The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The second source of this belief lies deeper still. Patterns of growth, or of the march of events, can plausibly be represented as a succession of causes and effects, capable of being systematised by natural science. But sometimes we speak as if something more fundamental than empirical connections (which idealist philosophers call ‘mechanical’ or ‘external’ or ‘mere brute conjunctions’) give their unity to the aspects, or the successive phases, of the existence of the human race on earth. When we say, for instance, that it is absurd to blame Richelieu for not acting like Bismarck because it is obvious that Richelieu could not have acted like a man living in Germany in the nineteenth century; and that conversely Bismarck could not have done what Richelieu accomplished, because the seventeenth century had its own character, very different from the deeds, events, characteristics of the eighteenth century which it uniquely determined, and which in their turn uniquely determined those of the nineteenth; what we are then affirming is that this order is an objective order; that those who do not understand that what is possible in one age and situation may be wholly inconceivable in another fail to understand something universal and fundamental about the only way in which social life, or the human mind, or economic growth, or some other sequence, not merely does, but can, or perhaps must, develop. Similarly, when we say that the proposition that Hamlet was written at the court of Genghis Khan in Outer Mongolia is not merely false but absurd; that if someone acquainted with the relevant facts seriously supposes that it could have been written at that time and in that place he is not merely unusually ignorant or mistaken, but out of his mind; that Hamlet not merely was not, but could not have been, written there or then – that we can dismiss this hypothesis without discussion – what is it that entitles us to feel so certain? What kind of ‘could not’ is this ‘could not’? Do we rule out propositions asserting possibilities of this kind as being false on scientific, that is, empirical-inductive grounds?

  It seems to me that we call them grotesque (and not merely implausible or false) because they conflict, not just with this or that fact or generalisation which we accept, but with presuppositions which are entailed by our whole way of thinking about the world – the basic categories that govern such central concepts of our thought as man, society, history, development, growth, barbarism, maturity, civilisation and the like. These presuppositions may turn out to be false or misleading (as, for example, teleology or deism are considered to have been by positivists or atheists), but they are not refuted by experiment or empirical observation. They are destroyed or transformed by those changes in the total outlook of a man or a milieu or a culture which it is the hardest (and the most important) test of the history of ideas (and, in the end, of history as such) to be able to explain.

  What is here involved is a deeply ingrained, widespread, long-lived Weltanschauung – the unquestioning (and not necessarily valid) assumption of one particular objective order of events or facts. Sometimes it is a vertical order – succession in time – which makes us realise that the events or institutions of, say, the fourteenth century, because they were what they were, of necessity (however we analyse this sort of necessity), and not just as a matter of fact – contingently – occurred earlier than those of the sixteenth, which were ‘shaped’, that is, in some sense determined (some would say caused), by them; so that anyone who tries to date the works of Shakespeare before those of Dante, or to omit the fifteenth century altogether, fitting the end of the fourteenth into the beginning of the sixteenth century without a break, can be convicted of suffering from a defect different in kind, not degree, from (and less easily remediable than) ignorance or lack of scientific method. At other times we conceive of the order as ‘horizontal’; that is, it underlies the perception of the interconnections between different aspects of the same stage of culture – the kinds of assumptions and categories that the anti-mechanistic German philosophers of culture, Herder and his disciples (and before them Vico), brought to light. It is this kind of awareness (the historical sense) that is said to enable us to perceive that a certain type of legal structure is ‘intimately connected’ with, or is part of the same complex as, an economic activity, a moral outlook, a style of writing or of dancing or of worship; it is by means of this gift (whatever may be its nature) that we recognise various manifestations of the human spirit as ‘belonging to’ this or that culture or nation or historical period, although these manifestations may be as different from one another as the way in which men form letters on paper from their system of land tenure. Without this faculty we should attach no sense to such social-historical notions as ‘the typical’, or ‘the normal’, or ‘the discordant’, or ‘the anachronistic’, and consequently we should be unable to conceive the history of an institution as an intelligible pattern, or to attribute a work of art to its time and civilisation and milieu, or indeed to understand or explain how one phase of a civilisation ‘generates’ or ‘determines’ another. The sense of what remains identical or unitary in differences and in change (of which idealist philosophers have made altogether too much) is also a dominant factor in giving us our sense of unalterable trends, of the ‘one-directional’ flow of history. From this it is easy to pass to the far more questionable belief that whatever is unalterable is so only because it obeys laws, and that whatever obeys laws can always be systematised into a science.

