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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 80

VI

VI

Hitherto I have been dealing only with those new sources of material for history, which have been opened in the search for traces of Man's own handiwork, or by the comparative study of societies and institutions. To collect these materials, and still more to master the meaning of them, historians have had to borrow methods from the natural sciences, and have been led into entanglements with branches of the knowledge of Man, which agree in essential respects from other departments of biology in their aims and the quality of their results. The data, however, which I have had in view down to this point, are all derived from the direct and specific study of Man himself and his creations.

Yet there is another aspect of human activity, which concerns the historian directly, but in the study of which not only the method, but a great part of the data, comes from a non-human and at first sight even a non-historical science, in the sense in which I have described as 'historical' the sciences of geology and palaeontology.

page 28

Common knowledge, as well as metaphysic, testifies that all human activities occur in space as well as in time; man being a terrestrial animal, all history finds its materials in some region of the planetary surface. All history, therefore, has a geographical aspect It asks, of course, primarily 'what was it that happened, and how?' But just as it necessarily asks 'when,' so also must it ask 'where.' The converse is of course true also. All geographical facts occur 'somewhen' as well as 'somewhere'; all geographical knowledge takes account of processes in time as well as distribution! in space, and consequently needs must have a historical aspect. At first sight, therefore, there is complete overlap between the History and the Geography of Man.

But, as we have seen already in the case of anthropology, this overlap does not trouble the historian. The geography of Man considered as one department of the study of the earth's surface, has its standard of interest within itself, like any other branch of natural science. If I may coin a phrase, it is geocentric; for the geographer, that is, γη∘ πάντων νέτρoν History, however, as we have already seen, is anthropocentric; no fact of human distribution, or human activity in space, is of concern to the historian at all unless it stands in intelligible relation with man's present efforts to achieve. To take an extreme instance, it would be a discovery of the first importance to geographers, if it were shown that there are men in Mars; but though it might be shown that these had been there from the beginning, it would need a cosmic revolution to bring Martians within the ken of history.

What determines, then, whether this or that region, or locality, has value for the historian? or to put the same question another way, what is the geographical distribution of historical interest? This distribution is clearly quite independent of time; it may vary, there-fore, and we know very well that it has varied, from one period of history to another.

page 29

Now we have seen already, in tracing the tine of demarcation between history and anthropology, that all the varied forms of human activity—and we may now add, the geographical distribution of each of them—are consequences of one fundamental activity of man, which is concerned, as in the case of other animals, simply with the attempt to preserve life in the midst of nature; or at best is the struggle to perpetuate human life at a stage slightly in advance of that at which it stood before. That struggle to maintain life takes a specific form and direction in each region of the earth. But the precise form that it assumes is not the result of human reason unaided and uncontrolled; it depends no less on the quality and degree of many forces of nature; on the external, non-human circumstances of fauna and flora, of climate and surface-relief. In each given case the struggle has issued as it has only because human reason, applied to one central ever-present problem of preserving human life at all, has hit upon the particular plan which on the whole maintains human life in the best way under the circumstances of the particular region, Now many—in fact immeasurably the larger number—of the occurrences which make up the human struggle for existence happen with such uniformity in all habitable regions that they resemble rather the daily round of an animal's existence than the performances of a reasonable being. All these, and the distribution of them, are still the care of the geographer and the sociologist. Others, again, are more specially and more and more fortuitously distributed, until at the further end of the series, we reach the 'historic event,' which occurs once for all, and only in one place, and never repeats itself; presumably because the conditions for its repetition cannot be assembled again, either there or anywhere else.

It is at this other end of the series that the historian's interest is highest. It is the historian's business—as we are accustomed to see by this time—to select from page 30 among the rest, and to present intelligibly in their true proportions and relations, just those events which are the real turning-points. These events are of more or less importance historically; partly according as they affect a wider or a narrower circle of humanity; partly, again, according as the subsequent course of events differs profoundly, or not, from that which may be shown to have been likely, if the event in question had happened otherwise; most of all, perhaps, according as the historian is forced, by his own skill and experience, to decide that the crucial factor was the human factor; that, to all outward appearance, the Great Man, or the Great People, was, in popular language, 'free to choose' between different courses of action. In such cases, it is often possible even for contemporaries to form a reasonable and accurate opinion as to the consequences of an opposite decision.

These moments of crisis, of equipoise, present the great problems of history, for they are the occasions when humanity has been active in its highest function, in the persons of the men who make history. Croesus as we say, is at the Halys, or Caesar at the Rubicon, or Augustus at the Rhine; or Pericles or Fabius carries Peace—or War—upon his tongue. Those which are of really first-rate importance are few in number, and old acquaintances. To discover a new one, indeed, whether in ancient or in any other history, would be a greater achievement than to discover a chemical element or a new mode of energy. But though they are old acquaintances, and though each historian in turn attempts a solution, they remain, as problems, perennial: to solve one of them finally, to eliminate it, or to subsume it in another, as can occasionally happen, is, again, as great a triumph of science as to eliminate or transmute

It would be only too easy to slip from this position which we have found to underlie the definition alike of Herodotus and of Eduard Meyer, into a conception page 31 of History as an exclusive study of the Influence of Great Men; and the course of historical writing in the past offers much to support such a view. Man's interest in himself has never been less keen than his interest in nature; and his knowledge of himself, though not always so early reduced to such system as his knowledge of nature, has outrun it appreciably, in depth and truth, in most ages of the world. We have, therefore, to expect that there should be in the main a greater risk of an enslavement of history to biography than to geography; interpreting the latter term as the inclusive study of non-human processes and changes upon this earth. But we may reasonably expect on the other side that an age like our own, distinguished beyond all predecessors by great advances in its knowledge of nature and by huge new problems of human need face to face with nature, which its own social growth, as well as its very knowledge of nature, has set before it, may be inclined to lay stress upon the study of the regional environment of societies, for the same reason as impels it to lay stress within those societies themselves, less upon the voices of the great men, than on the clamour or the response of the masses.