 
 fection. The unconscious influence of these motives 
 Induces man to see the goal of human development in 
 the Individual at his best rather than In his shrunken old 
 age. Firstly, from the utilitarian point of view, life is 
 more effe ctive at its hig hest point than at its end. 
 Secondly , from the egoistic point of view, man is unwil- 
 ling to accept the Idea of development proceeding 
 beyond his prime, because he finds more^joy in his years 
 of blossom t han In those of decay, and would therefore 
 like his development to remain stationary there, and 
 proceed no farther. Last, but not least, he is influenced 
 by the subdued ground tone of sex , which sounds In his 
 ears in life's bloom, and dies away when it begins to 
 decay. But the scheme of progress as improvement 
 and Increasing value, outlined from the observation of 
 the phenomena of life, is Incorrect, because it supplies 
 no criterion of value for the different sta ges of life . If 
 the aesthetic satisfaction of the looker-on is to decide, 
 many will place the charm of childhood above the magic 
 of youth, and most will prefer either to the solid virtues 
 of maturity. If the degree of subjective pleasure Is to 
 be the standard,, there can be no doubt that youth Is 
 preferable to maturity, although no thinker, however 
 
326 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 casual, would take youth rather than maturity to be the 
 goal of human development. Thus the very movement 
 of life itself from one stage to the next, which suggested 
 to men the notion of progress, does not, on closer exam- 
 ination, justify the identification of progress with im- 
 provement and increasing value. 
 
 And to transpose a scheme of progress based on the 
 phenomena of life to the world as a whole is utterly 
 false. Only the most naive anthropomorphism could 
 draw such an analogy. It premises that the universe 
 possesses an i deal of its own perfection, related to It as 
 maturity is related to infancy, and that it is developing, 
 like the infant, towards this goal, this maturity of some 
 sort. No single observed fact justifies the assumption 
 that the universe is developing towards some riper, more 
 complete form as its goal; on the contrary, all astro- 
 physical observation compels the belief that in the uni- 
 verse determined processes follow regularly upon one 
 another, and the heave nly bodies pa ss In permanent 
 flux through a series of forms that diss olve i nto one 
 another in an apparently Jmm u table orde r. Primary 
 vapour rotates, thickens, grows hot, and divides into 
 sun and planets ; these, originally fluid drops, harden ; 
 the system gradually spreads the heat that has drawn 
 it together over the universe, then cools off and congeals, 
 until, after long periods of time. It collides with other 
 systems, and Is thereby plunged Into conflagration anew 
 — Nova Persei occurs to the mind — ^melts, evaporates, 
 and dissipates, and returns to primitive vapour, to be 
 driven in a new direction, and, animated by an altered 
 velocity, to begin the whole process again. We call this 
 course of events the rising and setting of worlds, but 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 327 
 
 without a trace of objective justification. Nothing rises 
 and nothing sets. P rimary vapou r is_insB ired by^ the 
 sa me energ y, as the system of sep arate planets round a 
 sun : the laws that determine the collision of two sys- 
 tems and their return to primary vapour are the same 
 that regulate the formation of the solar and planetary 
 system from primary vapour. The on£_st^te hasjthe 
 same dignity, the same value, as the other. Both are 
 but different aspects of one and the same regular 
 process. If the system of sun and planets represents 
 real existence to us, and primary vapour chaos, and 
 we regard the return of the system to primary vapour 
 as its end, that is but another result of the unconscious 
 egoism that dominates our thought. Because we live 
 upon a planet, and do not find in primary vapour the 
 conditions of our life, of the only life that is known to 
 us, we regard the development of a system of sun and 
 planets as the goal of all forces operative in the universe, 
 and primary vapour as an end of all things and of all 
 being. We make our life the criterion of the cosmic 
 process, and, assigning high value to what is advan- 
 tageous to it, and a low value to what is incompatible 
 with it, shut our eyes to the fact that the world goes on 
 its way without regard for us, and that all the forces 
 in the universe are incessantly and regularly at work, 
 whether mankind exist or no. Schopenhauer^, argynient y 
 that, since the world is eternal, every development must y.. 
 already have reached its goal within eternity, sufficiently Y" 
 proves the meaninglessness of the notion of develop- ^ 
 ment as applied to the world. The Spencerian formula 
 is inadequate, since the course of cosmic conditions is 
 neither differentiation, nor integration, nor dissociation, 
 
328 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 but a continual movement, a n eternal cycle whose 
 rhythm-i &al gays the s ame. It is invalid to select certain 
 sections of the cycle, certain periods of the rhythm, as 
 being better, more complete. Individual periods are 
 only better or more complete in reference to us, and if 
 we cease to look at them in relation to ourselves, to 
 humanity, and the processes of life, there is no longer 
 any justification for assigning a higher value to the 
 amalgamation of matter into spherical bodies than to 
 their regular dispersion through vaporous space; or for 
 seeing any superiority in a glowing sun and planets, 
 capable of heat, and containing air and water, over 
 an extinct sun and scorified planets without air or 
 water. 
 
 The universe thus affords absolutely no place for de- 
 velopment, and still less for progress, in the sense of 
 gradual perfection. AH known facts compel a reason 
 which is closed against mystic reverie to assume an 
 eternal, regular, cyclic movement perpetually passing 
 through similar phases, and to r eject as irrational the 
 id ea of a go al to which th e earth is constantls_p rogress- 
 iilgj_^ The notion of progress, derived from the specta- 
 cle of the stages of living things, is strictly limited in 
 its application to those living things. From the 
 hedonistic standpoint, which regards p leasure as the 
 only recognizabl£„£urgose_of_life, youth and early man- 
 hood, as the period of life which is richest in conscious 
 feelings of pleasure, must be admitted to be the most 
 beautiful in the existence of the individual, and devel- 
 opment towards that stage recognized as a real progress, 
 so far as conscious pleasure is concerned. At the same 
 time we must be extraordinarily careful in extending 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 329 
 
 this point of view beyond the narrow limits of individ- 
 ual existence, and even In applying if to humanity as a 
 whole. The hedonistic criterion here ceases to be valid. 
 Humanity, as has been repeatedly pointed out in pre- 
 vious sections, is an abstraction; it is by a merely 
 rhetorical simile that we look upon it as an individuality, 
 a person passing through childhood, youth, maturity, 
 and old age. Every man bom and normally developed 
 goes through the same periods of life ; everyone knows 
 childhood, youth, maturity, and grey hairs whether he 
 lived at the first appearance of the species upon earth, 
 lives to-day, or will live a million years hence. But there 
 cannot b e ^ny s pecial age of mankind characterized^ as 
 are the youth or old age of the individual, by feelings 
 of pleasure or pain. We speak of happy or unhappy 
 historical epochs, but that is a generalization that does 
 not touch the individual. In the reign of Antoninus 
 Pius, according to contemporary testimony one of the 
 few halcyon ages recorded by the memory of man, there 
 was sickness and death, and individuals must have com- 
 plained and felt the misery of disease and old age. At 
 the time of the Black Death and of the Thirty Years' 
 War, probably the dreariest period in the last thousand 
 years, there were young people who rejoiced In life and 
 youth. No one historical epoch can be called happier 
 than another, nor can the development from one to 
 another be regarded as progress, from the hedonistic 
 point of view. 
 
 If we are to hold to the notio n^^ pfjjrpjxgss _withia 
 the limits of human life, we must seek some other cri- 
 terion than the hedonistic. For that purpose morality 
 has often been suggested. It is maintained thatpfroin 
 
330 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 one generation to another, from one age to another, 
 c onscience becomes more subtle, sensitive, and clamant^ 
 sense^of dutj^more profound and compelling, and horror 
 of violence and Injustice more immediate and pro- 
 nounced. Unless it be held that the gradual transition 
 from evil to good, from vice and crime to virtue, from 
 indifference to love, consideration and pity for one's fel- 
 lows, really represents no change from the point of view 
 of worth, or even that it represents a deterioration of 
 the human type by making it less efficient in the 
 struggle for existence, this change must be admitted 
 to be a development., for wards, and upwards — a prog- 
 ress. 
 
 But this moral criterion is uncertain. One objection 
 occurs immediately, and has already been briefly indi- 
 cated. From the social point of view the more moral 
 man is doubtless more perfect than the less moral ; the 
 greater_jils consideratiqn for his jFellowS;;— and that is 
 what morality really amounts to when freed from its 
 mystical wrappings — ^the more easy and pleasant are his 
 relations with them. But the greater peace, the more 
 restful comfort that may be acquired by this morality, 
 'may be bought too dear at tljejirice jof a .dhajiiutign 
 Lof_jiIs_ resolution, of his healthy egoism and his instinc- 
 -tive vitality — of all those characteristics whose main- 
 tenance is the condition of an enhanced and fully-devel- 
 oped personality. Advancing morality can thus be 
 regarded as progress only if the ideal human develop- 
 ment be social or not individual. This postulate is 
 accepted by some, rejected by others. There are equally 
 strong arguments both for and against. But, apart 
 from the fundamental objection that advancing morality 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 33 r 
 
 does not necessarily denote progress from the anthropo- 
 logical, though it may from the social point of view, 
 there remains the preliminary question whether the 
 course of history does display such an increase in 
 morality. 
 
 At the first glance it seems incontestable. Many of 
 the enormities of earlier days have completely disap- 
 peared from civilized life. Cannibalism, which once 
 prevailed all over the world, is now confined to the most 
 backward of savage tribes. Prisoners of war are not 
 tortured and killed nowadays, but treated honourably, 
 and all their wants attended to. The stranger, instead I 
 of being an outlaw, is protected in every civilized | 
 State by treaties and the law. It is no longer possible / 
 for the mighty openly and with impunity to sacrifice 
 the honour and life of the weak to their own whims. 
 Crimes of violence are on the decline. The value of 
 human life is more highly rated. None of these facts 
 need be denied or questioned. But they are capable 
 of various " interpretations. 
 
 All comparisons between the present and any former 
 stage of civilization rest upon statistics, which enu- 
 merate and index facts, but have no access to spiritual 
 impulses and efforts. The fact that fewer acts are 
 committed which the law regards as offences or crimes 
 is not necessarily a proof of loftier morality. It may be 
 a consequence of weakness of will and., indolence. It 
 may likewise be connected with the fact that in a better- 
 ordered State there is more supervision, and every trans- 
 gression is immediately discovered, tracked down, and 
 punished, so that the individual walks in wholesome 
 dread of an ever-watchful and present authority. 
 
332 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Within his consciousness, alone with his instincts and 
 passions, civilized man is no more moral than the sav- 
 age, and man to-day probably no different frorn man 
 ih'tKeeariiest Stone ^e. In what way is the anarchist, 
 who hurls a bomb regardless whether it tear women 
 and children in pieces, superior to the wild warrior who 
 fell upon the enemy at night, and butchered men, 
 women, and children? The anarchist is admittedly in- 
 spired by what he holds to be a beautiful and glorious 
 idea, but the wild slaughterer is likewise convinced that 
 his action is splendid and heroic, and the bards of his 
 race support him in this view by their panegyrics. Each 
 follows his own impulse and satisfies himself, without 
 a thought of those who are sacrificed. Is t he speculative 
 company promoter , who amasses hundreds of millions, 
 robs thousands of families of their all in cold blood, 
 and drives them to misery and despair, even to suicide, 
 while he enriches himself with the fruits of their life's 
 toil, any less guilty of robbery and butchery than the 
 Sultan of Wadi-Halfa, who enslaved or executed the 
 whole population of vast territories, and appropriated 
 all their possessions? Does he feel any more consid- 
 eration for his fellows than did the medieval Viking, 
 who attacked the foreign coast with fire and sword, 
 plunder and rapine? HI§,tflJ5L„records no enormity 
 which cannot ^e paralleled JlLjhL n.?ar past_ or^in the 
 present. The most appalling atrocities of the French 
 
 Villi*"-" -..iHlllil IJI. *^ ^ ^ 
 
 Jacquerie reappeared during the rising of the Esthnic 
 and Lettish peasants in the East Russian provinces in 
 1 906. The cruelties of the Armagnacs and extortioners 
 during the Thirty Years' War were repeated in the 
 Spanish wars of Napoleon, in the Kurdish raids against 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 333 
 
 the Armenians, and the incursions of the robber bands 
 in Macedonia. Marius, whose acknowledgment or re- 
 fusal of salutations when he entered Rome signified life 
 or death, was no more blood-thirsty than Rosas in 
 Argentine, Lopez in Paraguay, or Castro in Venezuela. 
 The sdme evil spirits inhabit the^soaJLof^, man iQxday 
 as in the d ays "o7 our forefathers, hundreds and.thou- 
 sands of y^ears ago. The chains that bind them are 
 stronger; they are the ordinances of the State. But 
 let them be once unfastened or even relaxed, and the 
 demons will break out with cries as wild and rage as 
 feajsome as of old. What, then, of moral progress?. 
 The crowd has a shrewd suspicion that there is no 
 such thing. Every proverb, every popular saying, 
 speaks of the past as a golden age, especially in morals, 
 and praises the simple honesty and righteousness of 
 their ancestors at the expense of the falsity and faith- 
 lessness of their descendants. 
 
 If we would estimate human progress, we must lay 
 aside the criteria of happiness or morality; a third may 
 serve us — that of technical inventiion.. What a gap 
 between the little oil-lamp and pinewood torch and 
 electric light ! between the kindling of fire by the tinder 
 and by a match ! between travelling on foot, horseback, 
 or on a raft, and in the electric train or turbine steamer ! 
 between sending a message on foot and by means of 
 telegraph and telephone! between the club and axe of 
 stone and the revolver, machine-gun, torpedo, and 
 armoured cruiser! Why prolong a recital that every 
 educated man can complete for himself? Here, prog- 
 ress is undeniable. It certainly connotes no advance in 
 morality; th? master of all the technical inventions of 
 
334 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 modern times is not necessarily any the better for them. 
 They may, under certain circumstances, make it easier 
 for him to satisfy his criminal selfishness. They do 
 tempt him to abuse his superiority. As a matter of 
 fact, each invention is the cause of new misdeeds that 
 could not have been carried out at all, or not so easily, 
 with less perfect instruments. Nor does it signify any 
 enhancement of human happiness. Ignorance and indi- 
 gence may permit man more subjective satisfaction than 
 the most advanced civilization. It must be remembered 
 that many inventions create, or at least increase and 
 spread, the needs for which they provide elegant satis- 
 factions ; and therefore men, unaware of the needs thus 
 met, did not suffer from them. Moreover, all the me- 
 chanical marvels of the present only provide a small 
 minority with new pleasures from which the vast ma- 
 jority are excluded. The train de luxe which makes 
 travelling a choice pleasure for the rich, carries the poor 
 man only as stoker or brakeman, in which case he is 
 little better off than the driver or postillion of the past. 
 Bank-books and cheques make the management and use 
 of money much more convenient than in the old days, 
 when it had to be carried in a bag; but the man who 
 has no money had no money-bag then, and knows noth- 
 ing of bank-books and cheques to-day. It is unneces- 
 sary to pursue the relation of the many and the few into 
 every invention. Not the whole of humanity, not even 
 the whole of civilized peoples, profit even by those 
 achievements whose influence extends far beyond their 
 immediate effects. The mechanism of international 
 trade to-day certainly prevents famine in any country 
 so long as food is available for export from any othei: 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 335 
 
 spot on the surface of the globe. But in early days 
 famine exercised its devastating sway only at long in- 
 tervals, between which there were often considerable 
 periods of superfluity; whereas to-day an excessive pro- 
 portion of the population of our towns — the " sub- 
 merged tenth " of the English economists — perma- 
 nently suffer from famine, while the days of superfluity 
 are now unknown. Details apart, it may be generally 
 affirmed that morality and happiness or pleasure are in 
 nojsense dependent j)n technical invention. Men can 
 be moral, and feel happy and content, in a condition 
 of barbarism and ignorance, while the most profound 
 moral depravity, a spiritual suffering to which death 
 comes as a relief, and the extremity of brute wretched- 
 ness may accompany all the wonders of mechanical 
 science and the most advanced contest over steam 
 and electricity. If, then, some who despise the 
 world and h ave mast ered life refuse to technical prog- 
 ress any value for humanity, and even deny it recog- 
 nition as progress at all, the point of view, paradoxi- 
 cal as it may seem at a first glance, can readily bei 
 defended. 
 
 But if doubt is possible as to the immediate advan- 
 tage of inventions and discoveries to the great majority 
 of mankind, one thing is not open to doubt or to argu- 
 ment — that they are at once the result and the proof 
 of a wider and more profound knowledge. And here 
 at last we have ^j^e^oitenmi^^of^^ and one 
 
 which enables us to establish the existence, not simply of 
 mere movement, entitling us to pass no judgment of' 
 value, nor of a mere change in the relation of man to 
 nature, but of progress itself. 
 
336 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 Sjn gg. civilizat ion beganmen have beenjncessantl^ 
 £H£S£!^iSS„*b£ilLJ??!^hod of observing and recording 
 ghenginena, in order to penetrate more deeply into tfieir 
 connectjgn and comprehend theirjaws. The transition 
 from the blackest ignorance to clearer and more ex- 
 tensive knowledge may have been quicker or slower, 
 more or less limited in its range; but it has hitherto 
 never stood still. No single invention of utility toyman 
 has ever been lost, no single truth worth knowing ever 
 forgotten after it has once been learned. There is some- 
 thing quite visionary in the notion now and then met 
 with which ascribes to certain classes in earlier times, 
 such as the Egyptian priests, or to individuals, like the 
 adept of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, a 
 secret knowledge that was buried with them. The tem- 
 ples at Thebes were not lit by electric light; the statues 
 of the Gods did not speak to believers through phono- 
 graphs; no one ever possessed the philosopher's stone, 
 which gave him eternal youth and transmuted all metals 
 in gold; until our own day no one knew of X rays or 
 radium. Only the invincible attraction of the mar- 
 vellous induced men to invent and believe these fairy- 
 tales. Thus, Aristarchus was credited with knowledge 
 of the Copernican system which was not really discov- 
 ered till fifteen hundred years later. In this and many 
 other cases ji_brUliaJit^juspiciaa- is conf U5£d„mtb^ the 
 clear insight and_stero.logi.c;^^„prqof. To search 
 through ancient authors for indications of inventions not 
 made till thousands of years later may be an amusing 
 pastime; it Is, however, completely sterile to discover, 
 for example, a description of movable type in Cicero; 
 of the air balloon and flying-machine In Leonardo da 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 337 
 
 Vinci and Cyrano de Bergerac; in others of photog- 
 raphy, telegraphy, and the telephone. In the Opus 
 Majus of Roger Bacon alone decided forecasts are 
 found of gunpowder, the telescope, the air-pump, the 
 air-ship, the diving-bell, the suspension bridge, the 
 steamer, and the locomotive.^ Waggish interpreters 
 have ascribed the destruction of the people of Korah 
 to the explosion of a powder or dynamite mine, and 
 interpreted the trumpets before which the walls of Jeri- 
 cho fell down as cannon; Elijah's chariot of fire as a 
 locomotive or automobile; and the myth of Dsdalus 
 and Icarus as the story of the first kite-flier. This, how- 
 ever, is not serious. Man's needs have alv^^ aroused ' 
 the wish for satisfacti^T that wish was the father of 
 ideas, and a lively imagination soon raised fabulous 
 pictures of imaginary ways of satisfying the need. The 
 difficulty is , however, to ste^ ,f roni ihe_^la^ful activity 
 ofthe imagination, ..acting under the, stirnulHS,. of . some 
 need or longing, to the creation of somethine real ; from ' 
 juggling with ideas to making some definite technical 
 invention or scientific discovery. He who takes the 
 step has nothing in common with the dreamers who went 
 before him, save the need that spurred both on. The 
 step once taken, the ground thus won can never be lost 
 again. 
 
