132 ...a historian, without becoming a Historicist, may certainly infer unknown events from known ones. he may even infer future events from past ones; prediction may be a folly, but it is not Historicism. he may 'interpret' the past in the sense of reconstructing it imaginatively, making us feel (as far as may bee) what it was like, and in that sense what it 'meant', to a man to be a 12th century villein or a Roman eques. what makes all these activities proper to the historian is that in them the conclusions, like the premises, are historical the mark of the Historicist, on the other hand, is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological of (to coin a word) atheo-logical. the historian and the Historicist may both say that something 'must have ' happened. but MUST in the mouth of a genuine historian will refer only to a ratio cognoscendi: since A happened B 'must have' preceded it; if William the Bastard arrived in England he 'must have ' crossed the sea. but 'mus' in the mouth of a Historicist can have quite a different meaning. it may mean that events fell out as they did because of some ultimate, transcendent necessity in the ground of things..
138 we must remind ourselves that the word HISTORY has several senses.
it may mean the total content of time: past present and future.
it may mean the content of the past only, but still the total content of the past, the past as it really was in all its teeming riches.
thirdly, it may mean so much of the past as is discoverable from surviving evidence.
fourthly, it may mean so much as has been actually discovered by historians working, so to speak, 'at the face', the pioneer historians never heard of by the public who make the actual discoveries.
fifthly, it may mean that portion and that version, of the matter so discovered which has been worked up by great historical writers. (this is perhaps the most popular sense: HISTORY usually means what you read when you are reading Gibbon or Mommsen or the Master of Trinity.)
sixthly, it may mean that vague, composite picture of the past which floats, rather hazily, in the mind of the ordinary educated man.
when men say the 'History ' is a revelation, or has a meaning, in which of these 6 senses do they use the word HISTORY? I am afraid that in fact they are very often thinking of history in the sixth sense; in which case their talk about revelation or meaning is surely unplausible in the extreme. for 'history' in the sixth sense is the land of shadows, the home of wraiths like Primitive Man or the Renaissance of the Ancient-Greeks -and -romans. it is not at all surprising, of course,that those who stare at it too long should see patterns. we see pictures in the fire. the more indeterminate the object, the more it excites our mythopoeic or 'esemplastic' faculties. to the naked eye there is a face in the moon; it vanishes when you use a telescope. in the same way, the meanings or patterns discernible in 'history' (Sense Six ) disappear when we turn
139 to 'history' in any of the higher senses. they are clearest for each of us in the periods he has studied least. no one who has distinguished the different sense of the word HISTORY could continue to think that history (in the sixth sense) is an evangel or a revelation. it is an effect of perspective.
on the other hand, we admit that history (in Sense One) is a story written by the finger of god. unfortunately we have not got it. the claim of the practising Historicist then will stand or fall with his success in showing that history in one of the intermediate sense - the first being out of reach and the sixth useless for his purpose - is sufficiently close to history in the first sense to share its revealing qualities.
we drop, then, to history in sense Two: the total content of past time as it really was in all its richness, this would save the historicist if we could reasonably believe two things: first, that the formidable omission of the future does not conceal the point or meaning of the story, and, secondly, that we do actually possess history (Sense Two) up to the present moment. but can we believe either?
it would surely be one of the luckiest things in the world if the content of time up to the moment at which the historicist is writing happened to contain all that he required for reaching the significance of total history. we ride with our backs to the engine. we have no notion what stage in the journey we have reached. are we in act i or Act V? are our present diseases those of childhood or senility? if, indeed, we knew that history was cyclic we might perhaps hazard a guess at its meaning from the fragment we have seen. but then we have been told that the historicists are just the people who do not think that history is merely cyclic. for them it is a real story with a
140 beginning, a middle and an end. but a story is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be understood till you have heard the whole of it. or, if there are stories (bad stories) whose later chapters add nothing essential to their significance and whose significance is therefore contained in something less than the whole, at least you cannot tell whether any given story belongs to that class until you have at least once read it to the end. then, on a second reading, you may omit the dead wood in the closing chapters. i always now omit the Book of War and Peace. but we have not yet read history to the end. there might be no dead woo. if it is a story written by the finger of god, there probably isn't. and if not, how can we suppose that we have seen 'the point' already? no doubt there are things we can say about this story even now. we can say it is an exciting story , or a crowded story, or a story with humorous characters in it. the one thing we must not say is what it means, or what its total pattern is.
but even if it were possible, which I deny, to see the significance of the whole from a truncated text, it remains to ask whether we have that truncated text. do we possess even up to the present date the content of time as it really was in all its richness? clearly not. the past, by definition, is not present. the point i am trying to make is so often slurred over by the unconcerned admission 'Of course we don't know EVERYTHING' that i have sometimes despaired of bringing it home to other people's minds. it is not a question of failing to know everything; it is a question (at least as regards quantity) of knowing next door to nothing. each of us finds that in his own life every moment of time is completely filled. he is bombarded every second by sensations, emotions, thoughts, which he cannot attend to
141 for multitude and nine-tenths of which he must simply ignore. a single second of lived time contains more than can be recorded. and every second of past time has been like that for every man that ever lived. the past (I am assuming in the Historicist's favour that we need consider only the human past) in its reality, was a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments; any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination. by far the greater part of this teeming reality escaped human consciousness almost as soon as it occurred. none of us could at this moment give anything like a full account of his own life for the last 24 hours. we have already forgotten; even if we remembered, we have not time. the new moments are upon us. at every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of 'history' falls off the world into total oblivion, most of the experiences in 'the past as it really was' were instantly forgotten by the subject himself. of the small percentage which he remembered (and never remembered with perfect accuracy) a smaller percentage was ever communicated even to his closest intimates; of this, a smaller percentage still was recorded; of the recorded fraction only another fraction has ever reached posterity. ...when once we have realized what 'the past as it really was' means, we must freely admit that most - that nearly all - history (in Sense Two) is and will remain, wholly unknown to us. and if per impossibile that whole were known, it would be wholly unmanageable. to know the whole of one minute in napolean's life would require a whole minute of your own life. you could not keep up with it....
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