  These are among the many factors that have made men crave for a natural science of history. All seemed ready, particularly in the nineteenth century, for the formulation of this new, powerful and illuminating discipline, which would do away with the chaotic accumulation of facts, conjectures and rules of thumb that had been treated with such disdain by Descartes and his scientifically-minded successors. The stage was set, but virtually nothing materialised. No general laws were formulated – nor even moderately reliable maxims – from which historians could deduce (together with knowledge of the initial conditions) either what would happen next, or what had happened in the past. The great machine which was to rescue them from the tedious labours of adding fact to fact and of attempting to construct a coherent account out of their hand-picked material seemed like a plan in the head of a cracked inventor. The immense labour-saving instrument which, when fed with information, would itself order it, deduce the right conclusions, and offer the proper explanations, removing the need for the uncertain, old-fashioned, hand-operated tools with which historians had fumbled their way in the unregenerate past, remained a bogus prospectus, the child of an extravagant imagination, like designs for a perpetual motion machine. Neither psychologists nor sociologists, neither the ambitious Comte nor the more modest Wundt, had been able to create the new mechanism: the ‘nomothetic’ sciences – the system of laws and rules under which the factual material could be ordered so as to yield new knowledge – remained stillborn.

  One of the criteria of a natural science is rightly regarded as being its capacity for prediction; or, in the case of a historical study, retrodiction – filling in gaps in the past for which no direct testimony exists with the aid of extrapolation performed according to relevant rules or laws. A method of this conjectural sort is employed in archaeology or palaeontology where vast gaps in knowledge exist and there is no better – more dependable – avenue to factual truth in the absence of concrete factual evidence. In archaeology we make efforts to link our knowledge of one remote period to our knowledge of another by trying to reconstruct what must, or at least may have, occurred to account for the transition from one stage to the other through many unknown intermediate phases. But this way of filling gaps is commonly regarded as a none too reliable method of discovery of the past, and one to which no one would wish to resort if he could find the more concrete kind of evidence (however the quality and extent of such concreteness is assessed) on which we base knowledge of the historical, as opposed to prehistoric, period of human life; still less as a ‘scientific’ substitute for it.

  What would the structure of such a science be like, supposing that one were able to f
ormulate it? It would, presumably, consist of causal or functional correlations – a system of interrelated general propositions of the type ‘Whenever or wherever ϕ then or there ψ’ – variables into which precise dates and places could be fitted; and it would possess two forms, the ‘pure’ and the ‘applied’. The ‘pure’ sciences of social statics or social dynamics, of which Herbert Spencer perhaps a little too optimistically proclaimed the existence, would then be related to the ‘applied’ science of history, somewhat as physics is to mechanics, or at least as anatomy applies to the diagnosis of specific cases by a physician. If it existed, such a science would have revolutionised the old empirical, hand-woven history by mechanising it, as astronomy abolished the rules of thumb accumulated by Babylonian star-gazers, or as Newtonian physics transformed older cosmologies. No such science exists. Before we ask why this is so, it would perhaps be profitable to consider some of the more obvious ways in which history, as it has been written until our day, differs from a natural science conceived in this fashion.

  Let me begin by noting one conspicuous difference between history and the natural sciences. Whereas in a developed natural science we consider it more rational to put our confidence in general propositions or laws than in specific phenomena (indeed this is part of the definition of rationality), this rule does not seem to operate successfully in history. Let me give the simplest possible kind of example. One of the common-sense generalisations that we regard as most firmly established is that the normal inhabitants of this planet can see the sun rise every morning. Suppose a man were to say that on a given morning he had not, despite repeated attempts, seen the sun rise; and that since one negative instance is, by the rules of our ordinary logic, sufficient to kill a general proposition, he regarded his carefully carried out observation as fatal not merely to the hitherto accepted generalisation about the succession of night and day, but to the entire system of celestial mechanics, and indeed of physics, which purports to reveal the causes of this phenomenon. This startling claim would not normally be regarded as a conclusion to be unhesitatingly accepted. Our first reaction would be to try to construct an ad hoc hypothesis to save our system of physics, supported as it is by the most systematic accumulation of controlled observation and deductive reasoning made by men. We should suggest to the objector that perhaps he was not looking at the right portion of the sky; that clouds intervened; that he was distracted; that his eyes were closed; that he was asleep; that he was suffering from a hallucination; that he was using words in unfamiliar senses; that he was lying or joking or insane; we should advance other explanations, any one of which would be compatible with his statement, and yet preserve physical science intact. It would not be rational to jump to the immediate conclusion that if the man, in our considered judgement, had told the truth, the whole of our hard-won physics must be rejected, or even modified. No doubt, if the phenomenon repeated itself, and other men failed to perceive the sun rising under normal conditions, some physical hypotheses, or indeed laws, might have to be drastically altered, or even rejected; perhaps the foundations of our physical sciences would have to be built anew. But we should only embark on this in the last resort. Yet if per contra a historian were to attempt to cast doubt on – or explain away – some piece of individual observation of a type not otherwise suspect, say, that Napoleon had been seen in a three-cornered hat at a given moment during the battle of Austerlitz; and if the historian did so solely because he put his faith, for whatever reason, in a theory or law according to which French generals or heads of State never wore three-cornered hats during battles, his method, one can safely assert, would not meet with universal or immediate recognition from his profession. Any procedure designed to discredit the testimony of normally reliable witnesses or documents as, let us say, lies or forgeries, or as being defective at the very point at which the report about Napoleon’s hat occurred, would be liable to be regarded as itself suspect, as an attempt to alter the facts to fit a theory.

