I. Hesitations
As his studies come to a close the historian faces the challenge: Of what
use have your studies been? Have you found in your work only the
amusement of recounting the rise and fall of nations and ideas, and retelling
“sad stories of the death of kings”? Have you learned more about human
nature than the man in the street can learn without so much as opening a
book? Have you derived from history any illumination of our present
condition, any guidance for our judgments and policies, any guard against
the rebuffs of surprise or the vicissitudes of change? Have you found such
regularities in the sequence of past events that you can predict the future
actions of mankind or the fate of states? Is it possible that, after all, “history
has no sense,”
that it teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was
only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make
on a larger stage and scale?
At times we feel so, and a multitude of doubts assail our enterprise. To
begin with, do we really know what the past was, what actually happened,
or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past
event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent
evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic
or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is
prejudice.”
Even the historian who thinks to rise above partiality for his
country, race, creed, or class betrays his secret predilection in his choice of
materials, and in the nuances of his adjectives. “The historian always
oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces
out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can
never quite embrace or comprehend.”
the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the
acceleration of change. In 1909 Charles Péguy [Péguy, Charles Pierre
(1873-1914)] thought that “the world changed less since Jesus Christ than
in the last thirty years”
; and perhaps some young doctor of philosophy
in physics would now add that his science has changed more since 1909
