Perhaps some light may be cast on this issue by comparing historical method with that of linguistic or literary scholarship. No scholar could emend a text without a capacity (for which no technique exists) for ‘entering into the mind of’ another society and age. Electronic brains cannot perform this: they can offer alternative combinations of letters but not choose between them successfully, since the infallible rules for ‘programming’ have not been formulated. How do gifted scholars in fact arrive at their emendations? They do all that the most exacting natural science would demand: they steep themselves in the material of their authors; they compare, contrast, manipulate combinations like the most accomplished cypher-breakers; they may find it useful to apply statistical and quantitative methods; they formulate hypotheses and test them; all this may well be indispensable but it is not enough. In the end what guides them is a sense (which comes from study of the evidence) of what a given author could, and what he could not, have said; of what fits and what does not fit into the general pattern of his thought. This, let me say again, is not the way in which we demonstrate that penicillin cures pneumonia.
It might be that the deepest chasm which divides historical from scientific studies lies between the outlook of the external observer and that of the actor. It is this that was brought out by the contrast between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ which Vico initiated, and after him the Germans, and is so suspect to modern positivists; between the questions ‘How?’ or ‘What?’ or ‘When?’ on one side, and the questions ‘Why?’, ‘Following what rule?’, ‘Towards what goal?’, ‘Springing from what motive?’ on the other. It lies in the difference between the category of mere togetherness or succession (the correlations to which all sciences can in the end be reduced), and that of coherence and interpretation; between factual knowledge and understanding. The latter alone makes intelligible that celebrated identity in difference (which the idealist philosophers exaggerated and abused) in virtue of which we conceive of one and the same outlook as being expressed in diverse manifestations, and perceive affinities (that are often difficult and at times impossible to formulate) between the dress of a society and its morals, its system of justice and the character of its poetry, its architecture and its domestic habits, its sciences and its religious symbols. This is Montesquieu’s notorious ‘spirit’ of the laws (or institutions) that belong to a society. Indeed, this alone gives its sense to the very notion of belonging;12 without it we should not understand what is meant when something is described as belonging to, or as characteristic or typical of, an age or a style or an outlook, nor, conversely, should we know what it is for some interpretation to be anachronistic, what is meant by an incompatibility between a given phenomenon and its alleged context in time; this type of misattribution is different in kind from formal inconsistency, a logical collision of theories or propositions.
A concentrated interest in particular events or persons or situations as such,13 and not as instances of a generalisation, is a prerequisite of that historical sense which, like a sense of occasion in agents intent on achieving some specific purpose, is sharpened by love or hate or danger; it is this that guides us in understanding, discovering and explaining. When historians assert particular propositions like ‘Lenin played a crucial role in making the Russian Revolution’, or ‘Without Churchill Britain would have been defeated in 1940’, the rational grounds for such assertions, whatever their degree of plausibility, are not identical with generalisations of the type ‘Such men, in such conditions, usually affect events in this fashion’, for which the evidence may be exceedingly feeble; for we do not test the propositions solely – or indeed generally – by their logical links with such general propositions (or explanation sketches), but rather in terms of their coherence with our picture of a specific situation. To analyse this type of knowledge into a finite collection of general and particular, categorical and hypothetical, propositions, is not practicable. Every judgement that we formulate, whether in historical thought or ordinary life, involves general ideas and propositions without which there can be no thought or language. At times some among these generalisations can be clearly stated, and combined into models; where this occurs, natural sciences arise. But the descriptive and explanatory language of historians, because they seek to record or analyse or account for specific or even unique phenomena as such14 – as often as not for their own sakes – cannot, for that reason, be reduced without residue to such general formulae, still less to models and their applications. Any attempt to do so will be halted at the outset by the discovery that the subject-matter involves a ‘thick’ texture of criss-crossing, constantly changing and melting conscious and unconscious beliefs and assumptions some of which it is impossible and all of which it is difficult to formulate, on which, nevertheless, our rational views and rational acts are founded, and, indeed, which they exhibit or articulate. This is the ‘web’ of which Taine speaks, and it is possible to go only some way (it is impossible to say in advance how far) towards isolating and describing its ingredients if our rationality is challenged. And even if we succeed in making explicit all (which is absurd) or many (which is not practicable) of our general propositions or beliefs, this achievement will not take us much nearer the scientific ideal; for between a collection of generalisations – or unanalysed knots of them – and the construction of a model there still lies difficult or impassable country: the generalisations must exhibit an exceptional degree of constancy and logical connection if this passage is to be negotiated.
