e must be clear from the start that by “History” I mean no mean province of the vast kingdom of Human Knowledge. I scarce mean less than the capital. But it may be well to remind ourselves what exactly that kingdom is. For it is not, as you might suppose, a collection of facts, or a constellation of disciplines; it is not merely the meeting point of Science and Sociology and the theory of Statecraft. It is more like a tavern or a tea room, a meeting place of people; or rather, I think, a meeting of minds. It is a great gathering of specialists. And what specialists they are! Here is Homer, with his fine monograph on heroism; there is Plato, with a dissertation on the Divine. Galileo has that stuff on stars and the Stoics on good sense; the tragedians have their tragics and the comedians their jokes – so many writers, thinkers, songsmiths, wafflers; so many experimentalists and inventors, each in their partial provinces, each bound in a book, sometimes all on the one shelf – and I would put it to you, that that shelf is the shelf of the historian.
must make a careful distinction though. In comparing the kingdom of knowledge to the kind of club you find in the around of universities, I do not mean to suggest that the university is any special part of the kingdom of knowledge. These august souls whom I have ventured to call ‘specialists’ (comparing great things with small) often have nothing to do with the universities. Some of them could scarce be paid enough to go anywhere near a university. The scholar and the genius both specialise. But they specialise in different ways.
he scholar specialises by what we may call the monograph system. This system has been cleverly devised such that of every hundred monographs, ninety-nine are profoundly boring, even if the remaining one is the very epitome of interest. The scholar first chooses some inspiring topic: the crusades will seem sufficiently stark and impressive for our purposes, if you imagine them as they were, that is, all the nations of bickering Europe marching forth under one man’s banner for the cause of a Crucified God; and the scimitars of Syria crying back in the name of Allah who is One. This is actually something frightfully significant; the scholar must start by choosing something of the kind. Next, employing vast amounts of complicated erudition and study, he narrows it down half a dozen times: so that he ends up with “the ruinous effects of rust on Flemish currency dropped in the Black Sea during the first decade after the Fourth Crusade”. He will then find the most obscure publisher available, out of deference to the tastes of the general public, and have maybe twoscore copies printed off.
nce in a while, the process of narrowing unexpectedly makes the monograph that much more interesting instead; but I think this is the same kind of thing as when you accidentally put a negative sign in a maths equation at half way and end up with an answer diametrically opposite to what you expected.
hat is how scholarship works. Knowledge proceeds in the opposite direction. You start with your inspiring topic – we could take the crusades again, but let us choose a scientific example – the sun – and then, using the same labyrinthine apparatus of study and erudition, you enlarge it by what-you-will degrees – so that you end up, with Galileo, discovering the Laws of All Nature. Hence Galileo started as a simple astronomer and ended up a mighty Scientist. Again, Saint Thomas set out to solve a few little technical problems of philosophy, but became the Angelic Doctor, the Expert on Existence. And any number of clever men who have come up with a good idea about one thing, have gone on to become philosophers with general – usually somewhat deranged – theories about a thousand things.
n this sense scholarship is just a microcosm of the pursuit of knowledge as a whole, but for midgets, and dealing with incredibly small topics; while knowledge works in the same way, but is designed for giants, and deals with incredibly large topics. Fortunately, most people are able to operate – not with complete success, but with reasonable competency – on both levels. If anything, more people can operate on the large scale than can operate on the small scale. But you will understand what I mean better if I say a typical example of enormous matters of Knowledge is mortality, and a typical example of the minuscule matters of scholarship is an unusual bend in a branch on a bush on your street. A good many people would have take an interest in both.1
ndeed, I would iterate and reiterate that everyone is interested in Knowledge. For on my view, it includes, precisely, everything that is of interest to everybody. Let me explain. In the first place, every person is, it has been discovered, a person. So we all have some stake in understanding what a person is. Everyone thinks, so if someone has some general revelations to make about how to thinks, I am sure we would all to some extent appreciate them, if we had time for them. We all do things, so ethics is inevitable – that is, we all want to know how to do things well; and we all say things, so most of us take the time to learn at least one language thoroughly early on in life (sometimes even before the age of two).
