4. The Impact of New Ideas. In the sixteenth cen-
tury, the upholders of the “moderns” against the “an-
cients” claimed for the benefit of their side the com-
pass, gunpowder, and printing, as though these were
recent Western achievements. Giordano Bruno saw the
“moderns” enjoying the advantage of the astronomical
observations of ancient Greece, together with all that
had been recorded since, and concluded that the
Greeks really had belonged to the childhood of the
world. When towards the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, the feud of “ancients” and “moderns” broke out
again, those who argued that the literature of Louis
XIV's reign excelled that of antiquity, still did not
necessarily believe in the idea of progress, for some
of them thought it possible that a relapse would take
place sooner or later.
It was perhaps more important that the victory of
the “scientific revolution,” the achievement of Sir Isaac
Newton and the overthrow of Aristotelian physics
destroyed the authority of both the Middle Ages and
classical antiquity. Technical advances and the per-
ception that society was ceasing to be static—also the
reports of travellers about men in a more primitive
state—tended to supersede the picture of an ideal
world long ago, and the belief that in society there
was a natural tendency to decline. Gradually men
carried their conclusions beyond their observations, and
swallowed some of the misgivings that they had at
times; and, as theorists and manufacturers of broad
historical surveys, they would advance ideas of general
and indefinite progress. In a sense just as the notion
that the Jews were God's “chosen people” became
transmuted, and the English themselves claimed the
benefit of it, so the Jewish belief that history was based
on “the Promise” became in a certain sense secularized.
In other words, the transition to the idea of progress
was assisted by faith and a forward-looking spirit. The
Greeks had been able to conceive of progress from
primitive conditions up to a certain point. The early
Christians had come near it when they saw both the
Old Testament and Greek philosophy as a “prepara-
tion” for the Gospel. Henceforward the idea helped
to provide the structure for a new world view.
History was bound in the long run to be greatly in-
fluenced by this idea of progress; for it was no longer a
case of one generation succeeding another on the same
virtually unchanging stage, countries merely having
their ups-and-downs—all the centuries still form-
ing only a rope of sand. Here was something which
made it possible to give shape and structure to the
course of ages. In a way it contributed a meaning to
history, and gave point to the temporal succession,
making change more than kaleidoscopic, and turning
time itself into a generative thing. In spite of a certain
pessimism about human beings in the eighteenth cen-
tury, it gradually came to appear that world-history
had something like an objective—one which lay within
history itself. Paradoxically, a world that now began
to turn its eyes to the future rather than the past did
not desert the study of what had gone before, but
became more interested in history than ever, as though
the subject had acquired a new relevance. Men became
exceptionally interested in lengthy surveys—in study-
ing the way in which mankind, from a primitive be-
ginning had come to its present civilized state.
In 1681 Bishop Bossuet had produced his Discourse
on Universal History, which followed Saint Augustine
rather than the cruder views of Eusebius and Orosius,
while avoiding the danger that the conflict between
good and evil might be interpreted as a conflict be-
tween religious and secular organizations in the world.
He saw the divine ends often achieved through identi-
fiable secondary causes, the turns of the story being
repeatedly decided by the fact that men and nations
are what they are. God achieves his objects often by
the control of the human heart or by just leaving men
to their passions; the key to human history is L'esprit
des hommes, though God has something to do with
the character of this esprit. It was easy to eliminate
the last stage of this argument, to get rid of the super-
natural and move to the Voltairean view that history
depends on the spirit of men.
The universal histories of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries followed the pattern of the Chris-
tian ones in the sense that they were intended to ex-
plain the meaning of things and to show an analogy
to the Providential plan, a purposeful history-making
that goes on over men's heads. Even the pattern of
the book of Genesis leaves its mark on these works,
though the chapter on the Creation comes now to be
replaced by a scientific account of the globe itself.
Instead of theologies of history, we now have works
which, from the time of Voltaire, call themselves
“philosophies of history.” They brought into their sur-
vey the whole social and cultural history of the world,
not concentrating on politics, not confining themselves
to courts and kings. They extended the horizon of the
historians, including India and China in their survey
of world-history, and thinking it a feather in their cap
when they could add Tibet. They begin with Voltaire
and then, through Herder, Condorcet, et al., run in
a series which culminates in Hegel. When “academic
history” emerged, it took up arms against such philos-
ophers of history, at least until the time of Ranke,
because they inferred so much of their generalizing
from their theories about life, instead of allowing it
to emerge more slowly from careful researches. Yet
even Ranke said repeatedly that his ultimate object
was “universal history.”
In 1725, however, Giambattista Vico published his
Scienza nuova, and in certain respects he represents
a reaction against the tendencies of his age. He set
out to vindicate historical knowledge, in a world that
had doubts about it; and he asserted that man can know
history—events and institutions or mental achieve-
ments—for the simple reason that one can know the
things that one actually makes. Only God (not the
scientist) can know Nature with equal intimacy—know
it as the creator of it. While believing in Providence,
he identified its influence with the workings of history,
and regarded it as securing its objects through human
beings, using even their passions to serve its purposes.