What are we to call the faculty which an artist displays in choosing his material for his particular purpose; or which a politician or a publicist needs when he adopts a policy or presents a thesis, the success of which may depend on the degree of his sensitiveness to circumstances and to human characters, and to the specific interplay between them, with which, and upon which, he is working? The Wirkungszusammenhang, the general structure or pattern of experience – understanding of this may indeed be useful for the scientist, but it is absolutely indispensable to the historian. Without it, he remains at best a chronicler or technical specialist; at worst a distorter and writer of inferior fiction. He may achieve accuracy, objectivity, lucidity, literary quality, breadth of knowledge, but unless he conveys a recognisable vision of life, and exhibits that sense of what fits into a given situation and what does not which is the ultimate test of sanity, a perception of a social Gestalt, not, as a rule, capable of being formalised in terms, let us say, of a field theory – unless he possesses a minimal capacity for this, the result is not recognised by us as an account of reality, that is, of what human beings, as we understand the term, could have felt or thought or done.
It was, I think, L. B. Namier who once remarked about historical sense that there was no a priori short-cut to knowledge of the past; what actually happened can be established only by scrupulous empirical investigation, by research in its normal sense. What is meant by historical sense is the knowledge not of what happened, but of what did not happen. When a historian, in attempting to decide what occurred and why, rejects all the infinity of logically open possibilities, the vast majority of which are obviously absurd, and, like a detective, investigates only those possibilities which have at least some initial plausibility, it is this sense of what is plausible – what men, being men, could have done or been – that constitutes the sense of coherence with the patterns of life that I have tried to indicate. Such expressions as plausibility, likelihood, sense of reality, historical sense denote typical qualitative categories which distinguish historical studies, as opposed to the natural sciences that seek to operate on a quantitative basis. This distinction, which originated in Vico and Herder, and was developed by Hegel and (malgré soi) Marx, by Dilthey and Weber, is of fundamental importance.
The gifts that historians need are different from those of natural scientists. The latter must abstract, generalise, idealise, qualify, dissociate normally associated ideas (for nature is full of strange surprises, and as little as possible must be taken f
or granted), deduce, establish with certainty, reduce everything to the maximum degree of regularity, uniformity, and, so far as possible, to timeless repetitive patterns. Historians cannot ply their trade without a considerable capacity for thinking in general terms; but they need, in addition, peculiar attributes of their own: a capacity for integration, for perceiving qualitative similarities and differences, a sense of the unique fashion in which various factors combine in the particular concrete situation, which must at once be neither so unlike any other situation as to constitute a total break with the continuous flow of human experience, nor yet so stylised and uniform as to be the obvious creature of theory and not made of flesh and blood. The capacities needed are those rather of association than of dissociation, of perceiving the relation of parts to wholes, of particular sounds or colours to the many possible tunes or pictures into which they might enter, of the links that connect individuals viewed and savoured as individuals, and not primarily as instances of types or laws. It is these that Hegel tried to put under the head of the synthesising ‘Reason’ as opposed to the analytic ‘Understanding’; and to provide with a logic of their own. It is the ‘logic’ that proved incapable of clear formulation or utility: it is this that cannot be incorporated in electronic brains. Such gifts relate as much to practice as to theory; perhaps to practice more directly. A man who lacks common intelligence can be a physicist of genius, but not even a mediocre historian. Some of the characteristics indispensable to (although not, by themselves, sufficient to move) historians are more akin to those needed in active human intercourse than to those found useful in the study or the laboratory or the cloister. The capacity for associating the fruits of experience in a manner that enables its possessors to distinguish, without the benefit of rules, what is central, permanent or universal from what is local, or peripheral, or transient – that is what gives concreteness and plausibility, the breath of life, to historical accounts. Skill in establishing hypotheses by means of observation or memory or inductive procedures, while ultimately indispensable to the discovery of all forms of truth about the world, is not the rarest of the qualities required by historians, nor is the desire to find recurrences and laws itself a symptom of historical talent.