hen there are things outside of us. As most of us will never see the south pole, I cannot include the icy stalactite in my enumeration, dear as it is to me; but let us include trees and clouds and houses and the moon. I do not mean that we all feel a deathly urge to identify a nimbostratus or distinguish the Caledonian from the Norfolk pine. But most of us have on occasion stopped to stare at a tree long enough to make our own startling little discoveries; and most of us have advanced far enough in cloud science to be able, with some confidence, to tell when the sky is angry at us.
gain, society and friendship and God and good and evil. These are things that impinge upon us on a daily basis. I dare say you could summarise all this by saying, ‘matters of general interest are… anything you could easily make a decent story about’. Perhaps that is not a bad way of thinking about it.
veryone is really interested in these things. Even if you say your do not care to know useless information about God and ethics and all that mumbo-jumbo, you must realise that you often do want to know how to act in given circumstances, and what would be best for you: which is ethics: and if you were plagued by a doubt that God might be speaking to you directly, you would be pretty quick to take an interest: which is to say, you are only uninterested in God because you’ve already reached your own conclusions about him. They may be right, or they may not be: the point stands that even if you have no theoretical interest in matters of ethics and religion and so forth, you cannot avoid having a practical interest in all these things.
ven if someone had neither, they may well have an aesthetic interest in these same clouds and trees and gods and ideals. They have some poetic or artistic value. They are fascinating. In reality, we tend to have a mixture of all three: theoretical, practical, and aesthetic interest.
t is high time we returned to our original topic whence we digressed – if you recall, the topic was history. I can now explain what I would mean if I said that a historian is a peculiar kind of scholar whose subject is strictly limited to, ‘everything’. – Which is true. A good deal of trickery was involved in gaining this glorious position. First, we divided the whole expanse of time into three parts, past, present, future, and applied for a grant to study one of these categories, viz., the past. Since of course the future is largely nothing from our point of view and the present, proportionwise, is literally nothing, that left us with just about everything. Naturally the powers that be were not too happy with this, so we added the further qualification that we would limit our study to people, which they allowed. But because, as I have described above, the humans we wish to study are really interested in everything – the sun, the moon, the gods, the demons – individual twigs and the south pole – this again left us with pretty much the run of the universe. A historian can write paeans on pomegranates just because the Jews, who lived in the past and were people, used pomegranates in their vestments. There really is not much that the historian cannot find an excuse to study. For a long time this was actually the case; from the days of Herodotus to the days of J. B. Bury, a historian could actually write on just about anything he had the time for.
aturally their liberty was not always total, and naturally it could not last. It comes with a payoff, namely, that if you want to get anything published, you get, sure, a free pick of everything, but you have to choose one thing and stick to it. Often enough this winds up operating as a kind of penal servitude for historians, who pay for the momentary glory of this beatific vision of Everything with the duty of lifetime’s tedious study on the minutiae of nothing. Well, there is no help for it.
ut let us stop a moment and consider the terrain. History is the study of everything. Everything includes particularly large things that everyone has some interest in, and particularly small things that only very select people are interested in. That is as far as we have come. Well then, what on earth are we to make of this? How are we to make a philosophy of history out of – everything?
think what this shows is that if we are to have a philosophy of history, we must look at something other than its subject. What I propose is its means. History is the study of everything; that is, it is the art of thinking about everything. The subject is everything, and I am not competent to even begin to explain to you how everything works. But the means is thought. So we must turn ourselves to a new question: we must think about thought.
1 Well, of course, you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that your comments on the twig were scholarship, but that is of course quite arbitrary. If you managed to rope your neighbours in to a Society of Whatyouwill-Street Patriotism, the twig would generate a great deal of interest, and you might well get your comments published in the most scholarly paper your street can muster.
theparsnipoftime 