In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible, too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old question: What is History?

Ranke, in the preface of his _World History_ says: “History only begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Platæa--has this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must it be mentioned in books?

The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[56] says: “Historic is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.” The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in my terminology, _physiognomic fact_--is decided by the _blood_, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does _not_ consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which _one moment_ of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.

Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could acquire--just because for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive--much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew” the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed’s _milieu_ signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for _us_ it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history _is_.

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Cæsar’s time, or--what is substantially the same--between ant-communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,[57] or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is _history_. Here the “when” is of importance and each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the march of a grand life-course, in which every decision takes rank as an epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo, an organic duration--and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls, or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These are _zoölogical happenings_ and have their place in an altogether different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of “man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, _as species_. Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age-grades in the existence of respectively a genus and a Culture--i.e., two organisms belonging to two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial of there being ultimate aims at all. The life _has_ an aim. It is the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type Man on the other--there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoölogical or in the world-historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this, after this, outside this, man is _historyless_; and the destinies of the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the geological.

From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and one that has never before been established: that man is not only historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day is--notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped--just the old zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever--even when driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, purposes, and fortunes--the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage _per se_. Whereas previously power, even when to all appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.

The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties--whether we know it or not--and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same way--and with just the same religious awe--as bronze and the plough were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ _in toto_ from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[58] Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less important rôle than decades and even years within the Culture, _for the spans of time are gradually returning to the biological order_. This it is that confers upon these very Late conditions--which to the people living in them seem almost self-evident--that character of changeless pageantry which the genuine Culture-man--e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the Western successors of Marco Polo in China--has found so astonishing in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the changelessness of non-history.

Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the _Pax Romana?_ There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the world--though not for the actions of the private individual--whether an event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly experienced of oneself cannot be livingly experienced of another. When the later Egyptians speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of the corresponding period of the “Contending States,” they are judging the outward picture according to the criteria of their own ways of life, in which there are no riddles more. They see in these things merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those desperate wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien against their own kin, were fought for an idea. To-day we understand what was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and discharge, round the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius. In 1700 we could not have done so, and in 2200 we shall again be unable to do so. It is just the same with that of Chian, a Napoleonic figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could discover nothing more characterized than a “Hyksos king.” Had it not been for the coming of the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might have put the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which was overthrown by Cæsar.

Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer[59] between the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Cæsar misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68 set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, “eternal” forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of “world-history” under the two aspects--life-courses of the great Cultures and relations between them.