 It was natural that when the intellect awoke after 
 the long night of the Middle Ages, after a thousand 
 years of feudal barbarism, a dispute should arise as to 
 whether permanent progress existed or no. In the 
 famous literary war at the end of the seventeenth cen- 
 
 ^ Frederic de Kougemont, " Les deux cites," Paris, 1874, vol. 1., 
 P- 449- 
 
338 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tury, into which Boisrobert, Lamotte, Perrault, Ter- 
 rason, and others entered with spirit,^ Perrault tried 
 to explain the undeniable fact of the disappearance, 
 throughout many centuries, of all the knowledge of 
 Greece and Rome by a comparison with rivers that will 
 suddenly seem to be dried up, although they do, as 
 a matter of fact, continue their course underground, and 
 appear again in full force at some remote spot.'' The 
 comparison, though striking, is not really applicable. 
 Kjiowjedge once acquired.js .not.. swailofficd^up ,by the 
 earth, nor dqes It continue, to exist heneathk A teacher 
 hands it on to his scholars; sons learn it from their 
 fathers, just as they do in the time when knowledge flour- 
 ishes, or, to use Perrault's image, when the stream flows 
 above ground. Those who tend real, certain knowledge 
 are never numerous; at a time when barbarism is su- 
 preme they may be fewer than usual. But the type could 
 only die out were it confined to a single spot and to 
 a single class there, which was exterminated at the first 
 encounter with some wild foreign conquerer. In this 
 way the conquistadors butchered those who tended the 
 knowledge of Mexico and Peru, before any relations 
 had been established between them such as would have 
 enabled any communication or exchange of knowledge 
 to be made. But in the course of history no such case 
 has occurred within the white or yellow races who have 
 created and tended our civilization. All that has been 
 acquired has therefore always been maintained; the 
 confines of our knowledge have always extended, never 
 
 ' Hippoljrte Rigaut, " Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des 
 modernes," Paris, 1856. 
 
 ' Perrault, " Parallele dea anciens et des modernes," Paris, 1688. 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 339 
 
 closed in, and the progress of knowledge has been 
 constant. 
 
 Knowledge denotes the comp .rfih£l!isiQnJ?.y the under- 
 standing of the o rdered combination and course oi^ 
 p henomena . Intuition a,nd supposition may lead to 
 knowledge, by rousing and directing the attention, but 
 they are not in themselves knowledge. It can only be 
 acquired by the aid of observation consciously directed 
 by the will, in rare and exceptional cases by involun- 
 tary apprehension, or even by unconscious sense impres- 
 sion. Consciousness probably enters into the origin of 
 what is vaguely designated by the word ''instinct / ' 
 in so far as it is not a case of mere tropism. Extremely 
 complicated movements, such as swimming, fencing-, or 
 playing the pianoforte, which must originally have re^ 
 quired the greatest attention and a sustained and con- 
 scious exercise of will for their order and co-ordination, 
 are shown to be capable of an automatism into which 
 conscious ness, attention, and willjioJbnj;gr;,,ejgLtjEr. At 
 the same time it is impossible not to conclude that every 
 instance of this automatism — every instinct, in a word — 
 has ori ginated, in actions directed by will to some pur- 
 pose existing in idea, is the outcome of organized atten- 
 tion. At the moment of the completion of this organ- 
 ization by the nerve-centres consciousness is called up 
 by the summons of instinct ; and instinct is certainly not 
 knowledge. At the best, it may be a source of knowl- 
 edge when consciousness, to some extent a looker-on at 
 the manifestations of its own instinctive life, is at a 
 given moment aroused by curiosity out of the dull 
 acceptance of the usual and stimulated to ask the cause 
 and purpose of the instinctive action. In every case 
 
340 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 then, knowledge premises an operation of the conscious- 
 ness which observes phenomena with the aid of the 
 attention, and combines its perceptions by means of in- 
 terpretation and judgment into connected ideas. The 
 more alert and sustained the attention, the more accu- 
 rate and complete is observation, and the closer the 
 correspondence of the ideas and judgments with the 
 phenomena on which they are based; the more real, 
 in a word, will be the knowledge. &vowledge gro- 
 gresses as the reality of its content increases. If, not 
 satisfied with the result, it is desired to investigate the 
 mechanism by which it is obtained, the matter must be 
 put thus : Progress is an increasejn_the_cagacity tojet 
 attendon in^ct^ign artificially, and to sustain it by the 
 exclusion of distracting objects. In other words, prog- 
 ress, in the last resort, is the development of the force 
 and endurance of the human will TexEressgd in t he intel- 
 lectual^pheres of attentioji and mhibition. The func- 
 ition of the latter is to restrain the trains of new ideas 
 jthat are, under the stimulus of sense impressions and 
 association, continually trying to force their way into 
 the consciousness, so long as it is directed to a definite 
 field of observation, and to complete and logically 
 develop the results obtained from It. 
 
 It follows, from the definition of progress as an 
 increase of knowledge by an extension of its real ele- 
 ments of its content, that the imagination, which dis- 
 poses of the elements of reality at its own arbitrary 
 pleasure, and makes no claim to the exact representa- 
 tions of phenomena, can play no direct part in progress. 
 Art, too, as the creation of the imagination, is equally 
 invalid as a criterion of progress. Therefore it was an 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 341 
 
 error to try to solve the question of progress by a com- 
 parison of ancient and modern works of art, as was 
 attempted in the famous strife of old and new in the 
 seventeenth century. Nothing is proved for or against 
 progress by placing Homer above Dante, Tasso, and 
 Milton; Sophocles above Shakespeare and Schiller; 
 Phidias above Michael Angelo; Zeuxis above Raphael, 
 or vice versa. The spheres of imagination and of knowl- 
 edge do overlap, but not coincide, j^robably human 
 imagination was more fertile at the beginning^_than 
 Jater on.^ The scanty knowledge then possessed by man 
 could neither consciously nor unconsciously rein in the 
 wild and tumultuous course of his unbridled imagina- 
 tion. Its gambols, spurred on and guided solely by 
 need, desire, and longing, must have been extraordi- 
 narily pleasurable, because they corresponded fully to 
 the organic appetites and flattered them. Fantasy , 
 hardl y impeded by the attention, which w as as ye t but 
 little developed artificially, and limited by no considera- 
 tion of reality, known or unknown, dominated the whole 
 realm of brain activity, and developed with a luxuri- 
 ance never found in the disciplined reason and trained 
 observation of civilized man, except when his mental 
 balance is disturbed by disease and he raves under the 
 influence of acute mania, or of alcohol, opium, hashish, 
 or other poisons. No poetic invention of later times 
 comes up to the myths and fables of antiquity in vivid- 
 ness and wealth of astonishing incident ; and even to-day 
 the fairy-tales of savage races are far superior to the 
 
 " J. B. Vico, " Nuova Scienza," second edition, Naples, 1730, book 
 i., chap, ii.: "In the childhood of the world men must naturally 
 have been sublime poets." 
 
342 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 artistic inventions of the same sort among civilized 
 peoples. Progress digs^tjh^^vnngs of„JEfigasus or nar- 
 rows the space for his flight. The need of being care- 
 ful in his movements spoils his glorious turbulence and 
 the beauty of his unfettered soaring. 
 
 The progress of knowledge has only been indirectly 
 of advantage to art, by placing at the disposal of the 
 imagination a greater wealth of reliable ideas, and 
 demanding, side by side with the development of a 
 sense of reality, an Increased co-operation of critical 
 reason, and the logical faculty in the creative work of 
 the fancy. Yet it is very likely that the productions of 
 llnstructed artists may possess far less of that power of 
 'suggestion, on which their aesthetic effect wholly de- 
 pends, than those of much more Ignorant creators. 
 They believed ^ in the Inventions of their fantasy, while 
 the moderns stand outside of them and regard them as 
 merely so much intellectual construction. No modern 
 could emulate the naive creations of antiquity, such as 
 the hybrid centaurs, sphinxes, satyrs, griffins, harpies, 
 etc., or permit the Gods to interfere In human destiny 
 after the fashion of Homer and the tragedians. 
 How unconvinced, and therefore unconvincing. Is the 
 treatment of the supernatural In Tasso's " Jerusa- 
 lem " 1 How difficult it Is for the modern reader to 
 make anything of Shakespeare's witches and appari- 
 tions! They cannot possibly Inspire terror, because 
 the poet obviously does not really believe In them him- 
 self. 
 
 For what purpose does man make_thg_severe effort to 
 strengthen Jhls jKiU, sustain and sharpen his attention, 
 
 ' " Fingunt^ simul credunt" (Tacitus). 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 343 
 
 control the aimless association of his ideas, and intro- 
 duce more and more reality into those ideas — ^in a word, 
 to acquire more, more certain and m o re compr ehensive 
 knowledge ? For the one great purpose of all life — an 
 easier and more perfect adaptation to the natural con- 
 ditions of existence. 
 
 Progress is assuredly jrinvpment towards a goal, but 
 this goal is not mystical, has not been conceived by a 
 supernatural spirit, or determined by a supernatural 
 will; it Is throughout earthly, copcrete, immanent, thg 
 same for all life — it is self-preservation. Progress In^ 
 knowledge permits all the resources of nature that can 
 be used by man to be more profitably employed, the evils 
 and dangers that threatened him feo be more frequently 
 avoided, pleasure to be Increased, discomfort lessened, 
 and the average duration of life to be prolonged. The 
 immediate effect of Increased knowledge Is purely utili- 
 tarian and biological. Indirectly it is psychological and 
 moral. Itinc reases self-reliance in man , and gives him 
 a rlslnpf sense of his own dignity. It rouses resistance 
 to selfish domination, tutelage, exploitation. When a 
 man has reached the stage at which he sees that every 
 assertion, instead of being blindly accepted, should be 
 subjected to the critical examination of the reason and 
 compared with the facts of experience, hejiojonger^be: 
 li eves thatsome men are born with a right to liY.e „by the 
 labour - of their fellows, and others with the duty of toil- 
 in g for their advanta.ge ; and he refuses to part with the 
 fruits of his efforts except in exchange for useful and 
 desirable services. More perfect attention and stronger 
 will power enable him to fix one thgugljt more lastrnglj, 
 and to maintain it against the attack upon the conscious- 
 
344 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ness of distracting associations ; to develop it consequen- 
 tially, and pursue its ramifications ; to form judgments 
 in which the causes and effects of phenomena are fol- 
 lowed up in close harmony with reality. Therefore he 
 becomes more and more capable of penetrating the 
 multi tudinous and often exceedingly c unning dis guises 
 of exploit ing p arasitism, a nd defending himself effectu - 
 ally aga inst the sycopha nts who are hidden in the back- 
 ground o f old an djionourable institu tions^ or crowd 
 up to him under the masks of patrons, protectors, and 
 helpers, and slip their clever fingers in his pockets. 
 Villa,^ has correctly pointed out that men a lways aim at 
 ne"ar goals because they do not see or know distant ones. 
 But progress consists in a sharpening of their intellec- 
 tual sight that will perrni tihe m to fix thei r_gaze on more 
 an d more distant go als, and_ta pe netrate an d disentangle 
 increasingly comglexjzonditions.^ 
 
 Increasing knowledge, moreover, involves a higher 
 value~fo r p ersonHity T and a limitation and restriction 
 of parasitism. More and more t|ig^ i ndividual realizes 
 himself as an end, and pays less and less attention to 
 sounding s ophistries that declare it tO -be a duty, and at 
 the same time a virtuous and heroic act, to allow himself 
 to be abused by others. At an early stage of develop- 
 ment recognized morality is summed up in the Horatian 
 epigram, " Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." 
 How should it not be " sweet and honourable to die for 
 one's country " when, as Plato teaches in the " Re- 
 public," the individual is nothing, the State — that is, 
 the country — all ? Not only the State, to which one can 
 always assign some moral greatness, but the p rivile ged 
 ' Guido Villa, " L'idealismo moderno," Turin, 1905, pp. 205 et seg. 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 345 
 
 and^ugger class wit hin the Statg. Lucan ' expresses this 
 with incomparable brutality: "The Gods have never >c 
 demeaned their providence to the level of your Ufe, your y, 
 death (the common people). The people all imitate ■< 
 the movement of the upper class. Mankind l ives for -^ 
 the advantage £f^ the few. " Later moralists and 
 philosophers cynically laid bare the inner meaning of 
 such unctuous morality when they placed the ruler in the 
 place of the State. Thus Alberic Gentilis called the 
 power of kings over their peoples a natural, necessary, 
 unconditional, primitive right, like that of the father 
 over his children. This, in an Italian educated in the 
 traditions of classical education, Is obviously a reminis- 
 cence of the Twelve Tables: " Patri famillas ius vitae 
 et necis in liberos esto " — " The father shall have the 
 right of life and death over his children " — supple- 
 mented by the more practical " Quidquld filius acquirit, 
 patri acquirit " — " Whatever the son acquires, he ac- 
 quires for his father." 
 
 Hobbes gave his views an even harsher form. He 
 held peace to be the highest good, and freedom its 
 greatest enemy. In it he saw the source of all evil, 
 and regarded despotism as the only means of stopping it, 
 with the Church as an Instrument for the maintenance of 
 order. What a chasm between the views of Plato, 
 Gentilis, or Hobbes and those of H6ffdlng, ° who esti- 
 
 ' "Pharsalia," Lib. V., v., 343 et seq.: 
 
 "... Numquam sic cura decorum 
 Se premit, ut vestrse morti, vestrasque saluti 
 Fata vacent. Procerum motus liaee cuncta sequuntur 
 Humanum paucis vivit genus." 
 
 ' Harald HofiFding, " Filosofiske Probleme," Kopenhagen, 1902, p. 
 
346 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 mates the moral worth of a society by the extent to 
 which it rega rds the individual, not m^relx as a m^jn^ 
 but an end! Or, to take other milestones, between the 
 " L'etat, c'est moi " of Louis XIV. to Frederick the 
 Great's "I am the first servant of the State" and the 
 " Declaration of the Rights of Man." I do not propose 
 to enter into modern ana rchism , which sees in the State 
 the systema lizea exploitation of the _n}gnY by a privi - 
 leged class : in the idea of country, with its poetic 
 imagery, a cunning speculation on the part of this class 
 for trading on the easy sentimentalityjaf jhe unthinking; 
 and in the man without property, a man who, having 
 no country and no interest in the State, would be a fool 
 to make the smallest sacrifice in defence of the privileges 
 of those who exploit him. Such views must ap pear 
 abominably imm orali even criminal, w hen j udged by a 
 morali ty deve loped from the order established by a 
 privileged class. Crude and undeveloped as they are, 
 however, they contain the_ outlines of_ thg morality gi 
 ^ne^ order — an order in which the individual recog- 
 nizes himself as an end, brands all exploitation as a 
 crime, and regards as a revolting and unnatural im- 
 piorality any suggestion that he should sacrifice him self 
 to an end outside h iaselfj in whatever flattering name 
 that end may be dressed up. 
 
 Increasing knowledge has one consequence that is 
 apparently — but only apparently — directed against in- 
 dividual a utonom y and the sovereignty of p ersonality . 
 
 74 (trans. Galen M. Fisher, New York, 1905, p. 163): "The test of 
 the perfection of a human society ... is, to what degree is eve rY 
 gergsjji so p laced and treated that he is not only a mere means, but 
 also always at the same time an end?" 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 347 
 
 Man's greater insight teaches him that his fellow-men 
 are unequal by nature ; that there are among them strong 
 and weak, armed and unarmed; and that it is not easy 
 for the former to resist the temptation to misuse their 
 natural superiority at the expense of the less favourably 
 endowed. Gradually his intelligence discovers a means 
 of protection against the attacks of the strong in the 
 organized combination of the middling . It is the 
 awakened self-consciousness of the individual which 
 determines him to sacrifice a portion of his independence 
 by freely entering a community and submitting to 
 limitations on his freedom, in order to save himself by 
 the small sacrifice thus voluntarily imposed from being 
 reduced to the condition of a slave or chattel by the 
 powerful parasites whom he could not resist in isolation. 
 At the beginning, even in this systematic union of the 
 middling for mutual protection, inequality plays its part. 
 Even here the super ior legder rnmes to the fronj: . and 
 compels others to gather round him, in accordance with 
 his views, by the weight of his personality, by persua- 
 sion, command, or threats. It is a psychological 
 process practically not very different from that by 
 which the chieftains in early and very early times gath- 
 ered their following about them ; but its end is the exact 
 opposite. The superior man . gath^ ers, Ms comjaanions 
 about him, not for attack, but for defen ce; not to ex- 
 ploit, but to protect them., The end itself has an edu- 
 cative effect on the community, and soon the most 
 limited and least independent of its members sees why 
 he belongs to it ; that he is, in it, an equal among equals ; 
 that it safeguards his freedom and his independence. 
 Thus, in the common social life of man, progress con- 
 
348 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 sists in the gradual educ ation of conscious, voluntary 
 citizenship . ! ^^laitation becomes more and more dif- 
 ficult, until at last it becomes impracticable either by 
 force or cunning. Anyone who creates value will ex- 
 change it only for equal value. Symbiosis takes the 
 place of parasitism. " 
 
 The bjological significan£e of this is that over a wide 
 area progress brings the hum an species into the same 
 relation to nature as aU other„liyiag_ specieSj They 
 adapt their st ructu re to the conditions of their environ- 
 ment, or, if they fail, succumb. Within the species the 
 position of the individual relative to his environment is 
 the same : each has to struggle for survival with his own 
 means, and death is the in exorable penalty jf incapacity. 
 The position of the human species alone was, as we have 
 seen, originally different. Their structure was not 
 adapted to their environment. For hundreds of thou- 
 sands of years they endeavoured to adapt themselves 
 to it, undertaking that adaptation, not throughout their 
 organism, but solely by their brains, with the help 
 of observation, invention, judgment, and knowledge. 
 Within the human species a great inequality in method 
 of adaptation developed itself as between individuals. 
 The r nore efficient , following the law of least effort, em- 
 ployed the convenient and productive method of para- 
 sitism at the expense of their less well-equipped fellows, 
 on whom alone fell the hard labour of extracting from 
 [nature the means of subsistence of the whole species. 
 Gradually, however, the human species rendered the 
 conditions of its hostile environment favourable to itself 
 by artificial means, and individuals, instead of practis- 
 ing parasitism, were able to take direct advantage of the 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 349 
 
 favourable conditions of existence artificially created by 
 common exertion. Completed adaptation, then, is seen, 
 on the one hand, in the alleviation of human existence 
 in the midst of hostile nature, and, on the other, in 
 the penalization of parasitism by the increased power of 
 self-protection ; so that the law of least effort no longer 
 compels the most powerful individuals necessarily to 
 take recourse to parasitism. 
 
