The Historian's Craft

HISTORY, MEN, AND TIME It is sometimes said: “History is the science of the past.” To men, this is badly put.

For, to begin with, the very idea that the past as such can be the object of science is ridiculous. How, without preliminary distillation, can one make of phenomena, having no other common character than that of being not contemporary with us, the matter of rational knowledge? On the reverse side of the medal, can one imagine a complete science of the universe in its present state? …preoccupation with origins, justifiable in a certain type of religious analysis, has spread in a doubtlessly inevitable contagion into other fields of research where its legitimacy is far more debatable. Moreover, history oriented towards origins was put to the service of value judgments. What else did Taine intend, in tracing the “origins” of the France of this day, but a denunciation of the political ill consequences of what he considered a false philosophy of man” And whether the subject was the Germanic invasions of the Norman conquest of England, the past was so assiduously used as an explanation of the present only in order that the present might be the better justified or condemned. We speak of the “origins of the feudal system.” Where are we to seek them? Some say: “In Rome.” Others: “In Germany.” The cause of their confusion is obvious. Whether Roman or Germanic, certain practices, such as clientele relations, companionship in arms, and the use of land tenure as payment for service, were carried on by later generations in Europe during the ages we call “feudal.” But such practices were modified a great deal. There were two words – “benefice” (beneficium) among the Latin, and “fief” among the German-speaking peoples – which these later generations persisted in using, while gradually and without realizing it, conferring upon them quite a new significance. For, to the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs. All this is very interesting, but it does not tell us the causes of feudalism. The characteristic institutions of European feudalism were no mere patchwork of surviving scraps. At one stage in our history, they arose from a total social situation. HISTORICAL CAUSATION Historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts. Normally, therefore, they find their antecedents in other psychological facts. To be sure, human destinies are placed in the physical world and suffer the consequence thereof. Even where the intrusion of these external forces seems most brutal, however, their action is weakened or intensified by man and his mind. The virus of the Black Death was the prime cause of the depopulation of Europe. But the epidemic spread so rapidly only by virtue of certain social – and, therefore, in their underlaying nature, mental – conditions, and its moral effects are to be explained only by the peculiar propensities of collective sensibility. We should seriously misrepresent the problem of causes in history if we always and everywhere reduced them to a problem of motive.

Moreover, what a curious contradiction there is in the successive attitudes of so many historians: when it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, they cannot be sufficiently painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily founded upon one of those maxims of commonplace psychology which are neither more or less true than their opposites.