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VII. HISTORIOGRAPHY

Excepting simpleminded chronicles and listings, any
historical work has a theme of continuity inside of it.
The theme of the Old Testament, whatever the many
digressions, is the gradual erection of the Israelite
theocracy. Thucydides fused the two parts of the Pelo-
ponnesian war, which were separated by the peace of
Nicias, into one continuous event. Aristotle created our
academic field of the history of philosophy by conceiv-
ing a closely-knit continuity of development in natural
philosophy from Thales to Democritus. Within this
development he even created, rather forcedly, the
subdevelopments of “monism” and “pluralism.” Aris-
totle says himself that it may appear incongruous to
create a continuity of transition from the “materialists”
Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, to the “ontologists”

Parmenides and Melissus by calling them all “monists,”
but that he is going to do so anyhow (Physica, Book
1, Ch. 2). Aristotle also knew well that there had been
a great difference between the four “roots” (= ele-
ments) of Empedocles and the infinitely many atoms
of Leucippus and Democritus, but he subsumed them
under the rubric of “pluralists” nonetheless.

Continuity as a methodology in history does not at
all mean that all leading developments are presumed
to be continuous, that is composed of accumulations
of small-step events, let alone that developments are
presumed to be always “progressive,” that is positively
accented forward advances.

After the Renaissance, under the spell of a wide-
spread “idea of progress” (J. B. Bury), and lasting deep
into the nineteenth century (Bochner, pp. 73-74), such
presumptions sometimes did assert themselves. Thus,
in the history of science, the inductivism of Francis
Bacon presented such an idea of progress fairly closely.
It presumed that science advances gradually from ob-
servation to theoretization, univalently, forcibly, uner-
ringly. It also assumed that there are ways in science
of deciding between right and wrong and that an
experimenting and observing scientist can report on
facts “faithfully” without at all rendering an opinion
on them (Bochner, p. 62).

The twentieth century has become very critical of
inductivism in the history of science, but it has not
decided what to put in its stead. It is not properly
known what brings about significant changes in science,
and what the actual mechanism of change is. Some-
times a major change in science appears to be literally
a “revolution” which came about in a single step, but
at other times a major change, an equally significant
one, may appear to be the sum of many relatively small
changes in rapid succession. It is very difficult to find
a rationale for difference of these two types of change
or a schema common to both types.

The nineteenth century brought to the fore an inter-
pretation of continuity in history which is much less
naive than the ordinary belief in “inevitable progress,”
although it is deceptively similar to it. If we adopt
the term “continuism” (Bochner, p. 61), its relation to
the idea of progress may be seen as follows. Continuism
also assumes that any event of today was directly
preceded by some event which must have taken place
yesterday. However, the event of today is not neces-
sarily an “advance” over the event of yesterday, but
it is only a “reaction” to it, and the reaction may be
a positive or negative one. That is, the event of today
may concur with yesterday's event and carry it for-
ward, or it may disagree with it, and oppose it with
something different.

An unmistakably continuist enterprise is evident in
the large-scale work of Pierre Duhem in the history
of science, which was achieved in the beginning of the
twentieth century. In this work the author, una-
bashedly,

(Bochner, p. 117).

Duhem's continuism is obvious and obtrusive, and
therefore somewhat tedious; but subtler forms of con-
tinuism have been fully operative in many areas of
academic activity since the early nineteenth century.
Continuism has greatly influenced the routines of aca-
demic research, and it has been involved in an un-
precedented growth of scholarship and of historically
oriented analyses in many compartments of knowledge.
Whether it be the study of the origins of the Iliad or
the Old Testament, of Herodotus or Diogenes Laërtius,
of a play of Shakespeare or the Opticks of Newton,
there is always a strain of continuism involved in the
investigation. Finally, like all methods in historiogra-
phy, continuism had its distant roots in antiquity. In
fact, Aristotle's conception of Pre-Socratic philosophy
was entirely continuist, and has remained so since.
After Aristotle, versions of continuism are identifiable
in scholarship of any period, but it was the nineteenth
century which made the most of it.

In the twentieth century a major challenge to
straightforward continuism has come from the problem
of the rise of Western civilization as a whole. It has
long been recognized that in Western civilization in
its total course there had been, at various stages of
its growth, component civilizations with distinctive
characteristics of their own. This finding by itself is
not in conflict with continuism. But a conflict might
arise if one posits that two component civilizations did
not affect each other in a major way although they
were temporally contiguous or even overlapping. And
that there had indeed been such component civili-
zations has been proposed, respectively, by Oswald
Spengler and by Arnold Toynbee. The novelty of such
proposals is wearing off, yet the echo of them lingers
on and is likely to persist.

Very intriguing is a certain “continuist” question
relating to the origin of Western civilization in its
Mediterranean littoral. The oldest components of this
total civilization were the Old Egyptian and the Old

Mesopotamian civilizations. From the distance of our
retrospect the two arose “almost simultaneously” in
the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. This poses the prob-
lem whether there were any links between them, and,
if so, what the links were. They both initiated the art
of writing in a major way; and the absorbing problem
is whether there was any “stimulus diffusion” (Toynbee,
12, 344ff.) from the one to the other, and also what
it really was that made the Mediterranean littoral
eligible for the rise of both.