 Thus we have obtained an exhaustive answer to the 
 question of progress. The notion of progress has appli- 
 cation and meaning only for humanity. There can be no 
 progress in the universe. The eternity of the world, and 
 the absence of any end from which such progress could 
 acquire significance, exclude it. In an eternal universe 
 human thought can only discern eternal motion in a 
 cycle or cycles, of which all the periods possess the same 
 worth and significance. We cannot speak of progress 
 within the solar and planetary system, or even in the 
 orders of living creatures. There is no objective — that 
 is to say, non-human — aground for assigning higher 
 worth in the universe to a globe with a hard crust than 
 to a drop of molten fluid, or less to a completely scorified 
 and frozen orb than to our planet in its present or primi- 
 tive condition. Were any difference to be made as be- 
 tween such conditions, the primitive drop of molten fluid 
 must rank above the stiff-crusted orb and the ball of 
 ice, inasmuch as all the electric, chemical, and me- 
 chanical properties of energy must undoubtedly have 
 more powerful, free, and varied play in the form of 
 drops than later, when, its processes becoming slow, 
 they cool off into globes. Nor are we entitled to gen- 
 eralize from the development of the unicellular organ- 
 
350 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ism and apply to strongly differentiated plahts and 
 animals descriptive terms such as " advance " and 
 " progress," which suggest a judgment of value. On 
 the contrary, it could be very well maintained that the 
 simplest living creatures are more perfect than the more 
 complicated, because they are more capable of resistance 
 to hostile environment, more successful in maintaining 
 themselves, in spite of unfavourable circumstances, and 
 are practically immortal, since, instead of dying of their 
 own inherent weakness, they can only be destroyed by 
 the chance action of some external power. With 
 naively unconscious bias we have taken humanity and 
 human life as our standard of value, and test the worth 
 of all things, beings, and conditions by it. The more 
 closely any being resembles man, the more favourable 
 any condition is for human life, the higher is the value 
 we assign to them, and we conceive of their end as lying 
 in resemblance to man, becoming favourable to his exist- 
 ence, and speak of development in that direction as 
 progress. On such grounds we esteem the development 
 of the planetary system from primary vapour, the cool- 
 ing of the primary drop to form the habitable globe, the 
 differentiation of the unicellule into mollusc, worm, 
 vertebrate, warm-blooded animal, and mammal, as an 
 advance in the scale, as a movement towards perfection, 
 as progress. Such a view is based on an anthropo- 
 morphic illusion which cannot stand against scientific 
 criticism. 
 
 Even within the human race progress is hardly to be 
 thought of as regards the fundamental characteristics of 
 human nature and human life. Human memory is very 
 far from perfect, and it has very probably become less 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 351 
 
 powerful since it began to help itself out by means of 
 writing. Nor has man become happier. On the con- 
 trary, the preponderance of intellect over emotion causes 
 him to create imaginary evils, and prevents him from 
 enjoying the pleasures he possesses with the old reckless 
 glee. Nor can man to-day be said to be better than his 
 distant — even than his most distant— ancestors. He 
 has only learned to conceal his selfishness and his un- 
 sympathetic hardness towards his fellows or to disguise 
 it as love of his kind. The point remains in which real 
 progress is visible in the domain of will. The total 
 energy of the human will has possibly not increased ; it 
 is certainly no longer displayed, as among barbarians, in 
 violent ebb and flow, in the wild and sudden outbursts 
 of extreme and transitory exaltation that give rise to 
 deeds of heroism. But it is regular, disciplined, and 
 sustained, and therefore far more adapted for regular 
 and productive employment than the wild, untamed 
 force of primitive man. The one is like a canal that 
 drives mill-wheels and supplies the driving-power of 
 electric turbines ; the other is a mountain bum, that gen- 
 erally trickles along in a tiny streamlet, or dries up alto- 
 gether, but sometimes comes down with fury, tearing up 
 rocks, and laying waste woods in its course. When the 
 will is thus disciplined, even if its energy be not in- 
 creased, it permits the attention to be concentrated and 
 sustained, phenomena to be observed with more fruit- 
 ful results, a further tracing of their causal connection, 
 and anticipation of their consequences, judgments to be 
 formed and conclusions reached of a more thoroughly 
 logical kind. The result is that the sense of reality be- 
 comes more acute ; the ideas cover a wider range, present 
 
352 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 and future; and knowledge is extended, while its basis 
 becomes more secure. In the last resort knowledge as- 
 sists man to establish himself more readily within the 
 natural order, provide himself with more favourable 
 conditions of existence, and satisfy his instinct of self- 
 preservation more completely. Knowledge is thus 
 adaptation on the intellectual side, and progress the 
 return more and more to that relation to his environ- 
 ment in which man found himself before the first 
 Ice Age — a stage that may be called paradisical. In 
 other words, progress is the artificial re-creation of the 
 favourable conditions of life no longer provided 
 by nature, and the extension of those conditions, not 
 to favoured individuals alone, but to the average 
 man. 
 
 Such a conclusion, such an answer, to the question 
 of progress will, no doubt, be to many not only disap- 
 pointing, but positively revolting. " What ! " they will 
 cry, " is progress to result merely in returning us to 
 that condition now enjoyed from birth on by every ani- 
 mal and plant species that flourishes on the earth? 
 Have hundreds of thousands of years of exertion 
 brought us no more advantage than a share of the privi- 
 leges of the smallest bacillus? Is this all we have at- 
 tained through a knowledge that takes the universe for 
 its province, and tells us the secrets of the matter, con- 
 dition, and movement of the first cosmic vapour; 
 through all our discoveries, our inventions — that we 
 may live our little life and no more, and not live it so 
 happily as did our remotest ancestors, who enjoyed a 
 soft, warm air, that freed them from the need of shelter, 
 fire, and clothing, and food that could be plucked from 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 353 
 
 every tree? Is all this toil and labour to go for such 
 a miserable end? Mere life cannot possibly be worth 
 this huge, incessant expense of spirit! " 
 
 The indignation of wounded self-esteem cannot do 
 away with the humiliating truth. The objective worth 
 of human life, from a superhuman point of view, we 
 cannot know. To mankind it has hitherto always 
 seemed a good of the highest value, although Schiller 
 maintained the contrary, and may have been right in 
 exceptional individual cases. Self-preservation has al- 
 ways seemed the best use to which force and capacity 
 could be put. Life feels itself as an end, and is satisfied 
 therewith. Poets and thinkers have denied it. They 
 have declared that some exertions are not worth while. 
 Martial maintained that it was the greatest mistake 
 " propter vitam vivendi perdere causus " — to lose the 
 causes for living for the sake of life. He maintained, 
 that is to «ay, that life has causes that lie outside and 
 above it. Eighteen centuries later Georg Simmel ex- 
 presses the same view when he finds the cause of the 
 unrest, discontent, and vague yet painful longings of the 
 present to lie in the fact that in the complexity of mod- 
 em civilization and the extent to which the division of 
 labour has been carried the individual, divorced from 
 the purpose or utility of his work, feels his existence 
 to be empty and meaningless, and is discontented with 
 his life and with himself. These are brilliant ideas that 
 occur as one sits at one's desk. They are not drawn 
 from contemplation of the spectacle of actual human 
 life. The sense of life is pleasurable in itself, and af- 
 fords in itself a satisfaction that is sufficient stimulus 
 to the living to cling to it at any price. Not until the 
 
354 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tide of life in the organism begins to ebb, and the chem- 
 ical and physical processes connected with life begin to 
 circulate more slowly and less smoothly through the 
 cells, does kinssthesis cease to be pleasurable and begin 
 to contain elements of positive pain, which overpower, 
 and finally suppress, the others. Then, and only then, 
 does the reason, stimulated by subconscious feelings of 
 distress, begin to question the end of existence and the 
 meaning of its own activity. 
 
 To philosophize about the meaning and purpose of 
 life, in so far as it is an inward impulse, and not mere 
 imitation or intellectual gymnastic, is the sign of' ill- 
 humour or weakness, sickness or old age. A man in 
 the plentitude of his strength, who has a good appetite 
 for his meals several times a day, loves his wife passion- 
 ately, and finds joy in his growing children, and pleasure 
 in the opening buds of spring, never asks himself 
 whether these feelings and impulses and their satisfac- 
 tion make life worth living and justify its existence. He 
 does not seek for any hidden meaning and purpose in 
 life, but finds both completely satisfied in the immediate 
 sensations of the moment. Even the incomprehensibility 
 of organized labour in a civilized community, and the 
 intellectual nullity of the function performed by any 
 individual under a far-reaching division of labour, does 
 not spoil the temper of the worker, or fill him with pain- 
 ful doubt as to purpose and worth of his existence. If 
 Georg Simmel had studied popular wisdom, he would 
 have come upon a French proverb : " II n'y a pas de sot 
 metier, il n'y a que de sottes gens" — ^" There is no 
 stupid trade, only stupid people." To the plain man 
 every occupation seems right and rational which pro- 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 355 
 
 vtdes him and his with bread and butter. So long as 
 it be sufficiently lucrative, he does not trouble as to its 
 significance to the community as a whole. Speculation 
 as to the meaning and purpose of life is a function of 
 the reason, while the instinct of life and the joy in 
 life are feelings that arise and continue outside of the 
 reason, and uninfluenced by it. 
 
 The question as to the meaning and purpose of the 
 life of man and of humanity belongs to the same order 
 as the questions as to the meaning and purpose of the 
 universe as a whole, and the origin, goal, and end of 
 the world-processes, which give rise to fantastic ravings, 
 but admit of no rational answer. So long as we keepi 
 our eyes fixed on reality, and, instead of running off/ 
 after will-o'-the-wisps, submit to the guidance of factsJ 
 the conclusion is inevitably forced upon us that tha 
 one object of the endeavours of historic and prehistoric 
 men has been self-preservation. They observed, investi- 
 gated, thought, struggled towards knowledge, invented 
 and discovered, in order that their lives might be safer, 
 easier, and better, and they themselves obtain a larger 
 share of pleasure. They founded States, organized so- 
 cieties, created institutions, customs, habits, and laws, 
 waged wars, conquered, and stirred up revolutions, in 
 order at first to satisfy the needs of superior individuals 
 fully, and with least trouble to themselves, by sacri- 
 ficing to them the crowd of average persons, and, later, 
 in order to confine the parasitism of these superior beings 
 within ever-narrower limits, and to secure to the average 
 man, to an even greater extent, the enjoyment of the 
 fruits of his own labour. The self-preservation of hu- 
 manity against hostile nature on the one hand, and the 
 
356 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 assimilation of the claims of the average and the su- 
 perior individuals to the enjoyment of life within 
 humanity on the other — this is the goal and object of 
 progress. Those who have helped it on have always 
 been engaged In some immediate concrete task. The 
 vague search for a goal of progress, postulated to lie out- 
 side of the existence of the species, belongs to dreams, 
 not to knowledge, and those who have busied themselves 
 with weaving this dream and dressing It out in beautiful 
 language have had no share In progress. At best they 
 are the musicians who accompany its course with 
 rhythmic measures. 
 
 ' Progress has always advanced In the same way 
 throughout the course of human history. We have seen 
 that it consists in a widening and deepening of knowl- 
 edge. This is the work of the few. Civilization Is de- 
 veloped In the brains of exceptional men endowed with 
 more than common powers of thought and will, keen 
 and sustained attention, comprehensive consciousness, 
 manifold associations, and an alert sense of reality — 
 in a word, with unusual energy in the brain-cells. The 
 causes that retard corporate advance in knowledge do 
 not affect such men : they have no superstitious reverence 
 for tradition, no hatred of the new as such. The world 
 is more to them than books are ; they listen to the voice 
 of nature rather than to any teacher; and thus acquire 
 from events and their connection perceptions that are 
 new and personal. All the views, discoveries, and Inven- 
 tions that represent a better adaptation of the species 
 to the natural conditions of Its existence are their work. 
 They are the true heroes of human history, not the six 
 categories distinguished by Carlyle — the deified tribal 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 357 
 
 patriarch, the prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, and 
 king.^ Hero-worship directs itself to these categories, 
 it is true, and not to the silent genius whose creation is 
 for the most part accomplished in solitary obscurity, 
 who is during his lifetime almost always misunder- 
 stood, if not unknown, and who hardly ever sees his 
 exertions bear fruit, so that he may have any share in 
 the enjoyment of them. 
 
 The definition given of great men by Carlyle in 
 " Sartor Resartus " is mere mystic talk. " They are the 
 inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that Divine 
 Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed 
 from epoch to epoch, and by some named History." 
 Vico ^ sees the truth much more accurately when he says, 
 of the heroes : " They were in the highest degree rough, 
 wild, of most limited intellect, but of vast imagination 
 and the most ardent passions, and as the result of these 
 characteristics they must have been barbaric, cruel, 
 harsh, wild, proud, difficult to manage, and obstinate in 
 whatever they set before themselves." Current history 
 is for the most part confined to heroes of Vico's type, 
 to whom Carlyle would likewise have accorded some 
 measure of worship. They rivet the attention of con- 
 temporaries, whose accounts transmit their wonder to 
 
 ' Thomas Carlyle, " On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic 
 in History," six lectures reported, with emendations and additions. 
 Thomas Carlyle, " Sartor Resartus," London, Ward Lock and Co., 
 
 p. 130. 
 
 ' " Cinque libri di Giambattista Vico de' principj d'una scienza 
 nuova d'intorno alia commune natura della nazioni," Second im- 
 pression, Naples, 1730, p. 320: " Gli eroi . . . erano in sommo grado 
 goffi, fieri, di cortissimo intendimento, di vastissime fantasie, di 
 violentissime passioni; per lo ettes que doveltei essere zotici, crudi, 
 aspri, fieri, orgogliosi difficili ed ostinati ne'lor propositi." 
 
358 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 posterity. They provide the melodrama of history — 
 wars, conquests, revolutions. To them is assigned the 
 making of the map, the foundation, limitation, and . 
 alteration of States, and the origin of constitutions and 
 laws. They are regarded as embodiments of the en- 
 deavours and accomplishments of a nation or epoch. 
 But behind these brilliant and boisterous figures are the 
 students, engaged on the real, slow work of adaptation 
 to which human existence is due. They are the edu- 
 cators of mankind in Lessing's sense. The knowledge 
 they acquire becomes common property of subsequent 
 generations. In it the youth are brought up while they 
 are still able to learn, before they are petrified in habits 
 which resist everything new. The effect of this gradual 
 extension of the circle of vision of the masses of people, 
 who could never discover new truths for themselves, is 
 that natural resources are better used and the worth of 
 the individual increased. 
 
 Mighty parasites do nothing for the extension of 
 knowledge — ^that is, for progress. But their clear-eyed 
 selfishness makes them appropriate all discoveries and 
 inventions that can be of advantage to them by making 
 it easier for them to exploit the weak. It is their part 
 to translate the intellectual results of the students into 
 actual practical reality. They therefore endeavour to 
 gain a monopoly of these results, but cannot prevent 
 the use and knowledge of them spreading in the course 
 of time. Thus, unconsciously, they are arming the weak 
 against themselves, and making their exploitation more 
 and more difficult for themselves, with the result that, 
 within a measurable time, parasitism will become im- 
 possible for all but the very strongest human types, for 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 359 
 
 those of the most powerful will, greatest cunning and 
 depravity. 
 
 Humanity lives by its men of genius ; but they do not 
 live by it. Humanity gives them no more than any 
 other of its members, and incomparably less than it 
 gives the exploiting parasite. It is natural that this 
 should be felt to be somewhat unjust and ungrateful, but 
 the sentiment — a simple religious reflex — arises from 
 the same source as the primeval worship of the sun, the 
 phallic ritual and the service of all the beneficial forces 
 of nature. It makes no difference to the sun, which 
 sustains all the life upon earth, whether or no we are 
 grateful, the motive of our gratitude being partly the 
 desire to keep it in a shining humour. It radiates light 
 and warmth without knowing or intending it, and since 
 it sacrifices nothing for us, we are under no moral obli- 
 gation to be grateful. Creative genius does not discover 
 or invent with the same unconsciousness as the sun, but 
 any intention of giving happiness to the human race is 
 as far from one as from the other. Consideration for 
 humanity and the thought of benefiting it play no part 
 in stimulating, genius. When a new truth has been dis- 
 covered, then, and not till then, this consideration may 
 occur, on reflection. But the motive powers of that 
 genius are those common to all men — need, whether 
 higher or lower, that is to say, more or less generalized 
 or differentiated; the desire for knowledge, which is 
 a more powerful instrument in their hands than in those 
 of the average man, and the demand for self-advan- 
 tage and personal gain. He has no moral claim to the 
 gratitude of others, and his reward is in the satisfaction 
 inherent in the attainment of the goal he has set before 
 
36o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 himself. And there is a further consideration : no man 
 of genius creates by his own means alone. He is heir to 
 the labour of the men of genius who have gone before 
 him, without whom his existence would be impossible. 
 He receives on his entry into life an inheritance which 
 he puts out to interest and increases. Thus those who 
 have advanced the human race form a spiritual family, 
 and transmit their acquired knowledge from generation 
 to generation. They form a special genealogical suc- 
 cession, elevated above the average. They are, as it 
 were, a species within the species, a human organism 
 differentiated for a special function. All the compulsory 
 institutions of State and society, created by Vico's 
 " Eroi," to satisfy their own parasitic needs, form a 
 framework into which every individual must fit, whether 
 he will or no, if he be not strong enough to burst it or 
 adapt it to his purposes. The imprisonment does not 
 necessarily bring him into any closer relationship with 
 those who share it. It is quite false to regard the ap- 
 parent unity presented by a nation or species, as a result 
 of this merely external pressure, as organic, as is 
 done by Schaffle, Lilienthal, Gumplovicz, Durckheim, 
 Worms, etc. Knowledge, on the other hand, does really 
 unite the individuals who partake of it in an intellectual 
 and moral bond. It gives to all without taking from 
 any. It equips man for the struggle of existence, with 
 an implement artificially adapted for the purpose, such 
 as he could never have forged for himself, such as he 
 could gain only by entrance to the community. Any 
 Individual member of a community that does not share 
 in its acquired knowledge is like a blind or deaf man, 
 or a fledgling without wings. He who does possess it 
 
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS 361 
 
 Kas inherited it, like his physical stature and his inborn 
 characteristics, from the generations who have gone 
 before, with whom and with his fellow-men he is organ- 
 ically related by its means. 
 