Contemplating the whole development of civilization,
he divided the story into three stages, representing
respectively the ages of gods, heroes, and men—
themselves corresponding to the mental development
of the human race, from feeling to imagination, and
then to thought. He differed from the eighteenth cen-
tury in general in that he was so sympathetically pre-
occupied to recover the mood, the notions, and the
animating forces of primitive man, in whom he saw
wisdom of a poetic kind. Early myths and legends were
not merely fictions to him, but embodiments of a kind
of truth. He traced Homer back to folk-poetry and
regarded the leading “Legislators” of early history as
mythical, for he conceived of law as having rather a
spontaneous origin, emerging out of society as a whole.
He is a precursor of modern historicism, yet he does
not seem to have influenced the eighteenth century,
and, though he was rediscovered in the nineteenth, the
influence attributed to him during the romantic period
may rather have been due to Herder. In fact, the
twentieth century may have found more in him than
did any preceding age.
Montesquieu influenced historians, though he never
came to grips with primary sources except when he
studied Merovingian Gaul. In his Considérations sur
les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence (1738) he broached the questions which have
most engaged the minds of historians for nearly two
thousand years, but he intended only to ponder on the
knowledge that had long been current, and behind all
other factors he imputed the real cause to the fact that
Rome had extended too rapidly and too much, while
he assigned great importance in history to L'esprit gén
éral. In his L'esprit des lois (1748) he became interest-
ing to historians because he applied the comparative
method, and sought to explain causation in the histori-
cal realm, showing the influence of climate and other
physical conditions, as well as the importance of the
economic factor. For the rest, his influence also rein-
forced that of Voltaire (see above) whose main histori-
cal contribution takes place in the 1750's.
Two writers of history were important for the influ-
ence that they had in the development of a more
organic conception of the whole subject. Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, in his Geschichte der Kunst des
Altertums (1764, History of Ancient Art), was unhis-
torical in that he treated one Greek standard of beauty
as absolute, and saw development too schematically;
but he broke away from the practice of treating litera-
ture and the arts by the study of individuals or separate
schools, and set out to achieve a genuine history—
including the things which happen over the heads of
individuals and are not consciously willed—the whole
being related to the entire life and culture of the
Greeks, to the spirit of a people, and even to climatic
and economic conditions. Justin Möser, in his
Osnabrückische Geschichte (History of Osnabrück), in
1768 was concerned with a small territorial unit, but
was distinguished in the period of the Aufklärung by
his attitude to the Middle Ages—an admiration without
romantic sentiment. He used original sources and
brought an intensely practical mind to the analysis of
them. Above all, in a constitutional and administrative
history, he found a place for all the needs of a people,
including geographical, economic and social factors,
working these into connection with one another.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, the effective founder
of the philosophy of history in Germany, is in some
respects analogous to Vico, and stands as partly the
product of eighteenth-century rationalism, partly a
pioneer in the reaction against it. He had an undoubted
influence on practicing historians and is one of the
people who, through their interest in the Bible, in
Homer, and in earlier states of society as presented
in Ossian, learned to understand a little more about
the “historical sense”—the gift of “feeling” oneself into
the past—the thing the philosophes had lacked. He saw
nations and ages as organic unities, in which all things
were fused into something like a unique “personality”
by the governing influence of a spirit—morals, laws,
and artistic production so interrelated in a given cul-
ture that they could not be transplanted from one
nation to another. They all sprang from their own
central spiritual source, which was unlike anything else
in the world, and all required to be judged in their
own context. To a great degree it was through Herder
that the romantic movement became so influential
amongst historians.
In many respects the influence of the romantic
movement in Europe in the late eighteenth century
and the first half of the nineteenth came to be regarded
as unfortunate. This is illustrated in some of the extrav-
agances of “romantic nationalism,” including the ex-
cessive adoration of the primitive culture of one's own
people. In some respects the ideas of the romantic
movement were beneficial, however, and this has re-
mained as a final deposit, becoming a constituent part
of the historical outlook. This was the case with that
particular aspect of the revolt against the
philosophes
which involved the rejection of the policy of treating
previous generations as though they were only links
in a chain leading to the present day. History was only
too easy if one seized on what a bygone age had
contributed to one's own time, and assessed its ideas
by their analogy with those of the present, or judged
personalities by the standards of a later period. The
romantic movement showed the importance of being
interested in the past for its own sake, seeing things
or people or ideas in their own context, and even
judging men in terms of their own age. Realizing that
for each generation life has its aspect as an end in itself,
exactly in the way that it has for those living today,
the historian contributes something of himself to
achieve understanding—the past having one claim on
us, and one only: namely the right to be understood.
The sympathetic imagination plays its part in the effort
of understanding; and, in a sense, this means that the
historian should really be drawn to the past and deeply
interested in it—not simply anxious to use it, not
merely concerned with it as it throws light on the
present day. Something of all this was brought to its
climax in Leopold von Ranke's famous dictum: that
all generations are immediate to God. Even this had
its dangers, for the romantic historians sometimes ex-
cused too many things on the ground that they had
been tolerated in a given period; and it would have
been better if they had learned that history (particu-
larly their kind of history) had the function of explain-
ing rather than either judging or exonerating. Also,
though the romantic historian loved detail and sought
a concrete visualization of the past, something in his
sentimental equipment seems to have made him soft,
where he ought to have been hard, in historical criti-
cism.
