IX THE 'HISTORY OF NATURE' AND HISTORY

We must cease the process of classifying referred to just now, and also that of the illusion of naturalism connected with it, by means of which imaginary entities created by abstraction are changed into historical facts and classificatory schemes into history, if we wish to understand the difference between history that is history and that due to what are called the natural sciences. This is also called history—'history of nature'—but is so only in name. Some few years ago a lively protest was made[1] against the confusion of these two forms of mental labour, one of which offers us genuine history, such as might, for instance, be that of the Peloponnesian War or of Hannibal's wars or of ancient Egyptian civilization, and the other a spurious history, such as that known as the history of animal organisms, of the earth's structure or geology, of the formation of the solar system or cosmogony. It was observed with reason that in many treatises the one has been wrongly connected with the other—that is to say, history of civilization with history of nature, as though the former follows the latter historically. The bottomless abyss between the two was pointed out. This has been observed, however, in a confused way by all, and better by historians of purely historical temperament, who have an instinctive[Pg 129] repugnance for natural history and hold themselves carefully aloof from it. It was remembered with reason that the history of historians has always the individually determinate as its object, and proceeds by internal reconstruction, whereas that of the naturalists depends upon types and abstractions and proceeds by analogies. Finally, this so-called history or quasi-history was very accurately defined as an apparently chronological arrangement of things spatially distinct, and it was proposed to describe it with a new and proper name, that of Metastoria.

Indeed, constructions of this sort are really nothing but classificatory schemes, from the more simple to the more complex. Their terms are obtained by abstract analyses and generalization, and their series appears to the imagination as a history of the successive development of the more complex from the more simple. Their right to exist as classificatory schemes is incontestable, and their utility is also incontestable, for they avail themselves of imagination to assist learning and to aid the memory.

This only becomes contestable when they are estranged from themselves, lose their real nature, lay claim to illegitimate functions, and take their imaginary historicity too seriously. We find this in the metaphysic of naturalism, especially in evolutionism, which has been its most recent form. This is due, not so much to the men of science (who are as a rule cautious and possess a more or less clear consciousness of the limits of those schemes and series) as to the dilettante scientists and dilettante philosophers to whom we owe the many books that undertake to narrate the origin of the world, and which, aided by the acrisia of their authors, run on without meeting any obstacle, from the cell, indeed from the nebula, to the French Revolution,[Pg 130] and even to the socialist movements of the nineteenth century. 'Universal histories,' and therefore cosmological romances (as we have already remarked in relation to universal histories), are composed, not of pure thought, which is criticism, but of thought mingled with imagination, which finds its outlet in myths. It is useless to prove in detail that the evolutionists of to-day are creators of myths, and that they weary themselves with attempts to write the first chapters of Genesis in modern style (their description is more elaborate, but they confuse such description with history in a manner by no means inferior to that of Babylonian or Israelitish priests), because this becomes evident as soon as such works are placed in their proper position. Their logical origin will at once make clear their true character.

But setting aside these scientific monstrosities, already condemned by the constant attitude of restraint and scepsis toward them on the part of all scientifically trained minds—condemned, too, by the very fact that they have had to seek and have found their fortune at the hands of the crowd or 'great public,' and have fallen to the rank of popular propaganda—we must here determine more precisely how these classificatory schemes of historiographical appearance are formed and how they operate. With this object, it is well to observe that classificatory schemes and apparent histories do not appear to be confined to the field of what are called the natural sciences or sub-human world, but appear also in that of the moral sciences or sciences of the human world. And to adduce simple and perspicuous examples, it often happens that in the abstract analysis of language and the positing of the types of the parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and so on, or in the analysis of the word into syllables and sounds, or of style into proper or[Pg 131] metaphorical words and into various classes of metaphors, we construct classes that go from the more simple to the more complex. This gives rise to the illusion of history of language, exposed as the successive acquisition of the various parts of speech or as the passage from the single sound to the syllable (monosyllabic languages), from the syllable to the aggregate of syllables (plurisyllabic languages), from words to propositions, metres, rhymes, and so on. These are imaginary histories that have never been developed elsewhere than in the studies of scientists. In like manner, literary styles that have been abstractly distinguished and arranged in series of increasing complexity (for example, lyric, epic, drama) have given rise and continue to give rise to the thought of a schematic arrangement of poetry, which, for example, should appear during a first period as lyric, a second as epic, a third as drama.