 The effect of progress is thus apparently contradic- 
 tory. On the one hand it renders the individual more 
 independent and more capable of maintaining himself 
 against his fellows ; on the other hand, it unites individ- 
 uals in a combination beneficial to them all, whose dis- 
 solution would leave them less developed and less well 
 equipped. Both effects are, however, but different 
 aspects of a progressive adaptation to the given condi- 
 tions of existence. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 ESCHATOLOGY 
 
 The English saying, " Don't prophesy unless you 
 know," affords a really exhaustive definition of the 
 relation of human knowledge to the future. But so 
 incessant and so strong is man's desire to penetrate the 
 vast region of the unknown, that any visionary with the 
 gift of words who plays the seer and indulges in absurd 
 prophecies will find listeners ready to believe with all 
 their souls. It was religion that first emphasized 
 eschatology. It was, indeed, always its strongest at- 
 traction, side by side with the protection that it claimed 
 to afford against all the evils by which man was threat- 
 ened. With the same audacious confidence with which 
 it informed them of the final causes and destiny of the 
 world, it revealed all the secrets of the' future. The 
 Kathaka-Upanishad relates that the Brahman Naciketas 
 descended into the kingdom of the dead, in order, 
 unmoved by all the promises of transitory felicity, to 
 wrest from the God of Death the knowledge of what 
 lies beyond the grave.^ Buddhism teaches its followers 
 that the world returns to nothingness, in order to rise 
 out of nothingness to a new cycle of existence. The 
 Zend Avesta describes the Paradise of Light which is 
 
 'Hermann Oldenberg, "Buddha: His Life, Teaching and Fol- 
 lowers," Berlin, i88i, p. 57. 
 
 362 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 363 
 
 the eternal abode of the righteous. The religion of the 
 Northern Germans is less optimistic: it envisages the 
 conflagration of the world and the twilight of the Gods 
 — ^that is to say, the fearful destruction of all that is. 
 The prophets of Israel, instead of pointing to a here- 
 after, give a sufficiently joyous picture of the future 
 state of existence here, where the sword is made into 
 a ploughshare, and the wolf and the lamb lie down 
 together. Christianity prophesies the Last Judgment, 
 the Resurrection of the Dead, and the kingdom of God 
 upon earth. Islam promises to the faithful an eternal 
 life, with all the pleasures of the flesh. The psycho- 
 logical explanation of all these dreams' is simple : they 
 arise from a desire. The wish is father t o these 
 thoughts. Man Is afraid of death. He would like to 
 live in happiness for ever. This desire. In the imagina- 
 tion of excited mystics, takes the form of a premonition, 
 a vision, a promise, and religion authenticates it. 
 
 Geologists, too, and astronomers have followed in the 
 track of theologists on to the unsure ground of escha- 
 tology. In doing so, they cease to be scientific, for In 
 this field there are no certainties, only possibilities — or, 
 at the best, probabilities. Most of them have prophe- 
 sied that our planet will be turned to ice or to the 
 scorified conditions of the moon, through the chemical 
 combination of air and water; others that it will evap- 
 orate through concussion with a heavenly body. In the 
 once case humanity would be frozen to icicles, in the 
 other it would flicker away as atoms — in each case its 
 destiny would be accomplished ; it would disappear, and 
 leave no trace. Such a denouement to the human drama 
 is not unlike the closing scene of the Voluspa. The 
 
364 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 spectators are sent disappointed away. What they 
 want to know is not how humanity will come to an end. 
 That its existence will terminate, as that of each in- 
 dividual is doomed to do, they have no doubt. They 
 have had to put up with this inevitable lot as best they 
 may. What they would like to know clearly is the 
 form that human life will take before its end is reached. 
 They want exact and detailed information from those 
 who undertake to unveil the future. How will the 
 different States and peoples develop? Will Europe 
 continue to rule the world, or will the sceptre pass to 
 America, or even to Asia? What will happen to the 
 positive religions, to the form and principles of law? 
 What changes will be undergone by the hierarchy of 
 class, the sense of beauty, 8Se estimation and practice 
 of arts and science ? Will the conceptions of good and 
 evil, virtue and vice, honour and disgrace, alter, and 
 how? What new ideas will replace the old? What 
 progress can be expected in the material sphere ? What 
 inventions and discoveries will come to make human life 
 easier, richer, and more beautiful? 
 
 None of the facts we know, none of the methods at 
 present in existence, are adequate to give a definite 
 answer to these definite questions. Any attempt at 
 detailed forecast would be a mere amplification or con- 
 tinuation of the prophecies of the monk of Lehnin or 
 old Nostradamus. Scientifically it would be worth no 
 more than the fortune-telling on All Hallows' Eve by 
 means of tea or coffee-grounds. A general formula can, 
 however, be laid down as regards technical progress, 
 inventions, and discoveries, as the result of observation 
 of the course of their development. 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 365 
 
 Discoveries are the outcome of a fundamental psycho- 
 logical trait — curiosity. It compels the observation of 
 phenomena, and attention gives a new account of them. 
 Chance is credited with an influence upon discovery. 
 That influence is very limited. If a man happen to 
 witness any process which makes no great impression on 
 his senses, which he has never observed, which does 
 not connect itself with a series of phenomena that are 
 known to him, he does not notice it. He neglects it. 
 Events that are noisy and remarkable, such as a furious 
 storm, an earthquake, or volcanic eruption — any melo- 
 dramatic aspect of nature — cannot remain unheeded. 
 They force themselves upon the senses, and exercise a 
 powerful coercion upon the attention. But man fails to 
 observe the regular, silent operation of the chemical, 
 physical, and biological laws, and they make no impres- 
 sion on him until his intellect has been trained and his 
 attention prepared to receive them. Consciousness per- 
 ceives those sense impressions only which it expects to 
 receive, with which it is familiar, which will fit into a 
 logically constructed system of ideas; others pass over 
 it without leaving any trace, unless their impact is of 
 sufficient force to compel the consciousness to build a 
 new system to contain them. The world around him is 
 constantly addressing itself to man, and telling him all 
 about itself, but he does not understand until he has 
 learned its language word by word. Discoveries follow 
 an iron law of logical succession: no chance can turn 
 them from the straight course. Each prepares the way 
 for the next ; it premises the other. It was long known 
 that prisms refract a white light, yet three-cornered 
 glasses were used only to make a playful repetition of a 
 
366 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 little rainbow. Fraunhofer first noticed the black lines 
 in the colours made by a sunbeam refracting through a 
 prism. He noticed it because, being an optician, he 
 had, in preparing optical instruments, more occasion 
 for observation of the behaviour of light in a prism 
 than anyone before him had had. His discovery of 
 the black lines premised his knowledge of the prism 
 and of refraction. Bunsen and Kirchoff found black, 
 and later also coloured, lines in the spectrum of an 
 ordinary flame in which certain substances had been 
 burned, and found that these lines corresponded to 
 definite burning substances. Thus arose the chemical 
 analysis of the spectrum, which depended on Fraun- 
 hofer's discovery of the black lines in the spectrum of 
 the sun. Huggins observed, from a comparison of 
 various spectra, that the lines of the same substance 
 were shifted towards the violet end of the one spectrum. 
 He remembered Doppler's principle, according to which 
 one and the same set of tone-vibrations sound higher 
 when the vibrating body is near, deeper when it is more 
 remote; and, applying this principle to optics, he in- 
 terpreted the shifting of the lines to one end of the 
 spectrum to mean that the light was nearer, to the other - 
 that it was farther off, and was thus enabled, not only 
 to establish, but to measure, the movements of the fixed 
 stars. This astro-physical discovery was rendered pos- 
 sible by the former discoveries of Bunsen, Kirchoff, and 
 Fraunhofer, and by popular knowledge of the refraction 
 of light by a prism. The history of every scientific 
 discovery shows the same stages, from the crude per- 
 ceptions of the natural man to an insight of such subtlety 
 that the layman is for the most part unable to compre- 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 367 
 
 hend how it has been arrived at, and how It is possible 
 to convey it unimpaired in such a manner as to carry 
 irresistible conviction to everyone. Theories and hy- 
 potheses are valuable as creating an expectant mental 
 attitude, which directs the attention to the correspond- 
 ing phenomena, and prepares it to perceive them when- 
 ever they appear. On the other hand, they have the 
 disadvantage of diverting the attention from those phe- 
 nomena that do not correspond, and so far closing the 
 consciousness to the facts that would prove the inac- 
 curacy of the theories and hypotheses themselves. The 
 phenomena that do not fit into the prevalent hypothesis, 
 and therefore go unperceived, owing to the preposses- 
 sion of those who believe in it, will first be seen and 
 valued by the unprejudiced observer, whose attention is 
 not governed by any hypothesis, and who, therefore, 
 will be able to see the inaccuracy of the one which is 
 accepted and the necessity of replacing it by another. 
 For two generations all chemists were so full of the idea 
 of Stahl's phlogiston that they did not see the con- 
 tradictory facts operative on every side. After La- 
 voisier's experiments, it became clear to everyone that 
 phlogiston was an imaginary quantity, and chemists 
 could hardly understand how they had failed to see it 
 to be so. 
 
 It can be safely prophesied that man will not cease 
 making discoveries, and that the number and importance 
 of these discoveries will continually increase, since each 
 of them prepares the way for new. But the nature of 
 these discoveries cannot be foreseen by most acute 
 students, even by those to whom the most important 
 scientific results are due. When Heinrich Geissler in- 
 
368 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 vented his vacuum tubes, he could not foreshadow 
 Crookes' discovery of the radiation of matter or 
 Rontgen's discovery of the rays that bear his name. 
 When the Curies obtained radium from pitch-blende, 
 they had no idea that Gustav le Bon was to prove radio- 
 activity a fundamental characteristic of that substance, 
 and deduce therefrom such far-reaching consequences as 
 its uninterrupted resolution into ether on the one hand, 
 and its continual formation from ether on the other. 
 When Galvani and Volta discovered electric contact, 
 they had not the faintest conception that their experi- 
 ments and results would lead, over and above practical 
 inventions, to new views of the unity of energy and of 
 the nature of matter. Certain discoveries, already 
 dimly indicated, are, as a matter of fact, to-day nearly 
 as good as made, since attention is turned to them, and 
 is on the track of all the phenomena leading up to them. 
 The transmutation of metals is only a question of tlme.^ 
 The appearance of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, 
 rotating round their planets in the opposite direction to 
 that followed by all other moons, must surely before 
 long give us an astronomical and cosmological truth that 
 may well establish the theory of Kant and Laplace. 
 But though their shadows of coming knowledge are 
 clearly enough outlined to students of the subjects, they 
 are wholly outside of the range of supposition of the 
 living generation. It is, however, not only by the sum 
 of knowledge already acquired that the way is prepared 
 for new discoveries of increasing importance, but also 
 by psychological constitution of the select few. The 
 capacity for artificial attention develops progressively. 
 The attitude of the consciousness becomes more and 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 369 
 
 more critical; it is less and less easily satisfied with 
 surface explanations and words that will not stand the 
 test of reality. Observation and thought, freeing them- 
 selves more and more from assumption, are less and less 
 transcended by traditional authority. Hypotheses re- 
 tain their heuristic value while losing their detrimental 
 tendency to blind to certain aspects of a truth and 
 suggest others. All this, however, is only true of the 
 select few. The crowd is less and less capable of 
 sharing the task of observation and the discoveries to 
 which it gives rise, partly because it lacks the preliminary 
 training, which becomes increasingly arduous and 
 lengthy, partly because its curiosity about nature be- 
 comes dulled. We have seen, as a fundamental attri- 
 bute of all living things, this curiosity, which, in the 
 course of development, rises to a thirst for knowledge 
 and understanding. It is their foremost weapon in the 
 struggle for existence. It is thanks to it that it is 
 possible for any living thing to establish itself in its 
 environment and adapt itself to it — that is to say, to 
 avoid its dangers, and profit by such favourable con- 
 ditions as it affords. But it is long since man lived 
 under natural conditions. The instinct of self-preser- 
 vation, therefore, no longer compels him to direct his 
 innate curiosity to his natural environment. Between 
 him and it there stands society, of which he is an organ- 
 ized part, and the institutions within whose framework 
 his life is set. Not his natural, but his human, en- 
 vironment is important in the life of civilized man — at 
 any rate, he is far less conscious of the significance of 
 nature in his existence than of the men with whom he 
 lives and on whom he depends. His natural desire for 
 
370 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 knowledge is, therefore, Hirected to the phenomena of 
 society rather than of nature, and therefore the average 
 man is much more likely to increase sociological knowl- 
 edge than any understanding of the world as a whole. 
 
 Each discovery, besides being the mother of new dis- 
 coveries, generally initiates practical inventions that 
 simplify and enrich life. Discoveries are the fruit of 
 the desire for knowledge that is ever active in the mind 
 of man. Technical inventions, on the other hand, are 
 stimulated by his needs. It is sometimes maintained 
 that inventions create needs. This is mere talking in 
 the air. An invention may give birth to new habits; 
 it may develop and accentuate a need in many cases, 
 but where no needs existed it creates none. Thanks to 
 railways, many people travel nowadays who must other- 
 wise have remained at home; but the desire to travel 
 existed before the railway, although suppressed, except 
 in cases of necessity, because it was extremely difficult 
 to gratify. Gas and electricity have habituated us to a 
 brilliant light unknown before. But the need for illu- 
 mination at night existed even in the days of torches and 
 oil-lamps, though it could be but poorly satisfied with 
 the existing means. No inventor ever tried to construct 
 a thing for which there was no desire. On the con- 
 trary, inventive brains pondered over existing needs 
 until they hit upon something which seemed to them to 
 satisfy these needs better than anything hitherto known, 
 or for the first time. Well-read people are very fond 
 of rummaging through the authors of previous cen- 
 turies for a more or less clear foreshadowing, or even 
 an exact description, of various inventions not realized 
 until many generations later. In the seventeenth cen- 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 371 
 
 tury Cyrano de Bergerac gives directions for a flying- 
 machine that contain the germs of the air-balloon as well 
 as the kite. Almost two hundred years before him 
 Leonardo da Vinci first studied the question of human 
 flight, and arrived at solutions not very different from 
 that of to-day. In the eighteenth century Legends)'- 
 Burgess of Miinchhausen describe how the so und in they^ 
 post-horn ha d frozenup, and then thawed again, iny: 
 which, if one has the mind, one may see a humorous ^ 
 suggestion of the phonograph. Galilel^recounts, in his 
 " Dialogue," ^ a pleasant tale of an inventor, who said 
 he could transmit conversation between two people three 
 thousand miles distant from one another by means of 
 magnetic needles attuned in a certain way. May not 
 this be an anticipation of the telephone? The answer 
 is. No. This is no anticipation, no preparation for 
 later inventions, but mere wish and desire — the mere 
 expression of a need that has been felt, and for which 
 the imagination weaves visionary gratifications before 
 the reason sees any means of realizing them. Man is 
 
 ' Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo, matematico sopraordinario 
 dello studio di Pisa, etc., dove nei - contressi di quattro giornate 
 si dircorre sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Tolemaico e 
 Copernicano. In Fiorenza, Per Gio. Batista Landini, 1632, p. 88: 
 " You remind me of someone who wanted to sell me the secret of 
 conversing with someone two or three thousand miles away by means 
 of a harmony between magnetic needles (' per via di certa simpatia 
 di aghi calamtati! '). I replied that I would gladly purchase it, 
 but would like to see it tried; I should be satisfied with remaining 
 in one room, while he was in another. He replied that the experiment 
 could not be properly seen at such a short distance. Thereupon I 
 dismissed him, with the remark that I could not very well go to 
 Cairo or Moscow to see the experiment, but if' he would go thither, I 
 would gladly remain in Venice, and speak with him from there." 
 
372 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 conscious of longing for relief from some particular 
 evil, or for the alteration of his condition generally. 
 Above all, he would fain live for ever, freed from death 
 and all sicknesses and infirmities. He would like to 
 keep his youth for ever. He would like to acquire 
 without exertion treasures and delights, the fulfilment 
 of all his wishes. He would like to overcome all the 
 limitations of matter, of the flesh, and of the senses; 
 to be able to see, hear, speak, and feel, without regard 
 to distance or any other obstacle ; to traverse seas, moun- 
 tains, and continents in the twinkling of an eye, and 
 annihilate space with the rapidity of thought. He 
 would like all this, and because he would like it he has 
 always invented fairy-tales, in which the wish is by 
 some miracle realized. The idea of continued existence 
 after death, the resurrection of the body, and the im- 
 mortality of the soul, has arisen from the same human 
 longing to which are due such inventions as the stories 
 of the well of youth, the conjuring-stick, spells, the cap 
 of darkness, the talisman that makes the body in- 
 vulnerable, the cloak that enables one to fly through the 
 air; which has inspired the legends of Dsdalus and 
 Icarus, of Albert the Great, of Raymond LuUy, of the 
 Count of St. Germain, and all the medieval wizards, 
 coiners and devil's allies; which is expressed in the 
 fantastic pictures of the future drawn by authors who 
 imagine a time when men will fly, live under water, 
 walk through mountains, see through walls and rocks, 
 and talk with their fellows at the Antipodes. 
 
 Human desire gives inventors their direction; it 
 polarizes their thinking. Their consciousness is wholly 
 devoted to the needs they feel. Every advance in 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 373 
 
 knowledge must at once assist them in their search for 
 the satisfaction of some old longing, a new and more 
 highly differentiated impulse. They appropriate every 
 scientific discovery as it is made, and endeavour to use 
 it for the practical realization of what seemed im- 
 possible dreams. On the other hand, they neglect dis- 
 coveries that are unconnected with satisfaction of any 
 human need, even though they may revolutionize the 
 conception of the world. On the whole, research sees 
 only what it is prepared to see, and tends generally to 
 discover phenomena that conform to the stage of knowl- 
 edge at the time, very seldom such as would reverse it. 
 In the same way invention is confined almost exclusively 
 within the range of needs, and hardly ever feels a 
 temptation to contrive a novelty that supplies no felt 
 want. Near Phaestus, in Crete, a slab of clay, i6 cen- 
 timetres thick, was found, with more than 120 hiero- 
 glyphics carved on either side.^ A stamp with these yi. 
 signs raised upon it must have been pressed into the f 
 soft clay, probably several times. In a word, pointing -/t 
 — at least block-printing — had been invented in pre- % 
 historic Crete. The invention was, in fact, made when 
 the first seal-ring, cylinder, or stone, was engraved from 
 which an unlimited number of impressions could be 
 obtained. Nevertheless, the invention lay disregarded 
 for thousands of years. Why ? Because there was no 
 need for a rapid multiplication of writing and images. 
 There were too few educated people, too few able to 
 read, and intercourse was too diiScult for there to have 
 been any need of reproductions. But when the need 
 
 ' Communication of M. Salomon Reinach to the Academie des In- 
 scriptions at Paris, Comptes Rendus, 1908, p. 478. 
 
374 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 for books arose, and the possibility of an extended 
 market for them, the invention of printing followed — 
 •the development of a primitive thought and of a process 
 that had been employed for three or four thousand 
 years. 
 