  I have chosen a crude and trivial instance; it would not be difficult to think of more sophisticated examples, where a historian lays himself open to the charge of trying to press the facts into the service of a particular theory. Such historians are accused of being prisoners of their theories; they are accused of being fanatical or cranky or doctrinaire, of misrepresenting or misreading reality to fit in with their obsessions, and the like. Addiction to theory – being doctrinaire – is a term of abuse when applied to historians; it is not an insult if applied to a natural scientist. We are saying nothing derogatory if we say of a natural scientist that he is in the grip of a theory. We may complain if we think that his theory is false, or that he is ignoring relevant evidence, but we do not deplore the fact that he is trying to fit the facts into the pattern of a theory; for that is his business. It is the business of a natural scientist to be a theorist; that is, to formulate doctrines – true rather than false, but, above all, doctrines; for natural science is nothing if it is not a systematic interlacing of theories and doctrines, built up inductively, or by hypothetical-deductive methods, or whatever other method is considered best (logically reputable, rational, publicly testable, fruitful) by the most competent practitioners in the field. It seems clear that whereas in history we tend, more often than not, to attach greater credence to the existence of particular facts than to general hypotheses, however well supported, from which these facts could in theory be deduced, in a natural science the opposite seems more often to be the case: there it is (in cases of conflict) often more rational to rely upon a properly supported general theory – say that of gravitation – than on particular observations. This difference alone, whatever its root, must cast prima facie doubt upon any attempt to draw too close an analogy between the methods of history and those of natural science.

  It may be objected at this point that the only logical justification for belief in particular facts must involve general propositions, and therefore always in the end rests on some form of induction. For what other way of justifying beliefs about facts have we? The first of these assertions is true, but the second is not, and their conflation leads to confusion. It needs no deep reflection to realise that all our thought is shot through with general propositions. All thinking involves classification; all classification involves general terms. My very notion of Napoleon or hats or battles involves some general beliefs about the entities which these words denote. Moreover, my reasons for trusting an eye-witness account or a document entail judgements about the reliability of different kinds of testimony, or the range within which the behaviour of individuals is or is not variable, and the like – judgements which are certainly general. But in the first place it is a far cry from the scattered generalisations implicit in the everyday use of words (or ideas) to the systematic structure of even the most rudimentary science;3 and in the second place I am certain, for example, that I am not at this moment the Emperor of Mars dreaming a dream in which I am a university teacher on the Earth; but I should find it exceedingly hard to justify my certainty by inductive methods that avoid circularity. Most of the certainties on which our lives are founded would scarcely pass this test. The vast majority of the types of reasoning on which our beliefs rest, or by which we should seek to justify them if they were challenged, are not reducible to formal deductive or inductive schemata, or combinations of them. If I am asked what rational grounds I have for supposing that I am not on Mars, or that the Emperor Napoleon existed and was not merely a sun myth, and if in answer to this I try to make explicit the general propositions which entail these conclusions, together with the specific evidence for them, and the evidence for the reliability of this evidence, and the evidence for that evidence in its turn, and so on, I shall not get very far. The web is too complex, the elements too many and not, to say the least, easily isolated and tested one by one; anyone can satisfy himself of this by trying to analyse and state them explicitly. The true reason for accepting the proposition that I live on Earth, and that an Emperor Napoleon I existed, is that to a
ssert their contradictories is to destroy too much of what we take for granted about the present and the past. Any given generalisation may be capable of being tested or refined by inductive or other scientific tests; but we accept the total texture, compounded as it is out of literally countless strands – including both general and particular beliefs – without the possibility, even in principle, of any test for it in its totality. For the total texture is what we begin and end with. There is no Archimedean point outside it whence we can survey the whole of it and pronounce upon it. We can test one part in terms of another, but not the whole, as it were, at one go. When the proposition that the earth was flat was abandoned, this wrought great havoc in the assumptions of common sense; but it could not in principle destroy them all. For in that case nothing would have remained that could be called thinking or criticism.

  It is the sense of the general texture of experience – the most rudimentary awareness of such patterns – that constitutes the foundation of knowledge, that is itself not open to inductive or deductive reasoning: for both these methods rest upon it. Any one proposition or set of propositions can be shaken in terms of those that remain fixed; and then these latter in their turn; but not all simultaneously. All my beliefs cannot be overthrown. Even if the ground beneath one of my feet is crumbling, my other foot must rest securely planted, at least for the time being; otherwise there is no possibility of thought or communication. It is this network of our most general assumptions, called common-sense knowledge, that historians to a greater degree than scientists are bound, at least initially, to take for granted: and they must take a good deal of it for granted, since their subject-matter can be detached from it to a far smaller degree than that of natural science.