OSCAR
WILDE
THE RISE
OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM
(part 12)
It is evident
that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of manifestations which
external causes bring about in their workings on the uniform character of
the nature of man. Yet, after all is said, these are perhaps but very few
general statements: the ordinary effects of peace and war are dwelt on, but
there is no real analysis of the immediate causes and general laws of the
phenomena of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth that if
humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening. Perhaps we
may say that with him the philosophy of history is partly in the metaphysical
stage, and see, in the progress of this idea from Herodotus to Polybius, the
exemplification of the Comtian law of the three stages of thought, the theological,
the metaphysical, and the scientific: for truly out of the vagueness of theological
mysticism this conception which we call the Philosophy of History was raised
to a scientific principle, according to which the past was explained and the
future predicted by reference to general laws. Now, just as the earliest accounts
of the nature of the progress of humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him
we find the first explicit attempt to found a universal philosophy of history
upon wide rational grounds. Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher
proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce revolutions,
of the moral effects of various forms of government and education, of the
rise of the criminal classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in
a word, to create history by the deductive method and to proceed from a priori
psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos
of political life. There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from
a single philosiphical principle all the phenomena which experience subsequently
verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the world-plan from the idea
of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had found the key to the mysteries of
life in the development of freedom, and Krause in the categories of being.
But the one scientific basis on which the true philosophy of history must
rest is the complete knowledge of the laws of human nature in all its wants,
its aspirations, its powers and its tendencies: and this great truth, which
Thucydides may be said in some measure to have apprehended, was given to us
first by Plato. Now it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that
either his philosophy or his history is entirely and simply a priori. On est
de son siècle même quand on y protest [a man belongs to his age
even when he struggles against it], and so we find in him continual references
to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean system, the general characteristics
of Greek tyrannies and Grek democracies. For while, in his account of the
method of forming an ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed
to fix his gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure reason,
but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals on earth: yet, after
all, the general character of the Platonic method, which is what we are specially
concerned with, is essentially deductive and a priori. And he himself, in
the building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a kaqaro;"
pivnax [clean sheet] making a clean sweep of all history and all experience;
and it was essentially as an a priori theorist that he was criticised by Aristotle,
as we shall see later. To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme
of the laws of political revolution as drawn by Plato, we must first note
that the primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the general principle,
common to the vegetable and animal worlds as well as to then world of history,
that all created things are fated to decay – a principle which, though
expressed in the terms of a mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps
in its essence scientific. For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution
of matter and motion is the inevitable result of the normal persistence of
Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as impossible as it certainly is in
physics. The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic "city
of the sun" are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race consequent
on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation of physical achievements
over mental culture: while the hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy,
Democracy and Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed
in a very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned by
the actual order of history. And indeed it is apparent at first sight that
the Platonic succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas
in the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time. Aristotle
meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the theory of the periodic
decay of all created things, he urges, be scientific, it must be universal,
and so true of all other states as well as of the ideal. Besides, a state
usually changes into its contrary and not to the form next to it; so the ideal
state would not change into Timocracry; while Oligarchy, more often than Tyranny,
succeeds Democracy. Plato, besides, says nothing of what a Tyranny would change
to. According to the cycle theory it ought to pass into the ideal state again,
but as a fact one Tyranny is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a
Democracy as at Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The example
of Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a Tyranny, as
at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to represent greed as the chief
motive of decay, or to talk of avarice as the root of Oligarchy, when in nearly
all true oligarchies money-making is forbidden by law. And finally, the Platonic
theory neglects the different kinds of democracies and of tyrannies. Now nothing
can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's Politics (v. 12), which
may be said to mark an era in the evolution of historical criticism. For there
is nothing on which Aristotle insists so strongly as that the generalisations
from facts ought to be added to the data of the a priori method – a
principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive speculative politics
but of physics also: for are not the residual phenomena of chemists a valuable
source of improvement in theory? His own method is essentially historical
though by no means empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly
styled il maestro di color che sanno [the master of those who know], may be
said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively
empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both in the process
called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts, which has been defined as
the application to facts of such general conceptions as may fix the important
characteristics of the phenomena and present them permanently in their true
relations. He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is
incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of man, is
not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that inconsistency and
anomaly are as possible in the moral as they are in physical world, and that
where the superficial observer thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical
critic discerns merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable
results of certain antecedents. And while admitting the necessity of a psychological
basis for the philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that
man, to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as in
his natural powers, must be studied from below in the hierachical progression
of higher function from the lower forms of life. The important maxim, that
to obtain a clear conception of anything we must "study it in its growth
from the very beginning" is formally set down in the opening of the Politics,
where, indeed, we shall find the other characteristic features of modern Evolutionary
theory, such as the "Differentiation of Function" and the "Survival
of the Fittest" explicitly set forth. What a valuable step this was in
the improvement of the method of historical criticism it is needless to point
out. By it, one may say, the true thread was given to guide one's steps through
the bewildering labyrinth of facts. For history (to use terms with which Aristotle
has made us familiar) may be looked at from two essentially different standpoints;
either as a work of art whose tevlo" [end or aim] or final cause is external
to it and imposed on it from without; or as an organism containing the law
of its own development in itself, and working out its perfection merely by
the fact of being what it is. Now, if we adopt the former, which we may style
the theological view, we shall be in continual danger of tripping into the
pitfall of some a priori conclusion – that bourne from which, it has
been truly said, no traveller ever returns. The latter is the only scientific
theory and was apprehended in its fulness by Aristotle, whose application
of the inductive method to history, and whose employment of the evolutionary
theory of humanity, show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history
is nothing separate from the facts of history but is contained in them, and
that the rational law of the complex phenomena of life, like the ideal in
the world of thought, is to be reached through the facts, not superimposed
on them – kata; pollw'n not pollav [reasoning from the multiplicity
of experience]. And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science
of historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his attitude
towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a philosophy of history
on which I have touched above. I mean the assertion of extra-natural interference
with the normal development of the world and of the incalculable influence
exercised by the power of free will.
TO BE CONTINUED