 Our knowledge of nature undoubtedly makes it pos- 
 sible for us to-day to create many ingenious contrivances 
 and implements, and transform energy in many ways of 
 which no one has yet thought. But no one will think 
 of them until a need arises and demands satisfaction. 
 It is safe to assert that in the future, as in the past, 
 technical invention will be determined by the needs and 
 desires, if not of all men, at least of a great number of 
 men. Berthelot's prophecy that chemistry will succeed 
 in concentrating in a tiny pill all the carbonaceous and 
 nitrogenous matter needed by the human organism, and 
 substituting it for all animal and vegetable food, is cer- 
 tainly false. The digestive canal, which extends from 
 the mouth to the rectum, with all its apparatus of 
 nerves, glands, and muscles, is designed to receive and 
 assimilate animal and vegetable matter, and acts in 
 man as a permanent cause of physical sensation. It is 
 the source of feelings of lively pleasure and pain, which 
 are apprehended by the consciousness as needs. Ber- 
 thelot's pill could never satisfy them, and that is why 
 it will never be invented, even as a freak, in any chemical 
 laboratory. On the other hand, there can be no doubt 
 that all the needs of which men are conscious will pro- 
 duce inventions to satisfy them in whole or part. Hugo 
 Michel ^ has collected in his exceedingly interesting little 
 
 ' Hugo Michel, " Introduction to Invention : the Way of Wealth,'' 
 Berlin, 1906. 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 375 
 
 book 650 inventions for which a definite need exists to- 
 day. Some are important, others insignificant — the 
 flying-machine (section 75, Sport, Games, Aerial Navi- 
 gation, and Public Entertainments) side by side with a 
 "hygienic substitute for bread" (section 2, Baking), 
 and " a transparent material for those taking sun-baths " 
 (section 3, Clothing). The author is convinced that 
 all these inventions will be realized within a measurable 
 distance of time, and I share his conviction. But the 
 needs which he leaves out of account are the oldest and 
 most profound in human nature. He does not speak 
 of the desire for eternal youth, eternal life, annihila- 
 tion of time and space, control over all the forces of 
 nature. It is a subject upon which the level-headed 
 technologist does not enter. But one may venture to 
 predict that this desire, too, will, to some extent, be 
 fulfilled. Death cannot be got rid of, but life may 
 be prolonged beyond the measure of to-day.^ Old age 
 cannot be wholly obviated, but the limits of youth may 
 be extended by many decades.^ Disease may be pre- 
 vented and cured. Rapidity and security of intercourse 
 may increase to such an extent that man will be in a 
 sense ubiquitous in his planet. Air and water will pre- 
 sent no obstacles. He will fly as he now drives, and 
 travel under water as he now travels over it. He will 
 learn to use natural forces that to-day do not obey, and 
 even threaten him, and to provide himself with pleasures 
 in all the quarters of the globe. All this will certainly 
 
 ^ Jean Finot, " La Philosophie de la Longevite," Paris, 1900, p. 74. 
 
 " Elie Metchnikoff, " Etudes sur la nature humaine," Paris, 1903, 
 chap. X., " Introduction a I'etude scientifique de la vieillesse,'' pp. 
 294 et seq. See also p. 390. 
 
376 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 happen, because mankind desires it, and because the 
 whole history of the development of civilization teaches 
 that man has always been successful, if not in satisfying 
 his needs completely, at least in getting as near that 
 satisfaction as possible. 
 
 So much may fairly be anticipated as to the future of 
 invention and discovery. Certain cautious conclusions, 
 too, may be ventured as to the general destiny of man- 
 kind, so long as we avoid entering into any of the con- 
 crete details that mark the course of history — wars, 
 alliances, revolutions, class strife, and the rise and de- 
 cline of particular States. No one can foresee and fore- 
 tell when and where an Alexander the Great, Napoleon, 
 or Bismarck will be born, a Battle of Marathon, Actium, 
 Chalons, Hastings, Waterloo, Sadowa fought, a Polish 
 kingdom destroyed and partitioned, an Italy created, an 
 India acquired by England, or a Cuba lost by Spain. 
 ToJiistorians_such mjn and evejrits seem of the greatesjt 
 importan ce; t hey seejii__to thern jhe real content j)f 
 history. In realit.yi,as I have tried to show, the y have 
 nojjLal, or permanent. jffert on jhe history of humanity . 
 Whether a people groan under oppression or enjoy 
 freedom, whether they are ill or wisely ruled, birth, love, 
 and death go on with uninterrupted regularity, if in 
 different ratios. Needs must b£ s atisfied in a land 
 under foreign dominion as well as in an independent 
 one. Everywhere individuals and classes look after 
 their own interests, so far as they are aware of them, 
 with all the energy they possess; everywhere they be- 
 come habituated to the ills they can bear or which it 
 would cost them too great an effort to overcome, and 
 rise with desperate resolution against them if they be- 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 377 
 
 come unendurable. Waves rise and pass over the sur- 
 face of humanity, sometimes merely ruffling it, some- 
 times rising mountain high. One can watch a particular 
 wave rising, arching, passing, sinking down again. But 
 that it is not worth this interest, from the point of view 
 either of knowledge or of the destiny of the species, is 
 sufficiently evident to anyone with the smallest insight^ 
 since it is no more than a particular instance of the 
 universal law of wavelike movement. The rise and 
 fall, eddies and whirlpools that agitate the surface, 
 never penetrate fully to the depths below ; its mightiest 
 convulsions leave them unmoved. Events that may 
 determine the destiny of individuals leave no trace on 
 the life of the species of the whole. In human_ Me 
 every thinp ; happens as a consequence of the mod e ofjre- 
 action to external infl uences, whether natural or human_ 
 in the origin, which is deter mined by^ its^prganic struc-_ 
 ture. Since the physical and psychic organism will not 
 alter within a measurable distance of time, its behaviour 
 will always conform to those same laws that have regu- 
 lated it in the course of its history. One possibility 
 must be left open : after ten thousand years the present 
 climate of the earth may disappear, and be replaced by 
 that prevailing when the human species first appeared. 
 If, as then, the differences between the seasons were to 
 disappear, the ice to melt at the poles and in every 
 glacier, eternal spring to smile even in the highest lati- 
 tudes, and all over our planet animals and plants to 
 enjoy tropical conditions, then a profound revolution 
 must take place in the existence of man. He would 
 cease to feel most of those needs whose satisfaction is the 
 ^main purpose of his exertions, such as clothing, dwell- 
 
378 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 ings, nourishment, and artificial warmth. Once more, 
 as in the beginning, when he, like all other living things, 
 was the spoilt child of nature, he could live and let live, 
 free from toil and necessity. He would not, of course, 
 even so, return to a condition of primitive barbarism; 
 he would no longer be satisfied to vegetate like a satis- 
 fied animal in a well-stored manger; his intellectual 
 needs would remain, and probably, also, the habits ac- 
 quired during his severe struggle for existence, among 
 them being, no doubt, some tendency to parasitism and 
 to the accumulation of wealth, however greatly modi- 
 fied its form. Institutions and opinions would survive 
 from the day of necessity to that of superfluity — arrange- 
 ments which, though sensible and practical when origi- 
 nated, would have neither meaning nor use under new 
 conditions. Thrift and providence would still be es- 
 teemed as virtues, although, with manna falling every 
 day from heaven, they are an eccentricity, if not a vice. 
 Altruism and citizenship would still be regarded as' 
 moral sentiments, although they would have lost their 
 purpose In a world where no one needed the help of his 
 fellow. The strong, select few would still feel atavistic 
 tendencies to rule and command, although there would 
 no longer obtain any biological advantage by power 
 over others. Gradually all these surviving traits would 
 recede, and the primitive instincts atrophied in man 
 would revive. The consciousness, enriched by an ample 
 store of ideas, would acquire a tone of feeling entirely 
 unlike that existing to-day. The State might not dis- 
 solve, but its organization would relax. It would have 
 nothing to defend, since there would be no inducement 
 to deeds of violence. The competition for gain between 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 379 
 
 individuals and for the possession of the earth between 
 nations would cease: war and conquest would cease. 
 If the ambitious still thirsted for renown, they would 
 find it in the intellectual fields of art or science. There 
 would be no political history: only natural history and 
 biography. One danger, indeed, would still threaten 
 a happiness that might seem without a cloud — that of 
 overpopulation. Nature at its most luxuriant can only 
 support a limited number of living things, and boundless 
 demands exhaust her riches. Under primitive condi- 
 tions the cure for this evil lies in incessant struggle and 
 the extermination of the weak. A high civilization 
 would probably prefer to establish the balance between 
 the provision made by nature and the demands of those 
 who live upon her and maintain it by limiting of the 
 ratio of children to parents. 
 
 Short of the contingent retur n of the clirnate ^ 
 Paradise , which, if the learned pundit's ^ remarkable in- 
 terpretation is correct, is clearly recalled in the Vedanta 
 and Zend Avesta, history will always be what it has 
 been since our knowledge of it — a dial whose hands are 
 moved by the intellectual characteristics and powers of 
 man. The stimuli d fit-ermining human action are al- 
 ways the same; the form that action takes varies with 
 the knowledge and the instruments at its command. 
 In the future, as in the past, men will be bom unequal, 
 but the distance between the select few and the average 
 will constantly lessen. It is hardly conceivable that 
 there should appear to-day in any nation belonging to 
 the white race a man so much above his fellow-country- 
 
 ' Dr. George Biedenknapp, " The North Pole as the Home of a 
 People," Jena, 1906. 
 
38o THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 men as were the mythical eponymous heroes of the past, 
 who transformed the whole face of life by the civiliza- 
 tion that they brought, by the knowledge of the enlight- 
 X enment they spread, and who, by making law, purifying 
 X morals, and establishing religion, left a different race 
 ^ of men from that which they found. In the future 
 this will be even less possible. The time of demigods 
 is over. T he initi ative to all social progress, all im- 
 provement in laws, institutions, and morals, may pro- 
 ceed from a single personality; but realization is the 
 work of numerous groups. A single student may give 
 to scientific discoveries their final elucidation, their suc- 
 cessful form, but they are essentially the common work 
 of generations of savants. Only the creations of art 
 and poetry are purely individual achievements, and even 
 here there are innumerable links between one work, one 
 author, and the other, and every poet, every artist, will 
 incorporate in his work the best that has been attained 
 by his predecessors. 
 
 The. aver a, g.e and ^ the select are brought nearer to- 
 f, gether, not by the levelling down of the select, but by 
 ■^the levelling up of the average. The capacity for sus- 
 tained attention develops. The consciousness, con- 
 stantly extending its scope, is able to grasp a greater 
 number of ideas at one and the same time. As a result, 
 ' phenoffieim arejmoi£_exac^^ perceptions more 
 
 accurately combined, and conclusions and judgments 
 more correctly formed. In a word, the content of 
 thought is more thoroughly real, there is less psittacism, 
 less vagueness, less mysticism, less credulity, a more 
 complete adaptation throughout to the given conditions 
 kof existence. Whether the association of IdeaiS will be 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 381 
 
 less stereotyped and the crowd therefore freed from 
 the slavery of custom, and the hatred of all things new, 
 cannot be foreseen. Experience, so far as it goes, teaches t* 
 that highly civilized men, no less than savages, have y. 
 great trouble in forming new thought combinations , and ■)< 
 avoid it whenever they can. Civilized man is superior 
 in knowledge and judgment to the savage, only because 
 in his plastic and receptive childhood and youth a larger 
 supply of valuable and varied material was available 
 for his mind. His education over, he clings fiercely to 
 what he has learned at school as does the savage to his 
 scanty traditions, and reprobates the new as decidedly 
 as he can do. 
 
 It is at the most a difference of a generation. The 
 distance between nations, like that between individuals, 
 will diminish. It is questionable whether there is any 
 difference in the capacity for development possessed by 
 the different nations of the white races. If one appear 
 to be behind the others in civilization, the fact may be 
 a consequence of wars, bad government, or class oppres- 
 sion. The more backward will, no doubt, make up on 
 the more advanced so soon as the causes are removed 
 that have; checked their development. There has long 
 been no difference in education and culture between the 
 members of the upper classes of the different peoples of 
 the white race. All are represented by first-rate achieve- 
 ments in science, literature, and art, which show that 
 individual genius exists in all. It is less certain whether 
 the different races are equally endowed. Many anthro- 
 pologistSi including those who are free from race 
 fanaticism and a blind belief in the superiority of the 
 Aryans, contest this, even in the case of the yellow race, 
 
382 ' THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 which Is the nearest to the white, and which, in the case 
 of the Japanese, has given proofs of creative powers 
 justifying the most brilliant forecasts. One fact re- 
 mains. Hitherto the white race alone has by its own 
 strength created that genuine civilization which can 
 only rest upon knowledge. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, 
 and Malays have attained to lofty heights in aesthetics 
 and morals, but they have not scaled the highest peak 
 of science. The civilization of America before Colum- 
 bus may be comparable to the Asiatic, not to the Euro- 
 pean. Negroes, Redskins, and Australians have not 
 transcended the rudimentary civilization of the Neo- 
 lithic Age in Europe. The savage races are no longer 
 isolated. They have been violently brought into the 
 vortex of universal intercourse. They must accept the 
 whites as their teachers, whether they will or no. It 
 remains to be seen what they will do in this hard school. 
 If they cannot learn, they will disappear. If, on the 
 other hand, they can assimilate the knowledge and 
 judgments of the white, as has already been done by 
 many Asiatics, some Redskins, and not a few Maoris 
 and Hawaiians, we shall not long be able to speak of 
 higher and lower races, and national pride will have to 
 bend before the fact of the approximate equality of all 
 peoples. 
 
 I do not believe that all differences will disappear and 
 all types amalgamate in a comprehensive uniformity. 
 Among the commonplace faces, which will certainly be 
 extraordinarily numerous, some characteristic counte- 
 nances will always stand out. The perfection of the 
 average will be accompanied by an ever richer differ- 
 entiation, which will bring sufficient variety into the 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 383 
 
 aspect of the world. But this differentiation will affect 
 rather the subordinate details of life, and there will be 
 much more conformity than now exists in its essentials — 
 that is to say, the human race will approach the condi- 
 tion of biological equilibrium. Great differences be- 
 tween the Individual members of any living species are 
 always a consequence and a sign of some interruption 
 of the natural course of its development. They prove 
 that it has not yet reached its optimum. As the condi- 
 tions of existence become more favourable, and tend to 
 satisfy organic needs more fully, a greater individual 
 uniformity appears. Originally the human species can 
 have presented very few deviations from the main type, 
 over and above the sub-orders or races into which it 
 was from the first divided by skull formation, stature, 
 and colour of the skin. But when its natural conditions 
 were removed by the change of terrestrial climate, the 
 hard struggle for existence began, and the supermen 
 misused their superiority in an easy parasitism; then 
 individual development began to strain in different 
 directions : the more favoured rose, and the handicapped 
 sank more and more. Thus the differences developed 
 to which history testifies. Gradually that more perfect 
 adaptation to the nature of our planet, which is the 
 biological aspect of civilization, restored over a wide 
 area the conditions under which the species first lived, 
 and included in these conditions is a considerable meas- 
 ure of individual uniformity — at least, within a single 
 primitive race. 
 
 The narrowing of the limits within which the varia- 
 tion of the human type takes place has important social 
 and economic results. If an increasing number of men 
 
384 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 become capable of sustained attention, and think by 
 perceptions rather than by acoustic signs; if critical 
 reason, the power of logical thought, and a sense of 
 reality become common property, the exploitation of 
 the weak by the strong becomes increasingly difficult, and 
 at last almost impossible. The weak will protect them- 
 selves against brute force by closer combination, and 
 the cunning subterfuges of the parasite will lose their 
 efficacy when the crowd has grown clear-sighted enough 
 to see through them. When exploitation ceases to be a 
 remunerative employment for the superman, all the ad- 
 ministrative and social institutions, created and devel- 
 oped in order to make that exploitation easy or possible, 
 will gradually crumble away, and finally disappear, 
 without the need of any violent revolution to destroy 
 them. The^rm oifj;h£-.State,-wiU^presmn ^ endure , 
 but J t will receive_j..ji£S6L£ont_ent. Instead of being a 
 soldier, it will be a judge, a teacher, an architect, and, 
 to some extent, a policeman. In other words, the State 
 will no longer regard it as Its first function to maintain, 
 against other nations, the collective egoism developed 
 in its people, as the outcome of the individual egoism 
 of a sovereign and his servants; to wrest advantages 
 from other States by war, or the possibility of war, and 
 to be armed, against a similar undertaking on their part. 
 War will become as impossible as is to-day an officially 
 organized attack on the part of a civilized State on the 
 territory of a neighbouring State, for the sake of plun- 
 dering and carrying off women and cattle. To a man 
 like Count Moltke, steeped to the lips in feudal tradi- 
 tion, eternal peace must appear " a dream, and not a 
 beautiful one." But no one who can rise above his 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 385 
 
 prejudices and normal habits of thought can doubt that 
 war will fade to the horrible recollection of a barbaric 
 past, when indmHual citizerisare intelligent enough 
 to comprehend that they could not conceivably be worse 
 employed than in leaving their own trades and profes- 
 sions, exposing their health and life to the most appall- 
 ing dangers, in order, at no advantage to themselves, to 
 destroy the life and goods of others, by way of con- 
 vincing them of their own superiority. If no one de- 
 sires to attack, no one need trouble about defence. The 
 necessity of an army ceases, and with it all that pic- 
 turesque child's play, the " colour of war " — that is to 
 say, gay uniforms, shakos, stripes, and the less innocu- 
 ous ideas connected with the colours, the position of the 
 officer, and the duty of abject obedience. If there is 
 no army, diplomacy has no longer any function. A 
 court of arbitration will decide such disputes as may 
 arise between nations, respecting the regulation of com- 
 mon rivers and the protection of migrating fishes and 
 birds that travel from one country to another; an in- 
 ternational authority, like the International Postal 
 Bureau at Berne, will regulate the routes of the rail- 
 ways of the world, postal and telegraphic communica- 
 tion, common protection against epidemics, and the 
 extradition of criminals. Nothing will be left for emis- 
 saries and ambassadors to do, since the relations be- 
 tween nations will be limited to the settlement of techni- 
 cal points which, as concerning several States, and in- 
 volving matters in which violence and passion have no 
 place, must be settled by a conference of experts. 
 