If we ask ourselves which historians have commanded the most lasting admiration, we shall, I think, find that they are neither the most ingenious, nor the most precise, nor even the discoverers of new facts or unsuspected causal connections, but those who (like imaginative writers) present men or societies or situations in many dimensions, at many intersecting levels simultaneously, writers in whose accounts human lives, and their relations both to each other and to the external world, are what (at our most lucid and imaginative) we know that they can be. The gifts that scientists most need are not these: they must be ready to call everything into question, to construct bold hypotheses unrelated to customary empirical procedures, and drive their logical implications as far as they will go, free from control by common sense or too great a fear of departing from what is normal or possible in the world. Only in this way will new truths and relations between them be found – truths which, in psychology or anthropology as well as physics or mathematics, do not depend upon preserving contact with common human experience. In this sense, to say of history that it should approximate to the condition of a science is to ask it to contradict its essence.
It would be generally agreed that the reverse of a grasp of reality is the tendency to fantasy or Utopia. But perhaps there exist more ways than one to defy reality. May it not be that to be unscientific is to defy, for no good logical or empirical reason, established hypotheses and laws; while to be unhistorical is the opposite – to ignore or twist one’s view of particular events, persons, predicaments in the name of laws, theories, principles derived from other fields, logical, ethical, metaphysical, scientific, which the nature of the medium renders inapplicable? For what else is it that is done by those theorists who are called fanatical because their faith in a given pattern is not overcome by their sense of reality? For this reason the attempt to construct a discipline which would stand to concrete history as pure to applied, no matter how successful the human sciences may grow to be – even if, as all but obscurantists must hope, they discover genuine, empirically confirmed, laws of individual and collective behaviour – seems an attempt to square the circle. It is not a vain hope for an ideal goal beyond human powers, but a chimera, born of lack of understanding of the nature of natural science, or of history, or of both.
1 Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago (Paris, 1847–9), vol. 1, p. 392.
2 ‘In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity: and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results … Whoever is at all acquainted with what has been done during the last two centuries, must be aware that every generation demonstrates some events to be regular and predictable, which the preceding generation had declared to be irregular and unpredictable: so that the marked tendency of advancing civilisation is to strengthen our belief in the universality of order, of method, and of law. This being the case, it follows that if any facts, or class of facts, have not yet been reduced to order, we, so far from pronouncing them to be irreducible, should rather be guided by our experience of the past, and should admit the probability that what we now call inexplicable will at some future time be explained. This expectation of discovering regularity in the midst of confusion is so familiar to scientific men, that among the most eminent of them it becomes an article of faith: and if the same expectation is not generally found among historians, it must be ascribed partly to their being of inferior ability to the investigators of nature, and partly to the greater complexity of those social phenomena with which their studies are concerned.
‘… The most celebrated historians are manifestly inferior to the most successful cultivators of physical science: no one having devoted himself to history who in point of intellect is at all to be compared with Kepler, Newton, or many others …
‘[Nevertheless] I entertain little doubt that before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as it now is to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material world.’ Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1857), vol. 1, pp. 6–7 and 31.
3 This can be put in another way by saying that the generalisations of history, like those of ordinary thought, are sometimes unconnected; so that a change in the degree of belief in any one of these does not, as in a natural science, automatically affect the status of all the others. This is a crucial difference.
4 Poetics 1451b 11.
5 Or at best significant similarities, that is, those in which we are interested.
6 This is an empirical fact. The world might have been different; if, for example, it possessed fewer characteristics and these coexisted or recurred with much greater uniformity and regularity, the facts of history could more easily be reduced to a natural science or sciences. But human experience would then be altogether different, and not describable in terms of our familiar categories and concepts. The tidier and more uniform such a universe, the less like our own, the less able are we to imagine it or conceive what our experience would be like.
7 Discours de M. Taine prononcé à l’Académie française (Paris, 1880), pp. 24–7.
8 See pp. 43–4 and 52 below.
9 See pp. 452–4 below.
10 Critique of Pure Reason, A654/B682.
11 Exodus, chapter 23, verse 9.
12 Cf. p. 24 above.
13 ‘There are really only two ways of acquiring knowledge of human affairs’ says Ran
ke: ‘through the perception of the particular, or through abstraction … the former [is the method] of history. There is no other way …
‘Two qualities, I think, are required for the making of the true historian: first he must feel a participation and pleasure in the particular for itself … Just as one takes delight in flowers without thinking to what genus of Linnaeus … they belong … without thinking how the whole manifests itself in the particular.
‘Still, this does not suffice; … while [the historian] reflects on the particular, the development of the world in general will become apparent to him.’ In The Varieties of History, ed. Fritz Stern (New York, 1956), pp. 58–9.
14 All facts are, of course, unique, those dealt with by natural scientists no less than any others; but it is not their uniqueness that interests scientists.
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