Theological and Metaphysical Conceptions.
It is not,
for instance, the case that the causal agencies
regarded
as determining the sequence of occurrences have al-
ways been conceived to be empirical factors lying
within the historical process. On the contrary, it has
sometimes been
assumed that the clue to all that hap-
pens must
ultimately be located in something that lies
outside that process, such as
the will of a divine or
transcendent being. One potent source of
speculation
has been the belief that the pattern of historical events
represents the unfolding of some overall purpose or
design, views of this
sort originating in religious notions
of the universe and of man's place
within it. Thus, early
in the Christian era, certain of the Church fathers
were
already reacting against Greco-Roman views that
pictured history
in terms of recurrent cycles, seeking
to substitute a conception of linear
movement wherein
the intentions of a sovereign providential power were
clearly discoverable; while by the fifth century Saint
Augustine had given
articulate philosophical expression
to a directional view which presupposed
a providential
order and which was to prove immensely influential.
Augustine's ideas admittedly diverged widely from the
cruder hypotheses of
his predecessors; moreover, he
was notably reticent about the possibility
of interpret-
ing the details of
terrestrial history in a providential
manner, implying for the most part
that such things
fell outside the range of human cognizance and con-
cern. The same cannot, however, be said of
some later
writers who looked back to Augustine for inspiration,
and
least of all of the seventeenth-century French
historian, J. B. Bossuet.
Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire
universelle
(1681) was indeed remarkable for the con-
fidence displayed by its author in his capacity for
penetrating the
workings of the divine intelligence
insofar as these impinged upon the
affairs of men. It
was not merely that he took pleasure in offering exam-
ples of the retribution visited by God upon
erring
nations and individuals; he further professed to know
that even the most (apparently) fortuitous occurrences
had been
“contrived by a higher wisdom, that is to
say, in the
everlasting mind who has all the world's
causes and all the effects
contained in one single order.”
The modern development of historical enquiry as
a firmly established
discipline in its own right has
been—not
unnaturally—accompanied by a marked
decline in the tendency to
try to explain the general
course of history by reference to a governing
agency
external to it. It is true that some latter-day theologians,
for example, Reinhold Niebuhr, have spoken as if cer-
tain forms of providential interpretation remained fea-
sible: but the proposals put forward have
usually been
so tentative and heavily qualified, so imbued with a
desire not to trespass upon areas occupied by profes-
sional or “technical” historians,
that to treat them as
strictly comparable with the ambitious programs
of
earlier periods would be a mistake. Nevertheless, the
view that the
totality of historical events can and
should be understood as composing an
intelligible tele-
ological sequence has
been a persistent one in human
thinking, and in the eighteenth and
nineteenth cen-
turies this found expression
in systems in which the
purposive element stressed by previous
theological
writers was, so to speak, absorbed within the historical
process itself. Thus various attempts were made to
portray history as
moving in a determinate and mean-
ingful
direction, but without thereby positing a tran-
scendent entity which could be regarded as ultimately
responsible for the direction it took; the providential
principle was
regarded as being immanent in world
history rather than as deriving from an
extraneous
source.
Some such thought underlies the theories of history
propounded by Vico,
Kant, and Hegel. Despite their
considerable differences on other counts,
these philos-
ophers at least shared the
common assumption or
methodological postulate that what happens in the
historical sphere possesses an inner “logic” which
can
be regarded as being intrinsic to the course of events.
By this
they did not mean that the actual participants
in the process were always
aware of the long-term
significance of their actions: on the contrary,
they
implied that the historical purposes served by particu-
lar agents were obscure or even unknown to the
agents
themselves; it was only in retrospect—and from a
vantage point that transcended the contingencies of
immediate occasion and
circumstance—that the deeds
of individuals could be seen as
contributing towards
the realization of a state of affairs which was in
some
sense implicit from the beginning as a final goal or
end. At the
same time, they did not wish to be under-
stood as recommending a kind of applied theology.
When Vico, for
instance, spoke of there being an “ideal
eternal history... whose course is run in time by the
histories
of all nations” (Scienza nuova,
§114), he ex-
pressly repudiated the
suggestion that he was postulat-
ing a
divine “potter who molds things outside himself.”
It
was man who made his own history; he did so,
however, in a fashion such
that each stage of social
development could be interpreted as having a part
to
play in a sequence that, taken as a whole, displayed
a necessary
teleological structure. Likewise, Kant was
insistent upon the possibility
of conceiving history in
a way that portrayed the conflicts and
vicissitudes to
which men are subject by virtue of their own
activities
as representing the means whereby the human species
progressively realized the capacities originally im-
planted in it by nature and thus moved towards the
fulfilment of
its earthly destiny. The case of Hegel is
more complicated, since his
conception of history was
impregnated with conceptions deriving from a
com-
prehensive metaphysical system
that encompassed
every aspect of human experience; yet here, too, a
similar theme may be discerned. For history, along
with everything else,
exemplified the unfolding of a
rational principle or
“Idea” that was destined to realize
itself in time.
Hegel admittedly spoke of the operations
of a “World
Spirit” (Weltgeist) in history, but he
does
not seem to have envisaged this as an independent
agency; rather,
it expressed itself directly in the activi-
ties of historical individuals and was nothing apart from
these. So
understood, the historical process moved
inexorably forward, one phase
giving way to another
in a dialectical progression that culminated in a
form
of social life which—as the embodiment of
freedom—
constituted its ultimate objective, being referred to
by
Hegel as “the final cause of the world at large.”
Hegel himself sometimes gave the impression that
his interpretation of
history could be regarded as a
“hypothesis” that both
accounted for and was grounded
upon the empirical data at his disposal. And
a major
attraction, indeed, of teological theories of the type
to
which his may be said to belong has been the feeling
that, unlike
explicitly theological conceptions, they do
not in the end require for
their support anything other
than the attested facts of historical
experience. Such
a feeling is understandable. For what, from one point
of view, the historical teleologist can be considered
to be doing is making
a claim to the effect that a
certain trend or tendency has manifested
itself in
human affairs; and such a claim, it would seem, is one
fully
capable of being confirmed or disproved by expe-
rience alone. It is, however, one thing to assert that
events
have, as a matter of fact, exhibited a particular
tendency or direction; it
is another to say that it was
necessary that they should have taken the
course that
they did: and it is another again to seek to confirm this
necessity by reference to the state of affairs in which
they
have issued or to which they eventually led. To
argue that certain things
had to happen if something
else was to happen is not in itself to explain
why the
earlier events in the series occurred as they did; the
most
that would be shown is that the occurrence of
the prior events was a
necessary condition of the oc-
currence of
the sequel. The situation would, of course,
be different if, on independent
grounds, it could be
demonstrated that the end-product of history was
in
some manner intended or preordained from the start
and, moreover,
that there was only one route by which
such a consummation could be
attained. But it remains
hard to see how such an additional assumption
could
be established, or even assigned a clear meaning, in
the absence
of anything over and above the facts of
man's past as determined by
ordinary historical inves-
tigation. For
this reason, among others, a number of
empirically-minded theorists, such
as Saint-Simon and
Comte, were led to look elsewhere in their search
for
an explanatory key with which to unlock the secrets
of historical
evolution and change.