 The State will concentrate the energies of its people 
 on maintaining order and security at home, in grappling 
 
386 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 with such problems as ignorance, disease, and vice, which 
 are beyond the capacity of individuals, and in carrying 
 out public works of an extensive and costly character. 
 The course of legal development will, show considerable 
 diverg^.ce„^from _the . Romaa-conception of p roperty . 
 The principle that no law may be retrospective will not 
 be maintained as obstinately as it is at present. Ex- 
 cessive fortunes will doubtless be attacked with search- 
 ing questions as to their origin, and rules of equity 
 framed with the greatest subtlety, so as to track the 
 exploitation of the weak in all its most secret windings 
 and retreats, to prevent it by penalties, and ruthlessly 
 deprive those who exercise it of their gains. The pur- 
 pose of public instruction will not be to bring up a race 
 of pious church-goers, submissive subjects, blindly obedi- 
 ent soldiers, and patriots always ready to shout 
 " Huzza! " but to transmit to the rising generation the 
 established results of the scientific labours of former 
 generations, to develop their critical powers and their 
 feeling for reality, and to raise them to a rational en- 
 joyment of the beauties of nature and art. A genera- 
 tion thus schooled will not lend itself readily to ex- 
 ploitation by force or fraud. It will be intelligent 
 enough to follow its money as it passes into the Ex- 
 chequer, the Customs-house, the bank, and the joint- 
 stock company, and see what happens to it. Taxes can 
 no.J.Qtiger_be squandered^ on a now_ superfluous army, 
 nor on the fiscal beneficiaries and sinecurists, maintained 
 because there is latent in the State of to-day the idea 
 that it is really a brilliant and luxurious Court, whose 
 dazzling dignitaries and host of superfluous courtiers 
 serve to exalt the pomp of majesty. Protective duties, 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 387 
 
 will be as impossible as trusts and cartels, since no one 
 will be prepared to pay toll to individuals or groups in 
 return for no corresponding services. Joint-stock com- 
 panies will no longer gather in the money of small 
 savers, and then manage it so that the largest possible 
 share goes into the pockets of directors, agents, and 
 other middlemen, and the profits of the rest first re- 
 munerate the paid officials, many of whom are quite 
 superfluous, and many overpaid, while the poor share- 
 holders come last, and get a very modest share indeed. 
 No one will part with the fruits o f his Jgbour except 
 in return for the sati sfaction of some need or^n aesth^ic^ 
 plgasure. As the futuredarkens for the exploiter it 
 brightens for every sort of art and talent. Positive 
 religions have no place in a society in which the sense 
 of reality is strongly developed and the wits of every 
 man are sharpened against the parasite. They are 
 doomed to destruction, however the present constitution 
 of mankind may seem to contradict it. No man of sane 
 intellect will continue to believe in their unproved, 
 dogmas or their t waddling trans cendentalism. Their 
 failure to induce the many to submit patiently to ex- 
 ploitation will remove their value in the eyes of the 
 parasitic class and the protection afforded them. No 
 one will be inclined to pay for the^sa iPPort of priests. 
 when they are recogniz.ed on every side to be perfectly 
 useless members of society. Public worship^ will be 
 peacefully and naturally brought to an end by the State's 
 dissolving its connection with the Churches, and leaving 
 them to themselves. The chapels will be deserted ; the 
 clergy will fail to attract recruits, since no young man 
 with a faculty for work and study will wish to dedicate 
 
388 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 himself to a profession that neither insures him a live- 
 lihood nor carries any respect with it. With the rapid 
 extinction of the priesthood, the religion it serves will 
 soon be a historical memory. The manner in which an 
 enlightened humanity will satisfy the eternal necessity 
 for exaltation, consolation, and the thought of eternity, 
 I have tried to show in my sixth chapter. 
 
 Although the select few will no longer be markedly 
 above the average level, there will always be supermen, 
 and they will, even in the future, feel the desire for 
 power and domination over the many. But this atavis- 
 tic desire to rule will no longer display itself in the 
 historical and now-existing forms : it will no longer be 
 directed to parasitism. It will breed neither con- 
 querors nor dictators. No one will be able to think 
 of setting a crown on his head and founding a dynasty. 
 There may still be some attraction in the position of 
 President or Minister in a community based upon equal 
 citizen rights, but the attraction will not be very power- 
 ful. In a matter-of-fact community, which eschews the 
 adventurous and the capricious, and rewards its servants 
 strictly according to the utility of their work, executive 
 power will not afford any special satisfaction to pride, 
 or even to vanity, imagination, or bare greed. Ambi- 
 tion must seek other fields and other ends. The strong, 
 able, and superior man will always seek the first place 
 within his circle — the leadership of a trade group, ad- 
 ministrative body, political party, national assembly, 
 or whatever it may be. He will attain it by oratorical 
 gifts, wise counsel, success in business, or determination 
 of character, and find the reward of his exertions and 
 capacity in the reputation, admiration, respect, and per- 
 
ESCHATOLOGY 389 
 
 sonal influence that cannot be measured in terms of 
 money. The exclusively moral nature of the prizes 
 which ambition can hope to attain will exercise selection 
 among the ambitious. Public recognition will be sought 
 only by twp classes — those who are eaten up by personal 
 vanity and those in whom the social conscience is more 
 than commonly developed. That thirst for power, 
 however, which takes its rise in the consciousness of 
 brute strength, in gross selfishness, or vulgar self-in- 
 terest, and which is simply parasitic in its aim, must, if 
 it cannot be refined or elevated, be suppressed as an 
 evil propensity by a sustained exertion of the will, or 
 else, finding an outlet in crime, it will be tracked down 
 and exterminated by society. 
 
 A humanity without adventures, wars or revolutions, 
 without superstition or mysticism, without overweening 
 and dazzling rulers and swarms of blindly devoted ser- 
 vants, an equal society of enlightened, educated, and 
 intelligent human beings, who are all healthy and 
 moderate, who all work, all attain a ripe old age, and 
 all live orderly and contented lives, much in the same 
 manner — such a humanity seems horribly tedious, and 
 would certainly fill the romantic spirits of the present 
 day with a desperate longing for barbarism in its oldest 
 and wildest forms. But the future only appears thus 
 colourless and uniform because our eyes are accustomed 
 to regard the present aspect of humanity as picturesque. 
 The contrast between castle and cottage, luxury and 
 destitution, triumphant exploitation and unreflecting sub- 
 servience, is interesting, and not repellent, to the man 
 who regards it with the half-conscious idea of rising to 
 an exercise of exploitation himself. Party strife, politi- 
 
390 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 cal intrigue, and diplomatic complications make history 
 as exciting as a novel. Supermen can rise above the 
 herd, an inspiring example to the vain and the self- 
 seeking. But all the satisfactions that such a state of 
 things suggests to the imagination are purchased by a 
 great mass of human suffering, which it has been the 
 incessant endeavour of humanity to remove or alleviate. 
 Knowledge, as it widens and deepens, will reduce almost 
 to a vanishing-point the evils that men impose on one 
 another — evils which form the most horrible of their 
 sufferings. The noble pleasure of art and science will 
 become more general and more intense as the intellect 
 and the nervous system become capable of more subtle 
 enjoyment. Acute joy will be provided by the organic 
 impulses and kinaestheses of youth, joy, love, health, and 
 the sense of vigour, which must certainly be richer and 
 more robust when man is free from care, and lives 
 in the lap of luxury, than when he was always restless 
 and often starving. • The beauty of the future will be 
 different from that of the present — more natural, more 
 lofty, and more harmonious; and it certainly will not 
 feel any privation in the want of the Sadie alloy of 
 poverty and sorrow, sin and cruelty. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE MEANING OF HISTORY— CONCLUSION 
 
 I HAVE now reached the end of my inquiry, and it only 
 remains to take a comprehensive survey of its results. 
 
 The hundreds of thousands of volumes of written 
 history that fill so many libraries may amuse the reader 
 by the exciting adventures and varied careers that they 
 describe: they do not contain the smallest amount of 
 scientific knowledge. The historians describe events in 
 a traditional order, and estimate them according to a 
 subjective illusion, attracted by the unusual, and blind 
 to the invisible processes — regular, permanent, and uni- 
 versal — ^which are alone of real significance.^ When 
 Claude Henri de St. Simon ^ says, " History down to the 
 middle of the eighteenth century is only the biography 
 of might," and Count Joseph de Maistre says, " For 
 
 * E. Vacherot ("La science et la conscience," Paris, 1870, p. 92): 
 "An epoch, a race, a nation, or a class, may be studied ... by con- 
 sidering the actions and movements of great historic figures. . . . 
 The picture is gloriously dramatic, and its aesthetic effect wonderful. 
 But once the mutual connection and interdependence of events has 
 been grasped . . . there is perceived, behind the superficial drama that 
 occupies the front of the stage, at the back of the theatre, an action 
 in progress which, though far less lively, brilliant, and exciting to 
 the ordinary spectator, is infinitely more fascinating to the observer 
 who seeks to penetrate behind the mystery of phenomena.'' 
 
 ' Claude Henri de St, Simon, " Memoire sur la Science de rhomme," 
 Paris, 1857. 
 
 391 
 
392 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 three centuries history has been an uninterrupted con- 
 spiracy against the truth," they suggest limitations for 
 which there is no foundation. Not only up to the 
 middle of the eighteenth century was history merely the 
 biography of might, it has been so since, and is so to this 
 day, in spite of the chapters dealing with sociology and 
 the development of moral ideas that historians nowadays 
 amuse themselves by introducing into their works; not 
 only for three centuries has it been an uninterrupted 
 conspiracy against the truth, it has always been so, ever 
 since the earliest chronicler sat him down to record the 
 events within his knowledge, for the honour and glory 
 of those whom he loved, reverenced, or feared, and the 
 defamation of those whom he hated. History did not 
 begin to be written until the most important and preg- 
 nant period of human development was over, and dven 
 in the last five or six thousand years it includes but a 
 small portion of events. Although the darkness of the 
 past is but partially illuminated by It, It present" such 
 a connected picture as only the most lawless knowledge 
 could justify.^ Even in the rare cases where such ex- 
 ternal processes as are visible to the senses are recorded 
 with tolerable accuracy, the real motive power is over- 
 
 ' Professor Hugo Winckler, in a lecture read before the Asiatic 
 Society in Berlin, November, 1906, gives the results of the ex- 
 cavations at Boghazkoi, where Cheta, the capital of an empire of 
 the same name, vyas discovered. Nothing is known of Cheta, save 
 that a Theban inscription mentions a treaty between its Emperor 
 and Rameses III. But between 1500 and iioo b. c. this empire had, 
 in all probability, a profound influence on Judeea and Israel, an in- 
 fluence hitherto unsuspected by historians. In consequence, their in- 
 terpretation of the history of Judaea has been imperfect, or even en- 
 tirely false. ' 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 393 
 
 looked. This motive operates partly in the conscious- 
 ness, partly in the subconsciousness, of the actors. In 
 the latter case its workings are hidden from themselves, 
 and even in the former they are inaccessible to the his- 
 torian. When the historian undertakes to lay bare the 
 spiritual foundations of events, he abandons the firm 
 ground of reality, and soars into the airy regions of im- 
 agination. Instead of recording and expounding, he 
 invents, and pretends that his subjective interpretation, 
 guess-work, and invention are the results of actual re- 
 search. And yet the origin, nature, and reciprocal influ- 
 ence of the elements of tradition on the one hand, and 
 experience on the other, that compose the conscious and 
 subconscious life, remain outside his ken, although to 
 understand human action is impossible without such 
 knowledge. But if, these objections apart, the his- 
 torian's account is allowed to be always reliable, truth- 
 ful, and complete; if we admit that he does give a cor- 
 rect description of the men and actions concerned, does 
 estimate correctly the share borne by each individual in 
 any event, and does elucidate fully the motives and inten- 
 tions of his action, even so his work, after aU these 
 admissions have been made, remains vain and negligible, 
 if considered as a contribution to knowledge. The pic- 
 ture it presents displays the external form, but not the 
 inner organs of humanity. Its attention is engrossed by 
 the mutable forms of greatness, every one of which may 
 be exchanged, replaced, increased, diminished, or sup- 
 pressed, without any effect on the course of history as 
 a whole. It is as though we were to ask a scientist to 
 explain to us the chemical constituents and physical prop- 
 erties of soapy water, and he, as the result of arduous 
 
394 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 labour, were only able to present us with an account 
 of the number, size, form, colour, and duration of the 
 soap-bubbles blown by a-child at_ glaj. We are human, 
 and everything human interests and moves us. Any 
 vivid and convincing account of the destiny of a real 
 human being rous es our eager.§sinBathy» and will always 
 find grateful readers. But history, as the " biography 
 of might," can teach us nothing more than any other 
 true account of an individual life: it m akes us a_c- 
 quainted j wjth a personality, whjle, leaving, us in prg- 
 fourid[jgIjjQiai}£e...p| theiate of humanity and itsje ternal 
 laws^ Entertaining literature — ^nothing more — can be 
 produced by a method of historical writing which re- 
 gards the concrete event as essential, and treats it ac- 
 cordingly, instead of penetrating through it to an under- 
 standing of hfe^ofjtjbe jgedes_asjrw^ When history 
 ceases to recount, and begins to count — ^that is to say, 
 when, instead of lingering over the visible individual 
 bearers and makers of history — the picturesque soap- 
 bubbles, as it were, of individual events — ^it devotes its 
 attention to studying the forms, conditions, and modifica- 
 tions of the unevent ful dai l y existe nce of averag e 
 humanity then, and not till then, can it cease to 
 be an art, a mongrel poetry, and rise to the rank of 
 a science. But then it is no longer history in the cus- 
 tomary sense : it becomes anthropology, ethnography, 
 or sociology reinforced by biology, psychology, and 
 statistics. 
 
 The philosophy of history at least claims a higher 
 point of view. It includes in its survey the whole course 
 of human development, and seeks to know its origin, 
 course, and goal. It values concrete personalities only 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 395 
 
 in so far as they seem to throw light upon the answer 
 to the more general question. Such, at least, is its the- 
 oretical programme. But we have seen how imperfectly 
 it h^s hitherto been fulfilled. It is not in any spirit of 
 interrogation, in any modest desire to learn what it can 
 teach, that it approaches human life, but with the arro- 
 gant spirit of command, and opinions already formed. 
 These it seeks to have confirmed by question-begging 
 inquiry and the suppression of any answers that do not 
 fit in. Ernst Mach speaks somewhere of the " gciences 
 gf deceitt which have been formed for the purpose of 
 maintaining views that are a survival of the primitive 
 condition of mankind." The type of " these sciences of 
 deceit " is the philosophy of history, in the customary 
 aphoristic and deductive form, in which it includes every 
 vision, every chimera, and every superstition character- 
 istic of the theology and metaphysics of the day. It 
 attributes intent i ons to the actions of histqrical person- 
 a p;es which they never^had, invents an order of events 
 of its own creation, and ascribes a goal of human de- 
 velopment that has no existence outside an imagination 
 obsessed by anthropomorphic ideas. Were it possible 
 for the a priori philosophy of history to reflect upon 
 itself, and realize the real nature of the task before it, 
 it would shrink back, appalled by the immensity of its 
 undertaking and the inadequacy of its methods. The 
 impulse in which it originates is a longing to compre- 
 hend the riddle of the universe. Man s eeks to know the ' 
 significance of the universe and of his part in it — ^why 
 he was born, why he suffers; why he must die; why he 
 has been endowed with the awful privilege of reason, j 
 what will become of the heavenly spark housed in his 
 
396 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 i perishing earthly body, why, in the brief span of his 
 life upon earth, he aspires and struggles, thinks and 
 inquires, loves, longs, and suffers. And, because his 
 humanity is clipped in the limits of human existence, he 
 naturally exaggerates the importance of his species in 
 the universe. He thinks anthropomorphically, and fol- 
 lows his will-o'-the-wisp, without any gleam of scientific 
 mistrust, to the conviction that the meaning of the uni- 
 versejnust^ejevealed thrqughJ^ if not through 
 
 any individual human being. He believes that the 
 species as a whole has a consciousness of its vocation that 
 transcends the consciousness of the individual man, and 
 that it is only necessary to take a sufficiently wide and 
 penetrating survey of the life of the species to recognize 
 its working and the end towards which it strives, and to 
 be enlightened as to the nature of that task in which 
 the individual is engaged without being aware of it. 
 But the answer given by human history to such ques- 
 tions of eternity is the same as that given by the history 
 of every other species. We can get as near or nearer 
 to a solution of the riddle of the universe by looking up 
 to the starry heaven or down the shaft of a coal-mine 
 as by the most impassioned study of archives and 
 libraries. The search for a purpose in human events, 
 and in the development of peoples and States, involves 
 the silent assumption that history has such a purpose. 
 Itcan only have a purpose if s omeone outside of human- 
 ity, independently of the consciousness and open will, 
 has set that purpose before it, and ceaselessly urges 
 them to struggle towards it. This someone can only 
 be a Being endowed with intelligence and will, omnipo- 
 tent and eternal, and a Being with such attributes is the 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 397 
 
 God of the theologians. Whenever the philosophy of 
 history includes a transcendental theology, it is a form 
 of religion, and arrives by a superfluous historical circuit 
 at the point of view of the catechism. Faith in God 
 and His dominion on the earth does not require the 
 support of history to strengthen its conviction of the 
 being and attributes of God, and the stability of a world- 
 order that came from God and returns to Him. And 
 nothing in the course of history can create faith in God 
 where it is absent. If the deductive philosophy of his- 
 tory is not theology, it has no meaning; if it is, it is 
 superfluous. 
 
 When history is approached without preconceived 
 opinions, in t he sole desire to know; when its course is 
 regarded with scientific detachment, and no theological 
 assumptions are introduced, the resulting views have 
 nothing in common with the teachings of philosophy 
 of history in its customary form. 
 
 No single historical event, when truthfully presented 
 without any intentional interpolations, permits the 
 assumption of a purpose towards which the efforts of 
 historical actors are ignorantly directed, and which, re- 
 maining unsuspected by their short-sighted simplicity, is 
 first revealed to an astonished posterity. Nothing in his- 
 tory justifies the assertion that an .y .higheiiJjBt elligencfc 
 i^_gursuing plans in whose accomplishment unsuspecting 
 humanity is a passiv e instrument. Nowhere is there 
 revealed any transcendent Finality. On the contrary, 
 every act carried through by men can be referred to a 
 cause that is, as a rule, known, or, if unconscious, can 
 easily be discovered. Causality , not teleology , is the 
 law of history; a highly complex causality, certainly. 
 
398 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 which brings to bear upon every man, at every moment 
 of his life, the whole past and present of our species : the 
 present by the necessities of the struggle for existence, 
 and by the relations between stronger and weaker, 
 fellow-workers and competitors; the past by means of 
 the institutions it has created, inherited modes of 
 thought, standards of value, and forms of feeling. If 
 the causes of all human action be reduced to their sim- 
 plest terms, it would finally appear that the will of any 
 individual is determined solely by the needs that appear 
 in the consciousnes s as feelings, of pain. As long as 
 he lives man seeks to escape pain, and all his efforts are 
 directed to this one purpose. This highly generalized 
 psychological formula is unconditionally valid in every 
 instance, even where a man appears to do something 
 that, instead of removing or alleviating a pain, actually 
 causes him pain in the first instance. In such cases he 
 takes one pain to avoid another, that seems to him 
 more severe, however it may be estimated by the out- 
 sider, who is exempt from it. A slave will work for 
 his master till he drops down with fatigue, without any 
 hope of reward or freedom, because the idea of .the 
 pjunishia£nt^_Jo£ disob^^ — stripes, mutilation, or 
 even death — is more painful to him than the toil of 
 work, by which he escapes from it. The peaceful man 
 who loves his wife will go to war and run into the most 
 deadly peril, because disobedience to the command of 
 the State, failure to answer the call of patriotism and 
 honour, are to him evils more dreadful than death. The 
 habit of submission to traditional notions of duty and 
 virtue has been made, by education, so much a part of 
 the intellectual mechanism of the civilized man, and 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 399 
 
 controls his thoughts and feelings so completely, that 
 any deviation from it would cause him such unendura- 
 ble pain that wounds and death would seem a lesser 
 evil in comparison. A mere desire for pleasure is not 
 the cause of action unless it be so violent as to be felt 
 as a tormenting restlessness, excitement, and longing — 
 that is, as a sharp feeling of pain. It cannot even be 
 said that man is so constituted organically that he is 
 only stirred to action by the desire for sugar or the 
 fear of the whip. ge_ally, th e whip is the sole stimulus; 
 the sugar only becomes one when it stirs a desire that 
 is so strong that it acts as a whip. Only on such an 
 interpretation can either Hedonism or Eudaemonism 
 claim to afford an accurate explanation of human action. 
 Man is not al wajas-S.eeking the blue bird of haj)piness. 
 He is always fleeing from pain. He does not set his 
 footsteps towards a visionary Jerusalem — 'the fulfilment 
 of the joy and happiness he desires so ardently. He 
 flees ever from haunts of pain. 
 