The same has happened with regard to the classifications of abstract political, economic, philosophical forms, and so on, all of which have been followed by their shadows in the shape of imaginative history. The repugnance that historians experience in attaching their narratives to naturalistic-mythological prologues—that is to say, in linking together in matrimony a living being and a corpse—is also proved by their reluctance to admit scraps of abstract history into concrete history, for they at once reveal their heterogeneity in regard to one another by their mere appearance. De Sanctis has often been reproached for not having begun his History of Italian Literature with an account of the origins of the Italian language and of its relations with Latin, and even with the linguistic family of Indo-European languages, and of the races that inhabit the various parts of Italy. An attempt has even been made to correct the design of[Pg 132] that classic work by supplying, with a complete lack of historical sense, the introductions and additions that are not needed. But de Sanctis, who took great pains to select the best point of departure for the narrative of the history of Italian literature, and finally decided to begin with a brief sketch of the state of culture at the Suabian court and of the Sicilian poetical school, did not hesitate a moment in rejecting all abstractions of languages and races which to his true historical sense did not appear to be reconcilable with the tenzone of Ciullo, with the rhythms of Friar Jacob, or with the ballades of Guido Cavalcanti, which are quite concrete things.

We must also remember that plans for classification and pseudo-historical arrangements of their analogies are created not only upon the bodies of histories that are living and really reproducible and rethinkable, but also upon those that are dead—that is to say, upon news items, documents, and monuments. This observation makes more complete the identification of imaginary histories arising from the natural sciences with those which have their source in the moral sciences. The foundation of both is therefore very often not historical intelligence, but, on the contrary, the lack of it, and their end not only that of aiding living history and keeping it alive, but also the mediate end of assisting in the prompt handling of the remains and the cinders of the vanished world, the inert residues of history.

The efficacy of this enlargement of the concept of abstract history, which is analogical or naturalizing in respect to the field known as 'spiritual' (and thus separated from that empirically known as 'natural'), cannot be doubted by one who knows and remembers the great consequences that philosophy draws from the resolution of the realistic concept of 'nature' in the[Pg 133] idealistic conception of 'construction,' which the human spirit makes of reality, looking upon it as nature. Kant worked upon the solution of this problem indefatigably and with subtlety; he gave to it the direction that it has followed down to our own days. And the consequence that we draw from it, in respect to the problem that now occupies us, is that an error was committed when, moved by the legitimate desire of distinguishing abstract from concrete history, naturalizing history from thinking history, genuine from fictitious history, a sort of agnosticism was reached, as a final result, by means of limiting history to the field of humanity, which was said to be cognoscible, and declaring all the rest to be the object of metastoria and the limit of human knowledge. This conclusion would lead again to a sort of dualism, though in a lofty sphere. But if metastoria also appears, as we have seen, in the human field, it is clear that the distinction as formulated stands in need of correction; and the agnosticism founded upon it vacillates and falls. There is not a double object before thought, man and nature, the one capable of treatment in one way, the other in another way, the first cognizable, and the second uncognizable and capable only of being constructed abstractly; but thought always thinks history, the history of reality that is one, and beyond thought there is nothing, for the natural object becomes a myth when it is affirmed as object, and shows itself in its true reality as nothing else but the human spirit itself, which schematized history that has been lived and thought, or the materials of the history that has already been lived and thought. The saying that nature has no history is to be understood in the sense that nature as a rational being capable of thought has not history, because it is not—or, let us say, it is nothing that is real. The opposite saying,[Pg 134] that nature is also formative and possesses historical life, is to be taken in the other sense that reality, the sole reality (comprehending man and nature in itself, which are only empirically and abstractly separate), is all development and life.

What substantial difference can ever be discovered on the one hand between geological stratifications and the remains of vegetables and animals, of which it is possible to construct a prospective and indeed a serial arrangement, but which it is never possible to rethink in the living dialectic of their genesis, and on the other hand the relics of what is called human history, and not only that called prehistorical, but even the historical documents of our history of yesterday, which we have forgotten and no longer understand, and which we can certainly classify and arrange in a series, and build castles in the air about or allow our fancies to wander among, but which it is no longer possible really to think again? Both cases, which have been arbitrarily distinguished, are reducible to one single case. Even in what is called 'human history' there exists a 'natural history,' and what is called 'natural history' also was once 'human' history—that is to say, spiritual, although to us who have left it so far behind it seems to be almost foreign, so mummified and mechanicized has it become, if we glance at it but summarily and from the outside. Do you wish to understand the true history of a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man? First of all, try if it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man; and if it be not possible, or you do not care to do this, content yourself with describing and classifying and arranging in a series the skulls, the utensils, and the inscriptions belonging to those neolithic peoples. Do you wish to understand[Pg 135] the history of a blade of grass? First and foremost, try to make yourself into a blade of grass, and if you do not succeed, content yourself with analysing the parts and even with disposing them in a kind of imaginative history. This leads to the idea from which I started in making these observations about historiography, as to history being contemporary history and chronicle being past history. We take advantage of the idea and at the same time confirm that truth by solving with its aid the antithesis between a history that is 'history' and a 'history of nature,' which, although it is history, was supposed to obey laws strangely at variance with those of the only history. It solves this antithesis by placing the second in the lower rank of pseudo-history.

[1] By the economist Professor Gotti, at the seventh congress of German historians, held at Heidelberg. The lecture can be read in print under the anything but clear or exact title of Die Grenzen der Geschichte (Leipzig, Duncker u. Humblot, 1904).