 Every historical event, without any exception, can be 
 referred to a need- — ^that is, in the last resort, to a feel- 
 ing of pain. The purpa s£_Qf these feelings of di^pm- 
 fort is the pres ervation of life^„ajid_they are incompr e- 
 hensible wi thout the, assumption of a life force, a desire, 
 inherent in every living thing, to maintain itself against 
 destruction and annihilation. Only the assumption of 
 a life force explains why the living creature marks with 
 pain every perception of a state that could harm or 
 endanger it, and is thereby impelled to exert himself to 
 escape it. It is not quite correct to say that harms are 
 marked by pain, for that gives the appearance of a 
 duality, a separation of the perception and the pain; a 
 
400 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 relation as' between cause and effect, the thing accom- 
 panied and the accompaniment. As a matter of fact, 
 the perception of harm and the pain are identical. They 
 are a single organic state. Pain is the isubjective side 
 of harm. Harm is not the cause of pain ; it is pain. It 
 appears as pain in the consciousness, and operates in it 
 to cause acts of will directed to protection; outside of 
 it to cause reflex action. And as everything harmful to 
 life appears in the consciousness as pain itself, so the 
 unharmed movement of life appears in the conscious- 
 ness as pleasure in itself, in reality as the only pleasure 
 of which man is capable, and which he knows^^a pain 
 that may vary in intensity but not in nature. So we 
 arrive at the knowledge that all the actions of men, 
 whether individually or in groups, classes^ and nations, 
 are defensive of pleasure^— that is, of life — and pro- 
 tective against pain — -that is, dangers and harms to life 
 — and that the whole course of history is the expression 
 of one m idfidsigg %£t — ^the will of man and of man- 
 kindlb live and to make eyery exertion to maintain life 
 in the midst of hostile nature. This does not distin- 
 guish man from other living things— ^the lowest and 
 the highest, the vegetable and the animal. Every organ- 
 ism desires to laist, and defends itself against destruc- 
 tion with all the strength that in it is. T he life. fo rce 
 is segTiingly.i|i,sep.grab][e_^^ and_the whole activity 
 
 ^f every l iving thing is dirfifctgd-.to t he satisfaction of 
 Jtsjraecessides, which in the lowest stage are tropisms, 
 conditioned by chemical and physical laws, and, with 
 a higher development, are consciously realized as needs. 
 History, rightly seen and interpreted, instead of sep- 
 arating the human species from the chain of all other 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 401 
 
 living species on the earth, knits them all together, and 
 proves in its own way the unity of all life. 
 
 It has become more dif Ecult for th e human species to 
 satisfy its needs than for any that lived on earth before 
 it, or lives there now beside it. It arose between two 
 Ice Ages, at a time when our planet offered from pole 
 to pole the most favourable conditions of existence for 
 a race of beings who lived on plants, were almost or 
 quite hairless, needed the sun and disliked the wet, and 
 followed a happy course of development in its tropical 
 or subtropical paradises, until a subsequent Ice Age 
 came upon it — not upon it alone, but upon all then living 
 things. Many animal and plant species perished ; others 
 withdrew to a narrow tropical zone, and remained there, 
 forfeiting their lives if they left their prison. Others 
 struggled against the new hostility of nature, and 
 adapted themselves to its harsh conditions. Of these 
 was the human race. Instead of fading away before 
 the frozen breath of the murderous climate of the Pole, 
 or fleeing for refuge to a tropical region to which no 
 cold could penetrate, it adapted itself to altered circum- 
 stances — not, like the other dwellers on the earth, by 
 organic changes, but by jhe capacity of its mind to invent 
 artificial arrangements, which procured for it those con- 
 ditions of existence no longer provided by nature. 
 
 This artificial ada£tatigi by means of discoveries has 
 never ceaseSTjTheTonger it lasts, the more energetic 
 and effective does it become. It is the real content of 
 human history, not visible on the surface, but occupying 
 the depths. It has alwa YS_b gen car ried- on according 
 to the l aw of least efforti„^JPA.,has ther.efore alwaj^ 
 moved alongjthe line oi^least resistance^ This method 
 
402 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 produced one peculiar result. The stronger individuals 
 caused the weakex to provide-.thfi.ni with the favourable 
 conditions of existence indispensable to them. The re- 
 sistance of their fellows was less in proportion than the 
 resistance of nature. Less effort was involved in rob- 
 bing men of the fruits of their labour than in wresting 
 from nature warmth, dryness, nourishment, and com- 
 fortable rest. Parasitism proved by experience to be the 
 easiest form of adaptation. As far back as historical 
 tradition goes the strong are found directing their efforts 
 in this manner. This parasitism on the part of the 
 strgngisjhejobject — obvious or occult, direct or indirect 
 — of almost all the institutions that have arisen in the 
 course of centuries, and represent the framework, even 
 the substance, of civilization. Superior individuals 
 always devoted their best efforts to the direct exploita- 
 tion of those less highly gifted of the average people, 
 and also to their education in habits of thought and 
 feeling which would lead them not only to see no 
 violence or injustice in the parasitism to which they 
 were subjected, but even to feel themselves so distin- 
 guished by it that they worked with heart and soul for 
 those that exploited them, and felt a moral glow, a sense 
 of pride, in being permitted to sacrifice themselves. It 
 was with positive pleasure that they placed all their 
 capacities at the service of these plunderers, and com- 
 peted with one another to make inventions and discov- 
 eries with a view to their advantage. Thus, by the 
 exercise of their own brains, they made their exploita- 
 tion easier, less dangerous, more effective and pro- 
 ductive. The only return, at first hoped aiu j longed 
 for, then_besg}jght,_and finally demanded, by the aver: 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 403 
 
 ag e from the super m an was to be left undisturbed in 
 his habits, and not to be expected to form anj^ per- 
 sgnal^Judgments or resolutions^^ any new adaptations, 
 such as were ..beyond his power. He asked for 
 the maintenance of order about him, and protection 
 for his enjoyment of the few rights left him by the 
 State. 
 
 Externally, then, history is a rnelodrama o n the theme 
 of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting 
 or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stage- 
 trick. A strong man, called ,a hero by the weak, who 
 slavishly admire him, snatches dominion over some or 
 many — perhaps over a whole nation or nations. He or 
 his successors extend this power by means of raids into 
 foreign territory and by conquests, and endeavour by 
 the splendour of the court and occasional wars to main- 
 tain their position by rousing fear and awe. The war- 
 riors and servants of the ruler form a class apart, which 
 endeavours, in its turn, to secure the privilege of ex- 
 ploiting the rest of the people. If this class presses its 
 claims too far, or if any section of the exploited popu- 
 lation develops a strong economic position, then, when 
 this latter section becomes conscious of its strength, it 
 will endeavour to break the power of the others, to cast 
 them down from their privileged position, and occupy it 
 in their stead, unless they are clever enough to take into 
 their own ranks those whose attack they can no longer 
 resist. In this incessant warfare between individuals 
 for the supreme power, between classes for internal 
 domination, and between nations for the possession of 
 the earth and its fruits, the State, Government, trade, 
 industry, and law take their rise and perfect themselves, 
 
404 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 each the outcome of the other, each conditioned by the 
 other, and all serving but as weapons in the warfare. 
 But while wars and treaties, revolution and reaction, 
 party strife, crisis, and compromise, are the character- 
 istic expression of the efforts made by the parasitic self- 
 ishness of individuals and communities to attain the most 
 effective possible form of exploitation, and of the re- 
 sistance offered by those who are sacrificed to them, 
 the constant changes they effect are changes on the sur- 
 face. Beneath the turbulent waves of the internal and 
 external politics of States, the laborious task of adapta- 
 tion is always going on, quietly and regularly, by means 
 of a more and more penetrating knowledge of nature, 
 which is of advantage to the species as a whole, includ- 
 ing the average man, and also those who are handi- 
 capped by nature. In this it is unlike the easy adapta- 
 tion carried out by the strong, for the advantage of 
 a select few specially favoured organisms, by means of 
 parasitism. The discoveries of keen observers and capa- 
 ble interpreters permit a more and more penetrating 
 insight into the operations, if not into the nature, of 
 the forces of the universe. Able or intelligent inventors 
 incorporate each new piece of knowledge in a form in 
 which it can be of use in satisfying the needs of which 
 humanity, or a portion of it, has become conscious. 
 Better understanding of nature gradually educates the 
 human mind, teaches it to distinguish error from truth, 
 to think logically, to form judgments by carqful com- 
 bination of cause and effect, strengthens the attention, 
 develops the sense of reality, and limits man's tendency 
 to prefer words to views and ideas of his own. When 
 the reason is thus educated by a knowledge of nature. 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 405 
 
 the power of symbols and phrases over it is at an end. 
 Men lose their superstitious belief in portentous formulae 
 and signs; they test the accuracy of assertions made 
 to them, and estimate threats by the degree to which 
 they are capable of being realized. All this makes their 
 exploitation more difficult. It can no longer be accom- 
 plished by force, since the average people, when com- 
 bined, are fully competent to forecast and meet strength 
 by strength. It_cannojt be ^c^n^Jli^h^d by_craf t since 
 the average people are capable of seeing through it. 
 Parasitism, becoming more troublesome and less pro- 
 ductive with every advance in the enlightennient of the 
 crowd, ceases to offer to the select few the easiest method 
 of adaptation. Then the law of least effort determines 
 them to make the same efforts as the average persons 
 do in order to obtain the satisfaction of their needs, 
 whether from nature or by exchange with their fellows 
 — an exchange more profitable in their case, thanks to 
 their superiority. This dev elopment of^ ciyilizatipn is 
 paralleled by the dev e lopment of morality. Moral con- 
 ceptions undergo transformation with the change in the 
 relation between the select few and the average many, 
 with the rising self-respect of the ordi.n a£X-inan.who does 
 not aspire to domination, and with the increased value 
 assigned to personality, even in the case of him not 
 specially endowed. The ethics of parasitism, whose 
 standard of value, as applied to thought and actions, is 
 th^Jendensy^tg be, ben^figLgJ J3r„^^^ 
 en gaged in exploitation, to the men of overwhelming 
 force, to the privileged dass, to the State, are gradually 
 ousted, and their place taken by the ethics of sovereign 
 personality, for which good is that which assists the con- 
 
4o6 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 quest of nature by man, and evil that which assists the 
 conquest of man by man. 
 
 Parasitism is not the sole result of the law of least 
 effort in the struggle for existence in the midst of hostile 
 nature : it has also produced illusion. No living form 
 can preserve itself unless it is at home in nature, and 
 learns to avoid what is harmful, and discover what is 
 advantageous to it there. The development and dif- 
 ferentiation of its organs is relative to this capacity. In 
 proportion as its needs are manifold and complex, it 
 must have a delicate and m any-sid ed faculty of orienta- 
 tion^ In men, as in all other animals, the seat of this 
 faculty is the nervous system, with the brain as its 
 centre. The chemistry of the body and its movements, 
 and, to a large extent, its development, circulation, and 
 nutrition, are also controlled by this supremely impor- 
 tant organ, whose highest function — the psychic — has 
 arisen and been developed throughout by the necessity 
 of self-preservation. Compulsory adaptation to nature 
 strengthened memory, the primitive characteristic of 
 living matter, fixed the attention; created and perpetu- 
 ated the mechanism of the association of ideas; and 
 imposed the law of causality on thought. The functions 
 of attention, the association of ideas and causal think- 
 ing, are obviously determined by one and the same ob- 
 ject : to translate the sense impressions, when perceived, 
 into ideas and judgments in such a manner that the con- 
 sciousness should receive with all possible speed and 
 the least possible exertion as accurate a picture as possi- 
 ble of its environment, should form as correct as possible 
 a concept of the connection of phenomena, and foresee 
 with the greatest possible certainty the changes, near 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 407 
 
 and remote, likely to occur and prove in any way impor- 
 tant to the organism; so that, estimating their value, 
 both qualitative and quantitative, it may focus the o rgan- 
 ism in the most favou rabl e p ossible^wayj To form a 
 picture of the universe, as closely in touch with reality 
 as the formation and functioning of the sense and per- 
 ceptive organs permit, is a psychic task of the most 
 laborious description: knowledge is only acquired by 
 arduous effort. It is incomparably less difficult to give 
 full rein to the imagination, to allow the thoughts to 
 wander at will, as free and light as air, to indulge in 
 reveries and day-dreams, than to sustain and fix the 
 attention, form ideas from pure perception, without any 
 subjective interpolation whatsoever ; gather up from the 
 memory the perceptions already formed into ideas, and 
 to build up judgments from them ; finally to test with due 
 severity the causal connection and mutual interdepend- 
 ence of the terms of every conclusion. The associations 
 that are frequent and habitual organize themselves, and 
 summon each other automatically into the conscious- 
 ness. It is filled with a whirling cr awd o f ideas, that are 
 drawn from the memory by the playful mechanism of 
 the organized associations, instead of being composed 
 of immediate perceptions which have been tested. These 
 ideas, then, group and combine kaleidoscopically. They 
 dart like will-o'-the-wisps through the consciousness, and 
 disappear again into obscurity. And all this takes place 
 without the will at any moment intervening to control 
 the vanishing dance, or to introduce any order into it, 
 and without the thinking Ego being conscious of any 
 sort of effort. Out of these nebulous elements, which 
 never develop to rational thoughts, the dominant emo- 
 
4o8 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 tion of the moment creates subjective images like the 
 figures of Chladni formed by the vibrations that act 
 upon thin plates of glass — images whose origin prevents 
 them from corresponding in any way to reality. Yet 
 at the beginning of civilizatiorij and even to-day in many 
 cases, men were satisfied to use their brains in this way, 
 because it required so much less effort than the way to 
 knowledge. The automatic play of asjociatidn gave 
 them a view of the world that, though false in every 
 feature, gave them pleasure because it harmonized with 
 their feelings and inclinations. " Side by side with the 
 ■ real world," said Goethe, "there is a World of i llusion 
 more powerful than it is, and in it dwell the majority 
 of men." Men built up this world of illusion for them- 
 selves first by means of incotiiplete, inattentive observa- 
 tion, which was Satisfied with the most casual sense im- 
 pressionSf and falsified even them by arbitrary inter- 
 polations and preposterous intetpretaitidns ; then by pre- 
 sentment or intuition, which is no more than a formless 
 muddle of vague recollections, whose origin in the senses 
 is forgotten ; by the use of analogy in identifying things 
 which are essentially different because of certain partial 
 resemblances; and by imagination, which, working by 
 means of automatic associationism, has emancipated 
 itself almost completely from the law of causality. 
 
 In this world o f illusipft men were as comfortable as 
 in the warm huts inside which the cold, storm, and rain 
 without went unobserved. There everything had a 
 rational meaning. There they found the answer to all 
 the questions suggested by fear or curiosity — an assuage- 
 ment for all trouble and unrest, a comfort for every 
 sorrow, a solution to every riddle. Sickness ? The 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 409 
 
 tormenting of an invisible, sometimes of a visible, enemy, 
 who only had to be driven or cajoled away, and one 
 would be well. Death ? A mere appearance, the reality 
 being eternal lirem unknown but, for the good and 
 favoured, most glorious regions. The world ? A round 
 plate resting upon the sea, covered with a bell-glass of 
 blue crystal. Its origin? its end? Great artists, the 
 Gods, have created it, rule over it, and will one day 
 destroy it. IJappiness ? A gift that can be obtained 
 from these Gods, if one can win or purchase their 
 favour by submissive prayer and sacrifices. These exam- 
 ples suffice. For an exhaustive description of the world 
 of illusion with which men have surrounded themselves, 
 one would have to take in the whole range of mythol- 
 ogy, all fabulous cosmogonies, theology, and also all 
 metaphysical systems. 
 
 In the long-run, however, lUusionism was no more 
 successful as a means of adaptation than Parasitism. 
 The cold blast of reality pierced the world of illusion, 
 and laid waste its fair order. Magic fprniulae, incanta- 
 tions, and the burning of witches and wizards, did not 
 heal disease. Too often prayer and sacrifice failed to 
 avert evil from individuals and communities. Amulets 
 did not avail in battle to avert the deadly stroke. " Sator 
 areto tenet opera rotas " did not succeed in extinguish- 
 ing conflagrations. No incantations were of any use 
 against plague and famine. The nullity of all the meth- 
 ods of illusion inexorably compelled men to seek else- 
 where. Its explanations had to be abandoned in the 
 face of innumerable phenomena that could not be over- 
 looked. In fear and trembling, at first isolated individ- 
 uals, then more and more, were compelled by their sense 
 
4IO THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 of reality to come out of their cherished world of illu- 
 sion, and feel their way carefully, slowly, step by step, 
 into ^the real wgrid- It was trackless and incompre- 
 hensible, with sharp corners everywhere that bruised the 
 feet, blocks and crevasses over which they fell. But 
 gradually they began to learn their way about, and, so 
 soon as some sort of path was made, the explorers had 
 fairly solid ground under their feet. And t ho se who 
 studied the jt:,eal world arrived at ^psi ti ve^r esults, such 
 as the w o rld _.of ill usion never had, and never could 
 have affoE.dgd. The vast majority continued to be 
 wrapped up in the illusions of their own weaving that 
 they held for the real world. Nothing shielded them 
 from the danger of losing all touch with the world of 
 reality, and being exposed defenceless to the injustice 
 of nature, like the dreamers and sleepers on whom the 
 enemy descends in the night, except the incessant watch- 
 fulness of the sentries who undertook to guard and to 
 defend them. These were the small minority, those 
 who busied themselves with observation, research, re- 
 flection, and experiment. To them the world owes its 
 discoveries, its inventions, and its knowledge. Thanks 
 to the devot ed labours of thi s minority , the great ma- 
 jority could safely prolong their pleasant sojourn in 
 the land of illusion, though they are more and more 
 effectually being prevented from acting under the sway 
 of their illusions, and repeating, on a larger scale, such 
 aberrations as the Crusades, the flagellation movement, 
 the persecution of heretics, and burning of witches, or 
 the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. 
 
 But even the apostle of reality has not wholly re- 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 411 
 
 nounced his illusions. Even the scientist, accustdmed to 
 observe most carefully and test most severely the con- 
 tents of his consciousness — even he feels an atavistic 
 home-sidkng§s.,,ior__the_world of illusion, and is drawn 
 towards it by irresistible longing. But there is this dif- 
 ference between him and the man who has never awak- 
 ened to his illusions : he knows the play of his imagina- 
 tion for what it is, even while he delights in it, and never 
 for a moment confuses it with real ideas and judgments. 
 The world of illusion, that the undeveloped mind re- 
 gards as the whole world, is restricted by the critical 
 thinker to the sphere of art, which is to him a joy and 
 a luxury with which he cannot dispense. In art he recov- 
 ers that free play of the imagination that, until recent 
 times, formed the sole activity of the human brain. 
 Once more, untrammelled by the harsh negations of 
 reality, he is master of a world which he can build up, 
 and furnish with his own ideas, peopling it with the 
 embodiments of his longing for beauty, youth, strength, 
 and every kind of perfection, banishing from it every- 
 thing hateful and vulgar, everything evil, repulsive, or 
 repellent, all pain and all sorrow, and committing its 
 government to justice, gentleness, and love. Artj§,,ga^ 
 e rned by man's inclination s a nd impulses, whic h find 
 there the unbounded satisfaction deni^d^themjn reafity!^ 
 There man is not obliged to adapt himself with pain and 
 trouble to nature ; instead, nature — a nature of his own 
 invention — adapts itself to all his needs and whims, and 
 leaves no one of his wishes unfulfilled. The matter-of- 
 fact necessity of adapting himself to his environment 
 has compelled man to raise his thought to knowledge 
 by submitting it to stern discipline, and to renounce the 
 
412 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 pleasures of illusion, which, though facile and flatter- 
 ing, are sterile. In art he seeks his revenge on reality. 
 An answer to the questions of e ternity has been hoped 
 for from history. In vain: it contains none. The 
 moving picture of human life, present as well as past, 
 holds up to us the same inexplicable facts as does the 
 universe itself. These facts are the very existence of 
 the world, the phenomenon of life and consciousness. 
 They are given: we must accept and make the best of 
 them, whether we comprehend them, whether we give 
 a rational explanation of them or no. We see that the 
 world exists; that at a given moment in the world our 
 planet arose, and became the stage of the life-process; 
 that in the course of the development of life upjon earth 
 a being appeared with a relatively largexJbr^in than any 
 hijiiertojmown, man.; that the human species has the 
 desire and the capacity to maintain itself under very 
 unfavourable circumstances. So much we see. But 
 history can no more explain it than chemistry or 
 astronomy. How wasjcgns ciousness all at once ignited 
 by the combination of matter, and how did it develop 
 itself steadily to knowledge? How are the influences 
 of nature on living matter — i.e., energy, movement, 
 oscillation — ^translated into idea? Why has man and 
 no other living species on the earth attained to intel- 
 lectual development? To what purpose is this long 
 series of birth and death, the vast effort involved in 
 the attainment of knowledge, ceaseless struggles and 
 sorrows, if annihilation, the disappearance without a 
 trace of humanity, and perhaps of the earth itself, be 
 the end of it all? It is vain to ponder the annals of 
 mankind, and summon up, so far as we are ^h\e, men 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 413 
 
 and events from the vasty deeps of past centuries. We 
 can obtain no light on what we long to know. 
 
 We must cease toi regard huma^nity from the point^ 
 view of eternity. It dwindles else before our eyes to 
 an almost invisible speck, without permanence, signifi- 
 cance, or aim, the contemplation of which leaves us 
 utterly humiliated, broken, and dispirited. " Sub specie 
 aeternitates " we are nought; we must regard ourselves 
 " sub specie saeculi " if the spectacle is to be worth the 
 trouble. It is hopeless to ask the purpose of humanity 
 and its existence — as hopeless as to ask the purpose of 
 Sirius,,the Milky Way, or the comets. At least we can 
 see some sort of subjective purpose in the life of the 
 individual: he lives, and wishes to live, because life is 
 pleasant to him; he lives, and will live, because life 
 gives him pleasure, is pleasure. He has no doubts of 
 this; only in sickness and old age — that is to say, when 
 the energy of life is waning — ^is he overcome by a shrink- 
 ing feeling of emptiness and aimlessness, of tadium vita. 
 So long as he is filled with life even his reason accepts 
 the word of the Gospel : " Sufficient to the day is the 
 evil thereof." His happi e ^hours and his fairest experi- 
 ences come to him throu gh a world of illusion of his 
 pwji- creation, through religion, fairy-tales and super- 
 stitions, through art. In his thirst for permanence, in 
 his devouring desire for a future, he longs for a goal 
 of aspiration which may open a wide prospect before 
 him, he creates for himself an ideal transcending the 
 hours of his earthly pilgrimage and the limits of his 
 own existence, and in directing himself to it is comforted 
 by a_new idea of^his own val ue and his o wn far-reaching 
 significance. But is there one out of all the ideals to 
 
414 THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 
 
 which the noblest and ablest of men have aspired which 
 can stand the cold examination of knowledge? Only 
 one — the ideal^ goodness and of selfless lov^ . To add 
 no inevitable touch of cruelty to the inexorable evils with 
 which nature scourges man, but, within the limits of their 
 strength, tojessen the sum of human suffering — this is 
 the ideal towards which the most perfect men our species 
 has known have aspired, which they have tried to real- 
 ize, which they have felt to be noble and high enough to 
 inspire and recompense them. It is an ideal that is still 
 far from being realized. It may suffice us for a long 
 time to come. It can yet make life worth living to 
 many, and those the best among us. 
 
 Thus, behind all appearances and all delusions, we 
 find the, real meaning of hist ory to be the manifestation 
 of the life force in mankind. This manifestation passes 
 through successive forms — parasitism, illusion, and 
 knowledge — in an ascending scale of human adaptation 
 to nature. Any other meaning is not" deduced from his<- 
 tory but introduced into it. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abraham, patriarch, 58, 59 
 
 Achilles, 78, 177 
 
 Adam, 33, 58, 59 
 
 Adler, 286 
 
 ^schylus, 31 
 
 Agamemnon, i 
 
 Agrippina, 14 
 
 Alba, Duke of, 69 
 
 Albert the Great, 372 
 
 Alcibiades, I2 
 
 Alexander II. of Russia, 281 
 
 Alexander the Great, 7, 14, 51, 
 
 202, 235 
 Alfred the Great, 219, 296 
 Ammianus Marcellinus, no 
 Antoninus Pius, 329 
 Aristarchus, 336 
 Aristotle, 6, 35, 70, 166, 288, 302, 
 
 316 
 Arphaxates, 58 
 Augustine, St., 57, 60, 65, no, 
 
 168, 202 
 Augustus, 219 
 
 Bismarck, 25, 127, 200 
 
 Blanc, Louis, 3, 11, 109 
 
 Bodin, Jean, 48, 80 
 
 Boisrobert, 338 
 
 Booth, " General," 296 
 
 Boscowitch, Father, 260 
 
 Bossuet, 63, 65, 71, 183 
 
 Boswell, 14 
 
 Brown, John, 295 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, 240 
 
 Brutus, II 
 
 Buchez, 20 
 
 Buchmann, 200 
 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 76, 83, 
 
 321 
 Buddha, 295 
 Bunsen, Chr. Karl Josias von, 
 
 56 
 Bunsen, G. W., 231, 366 
 
 Cade, Jack, 291 
 Cadmus, 127 
 Caesar, Julius, 11, 51 
 Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam, Camp, Maxime du, 4 
 
 Carlo, i6 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 88, 126, 357 
 Carnegie, 178 
 Carnot, 213 
 
 319 
 Bacon, Roger, 337 
 Bagehot, Walter, 48, 81 
 Bancroft, George, 3, 56 
 Barnardo, Dr., 296 
 Barni, 11 
 
 Barot, Ddysse, 319 
 Barth, Dr. Paul, 91, 102 
 Baudrillart, Henri, 48 
 Beaumarchais, 40 
 Becker, 129 
 
 Bede, the Venerable, 63, 220 
 Benedetti, Count, 4 
 Bernard, Claude, 103, 32S 
 Bias, 17s 
 Biedenknapp, 379 
 
 Castro, 333 
 
 Cavour, Count, 25 
 
 Chamisso, A. von, 129 
 
 Charlemagne, 281 
 
 Charles XII. of Sweden, 280 
 
 Chateaubriand, 40 
 
 Christ, 58 
 
 Cicero, 32, no, 174, 316 
 
 Cleon, 309 
 
 Cleopatra, 4, 14 
 
 Cluverius, 16 
 
 Columbus, 51 
 
 415 
 
4i6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 71, 83, 108, iii, 
 
 179. 2i4> 320 
 Condorcet, 30, 320 
 Copernicus, 93 
 Cousin, O., 35a 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 291 
 Crookes, Sir W., 368 
 Curie, 274, 368 
 Cyrano de Bergerac, 337 
 
 Daedalus, 372 
 
 Daniel, the prophet, 63 
 
 Dante, 341 
 
 Darwin, 94 
 
 David, King, 59 
 
 De la Motte Fouque, 129 
 
 Democritus, 316 
 
 Descartes, 319 
 
 Diderot, 320 
 
 Diogenes Laertius, 175 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 294 
 
 Doppler, 366 
 
 Dreyfus, Alfred, 175 
 
 Dugas, L., 175 
 
 Dunant, 283, 296 
 
 Durckheim, 360 
 
 Ekkehard, 63 
 Elijah, the prophet, 337 
 Empedocles, 70, 316 
 Engels, F., 202 
 Erhardt, Ferdinand, i 
 Ezekiel, the prophet, no 
 
 Fawkes, Guy, 27 
 
 Fenelon, 319 
 
 Ferguson, 252 
 
 Feuerbach, 218 
 
 Fichte, 63, 124 
 
 Finot, Jean, 37s 
 
 Flint, Robert, 64, 76, 312 
 
 Florus, no 
 
 Fontana, 252 
 
 Fontenelle, 319 
 
 Forel, 90 
 
 Francis II. of Austria, 294 
 
 Francis of Assisi, St., 296 
 
 Fraunhofer, 366 
 
 Frederick the Great, 52, 281 
 
 Frederick William III., 294 
 
 Froude, James Anthony, 20 
 
 Fustel de Coulanges, 182 
 
 Galen, 81 
 
 Galileo, 371 
 
 Galton, 272 
 
 Galvani, 368 
 
 Gambetta, 25, 129 
 
 Gamerus, 16 
 
 Ganz, Edward, 68, 72, 75, 80 
 
 Garibaldi, 25 
 
 Geissler, Heinrich, 367 
 
 Genebrard, 16 
 
 Gentilis, Alberic, 345 
 
 George III. of England, 294 
 
 Giacomoni, 4 
 
 Giddings, F. H., 167 
 
 Gladstone, 294 
 
 Gobineau, 71 
 
 Goethe, 14, 39, 68, 140, 252, 301, 
 
 317, 408 
 Graf, Arturo, 129 
 Grote, 1 1 
 Grouchy, 18 
 
 Gumplowicz, 108, 305, 360 
 Guyau, 231 
 
 Hanotaux, Gabriel, n 
 
 Hardyng, 11 
 
 Harold, King, 69 
 
 Hartenstein, G., 2 
 
 Hartmann, Eduard von, 75 
 
 Hartzenbusch, 129 
 
 Hegel, 68, 75, 124, 260 
 
 Henry IV. of France, 52, 193 
 
 Heraclitus, 316, 322 
 
 Herbart, 107, 252 
 
 Herder, 68, 72, 81 
 
 Hermann, 76 
 
 Hesiod, 316 
 
 Hippocrates, 81 
 
 Hobbes, 188, 277, 345 
 
 HiiflFding, Harald, 345 
 
 Holinshed, it 
 
 Homer, 36, 341 
 
 Horace, 317 
 
 Huber, 90 
 
 Huggins, 366 
 
 Humboldt, W. von, 8, 33, 56, 80 
 
 Hume, 20 
 
 Huss, 4 
 
 Icarus, 372 
 
 Isidor of Seville, 63 
 
INDEX 
 
 417 
 
 Javillier, 274 
 Jesus, 59, 29s 
 Joan of Arc, 27 
 John of Leyden, 2S0 
 Johnson, Samuel, 14 
 Jouffroy, 305 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, 2, I2, 71, 124, 
 
 320, 368 
 Karr, Alphonse, 311 
 Kautsky, Karl, S5 
 Keller, Gottfried, 14 
 Kepler, 213 
 Kinglake, 11 
 Kirchho£F, 366 
 Kleist, Heinrich von, 307 
 Kossuth, Louis, 291 
 Krause, 56, 79 
 K'ronos, 185 
 Kupferschmied, 16 
 
 Laboulaye, Edouard, 3 
 
 Lacombe, P., i, 15, 44, 48, 252 
 
 Lamartine, 318 
 
 Lamotte, 338 
 
 Lamprecht, K., 10 
 
 Lanfrey, 11 
 
 Laplace, 368 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, 176 
 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 294 
 
 Lavoisier, 147, 367 
 
 Lazarus, Moriz, 121, 126 
 
 Le Bon, Gustave, 368 
 
 Leibnitz, 66, 210, 320 
 
 Leo, Heinrich, 80 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 337 
 
 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 202 
 
 Lesseps, Ferd. de, 78 
 
 Leasing, 223 
 
 Lilienfeld, von, in 
 
 Lilienthal, 360 
 
 Lingard, 56 
 
 Lingg, Hermann, 177 
 
 Linus, 316 
 
 Lippert, 304 
 
 Littre, in 
 
 Livius, Titus (Livy), 7, 11, 317 
 
 Locke, John, 303 
 
 Lombroso, Paola, 25 
 
 Lopez, 333 
 
 Lotze, Hermann, 30, 109, 312, 318 
 
 Louis, Saint, 219 
 
 Louis XIV., 201 
 
 Louis XVI., 3 
 
 Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Ave- 
 
 bury), 90, 320 
 Lucan, 345 
 Lucretius, 228 
 Luden, Heinrich, 72 
 Luther, 109 
 
 McCarthy, Justin, 1 1 
 Machiavelli, 285, 316 
 Mach, Ernst, 108, 395 
 Macker, 16 
 Maine, H. S., 109 
 Maistre, Count Joseph de, 391 
 Marcus Aurelius, 219 
 Marius, 12, 333 
 Marks, Mary A. M., 3 
 Martial, 353 
 Martin, 200 
 Marx, Karl, 84 
 Masaniello, 291 
 Maspero, n 
 Maurenbrecher, 9 
 Mendelssohn, Moses, 223 
 Menzel, Wolfgang, 3 
 MetchnikofI, Elie, 375 
 Methuselah, 60 
 Michael Angelo, 341 
 Michel, Hugo, 374 
 Michelet, Jules, 320 
 Mill, John Stuart, 106, 320 
 Milliet, J. Paul, 260 
 Milton, n, 341 
 Minos, 127 
 Moltke, 25, 384 
 Mommsen, Theodor, 6, 11 
 Monmouth, n 
 Monod, Gabriel, 19 
 Montesquieu, 81, 109 
 Mortillet, Dr., 146 
 Miiller, Johannes, 63, 68 
 
 Napoleon, 11, 18, 25, 74, 127, 
 
 288, 291, 332 
 Napoleon III., 291 
 Neander, 16 
 Newton, 213 
 Noah, 60 
 Nostradamus, 364 
 
4i8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Oldenburg, Hermann, 362 
 Ollivier, Emile, 11 
 Orosius, 65 
 Ossian, ^z 
 Ovid, 155, 317 
 
 Paracelsus, 114, 322 
 Pascal, Blaise, 4, no 
 Paul, the Apostle, 51 
 Peabody, 296 
 Percy, James, 200 
 Perrault, 318, 338 
 Petofy, Alexander, 129 
 Phidias, 341 
 Philo, 49 
 
 Plato, 151, 215, 316, 344 
 Platter, Thomas, 14 
 Plimsoll, 283 
 Pliny, 35, 116, 307 
 Pollard, 6 
 Polybius, 81 
 
 Pomponius Secundus, 116 
 Porsenna, 11 
 Prometheus, 31 
 Psammetichus, 12 
 Ptolemaeus, 35 
 
 Rameses, 12 
 
 Ramsay, Sir William, 274 
 
 Ranke, Leopold von, 5 
 
 Raphael, 341 
 
 Rauber, 171 
 
 Ravaillac, 193 
 
 Raymond Lully, 372 
 
 Reinach, Salomon, 373 
 
 Reuter, Fritz, 73 
 
 Richelieu, Cardinal, 52 
 
 Rienzi, Nicola di, 291 
 
 Rigaut, Hippolyte, 318, 338 
 
 Ritter, Karl, 81 
 
 Robespierre, 293 
 
 Rocholl, R., 48, 67 
 
 Rochow, von, 205 
 
 Roland, 25 
 
 Romagnosi, 304 
 
 Roon, von, 25 
 
 Rosas, 280, 333 
 
 Rougemont, Frederic de, 225, 248, 
 
 337 
 Rousseau, 75, 128, 155, 168, 195, 
 
 238, 360 
 Ruge, 76 
 
 Sadi, 2 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 35 
 
 Savonarola, 295 
 
 Schaeffle, 112, 360 
 
 Schelling, 56, 63, 124, 227 
 
 Schiller, Friedrich, i, 10, 97, 341, 
 
 353 
 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 68, 75 
 Schlozer, 107 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 80, 109, 
 
 318 
 Schreber, von, 172 
 Schurtz, 177 
 
 Schweinichen, Hans von, 14 
 Schwerin, Count de, 200 
 Scribe, 4 
 
 Sextus Empiricus, 104 
 Shakespeare, 341 
 Sighele, Scipio, 115 
 Simmel, Georg, 6, 18, 44, 55, 
 
 108, 353 
 Smith, Adam, 142 
 Sophocles, 341 
 Spencer, Herbert, 8, 109, 144, 
 
 179. 272, 304, 322 
 Spiiller, 129 
 Stahl, 367 
 
 St. Germain, Comte de, 372 
 St. Pierre, Abbe de, 73, 320 
 St. Simon, 20, 179, 320 
 Steinthal, I2i, 126 
 Strauss, 231 
 Sulla, 12 
 Sybel, 1 1 
 
 Tacitus, 190 
 
 Taine, 40 
 
 Tasso, 341 
 
 Terrason, 338 
 
 Themistocles, 12 
 
 Thiers, 11, 25 
 
 Thompson, R. Campbell, 31 
 
 Thor, 127, 235 
 
 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 312 
 
 Treitschke, 1 1 
 
 Trendelburg, 80 
 
 Trezza, 55 
 
 Turgot, 81, 320 
 
 Tyler, 320 
 
 Uhlenhuth, 94 
 Ulrici, 80 
 
INDEX 
 
 419 
 
 Vacherot, 7, 391 
 
 Vico, Giambattista, 68, 71, 297, 
 
 3»9. 357 , „ . 
 
 Vincent de Paul, Saint, 296 
 
 Volnej", 207 
 Volta, 368 
 
 Voltaire, 48, 64, 67, 81, 109, 123, 
 238 
 
 WaddingtoD, 129 
 Wagner, A., 304 
 Wallenstein, 10 
 Ward, 167, 304 
 Washington, Booker T., 130 
 Washington, George, 291 
 
 Wasmann, 90 
 Weber, 73 
 Weismann, 114 
 Wells, H. G., 32, 90 
 Werner, Karl, 71 
 William the Conqueror, 16 
 Winckler, Hugo, 392 
 Wolf, F. A., 69 
 Worms, Keai, 112, 360 
 Wundt, 101, 108 
 
 Zeno, 70, 312 
 
 Zeuxis, 341 
 
 Zola, Emile, xg, 103