There is
a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining, and which has been
subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that general law common to all organic
bodies which we call the Instability of the Homogeneous. The various manifestations
of this law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of the
different forms of government [Polybius, vi. 9] , are expounded with great clearness
by Polybius, who claimed for his theory in the Thucydidean spirit, that it is
a lasting possession, not a mere prize of the immediate present, and that a
knowledge of it will enable the impartial observer to discover at any time what
period of its constitutional evolution any particular state has already reached
and into what form it will be next differentiated, though possibly the exact
time of the changes may be more or less uncertain.
Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political revolutions
as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said to show what is his true
position in the rational development of the “Idea” which I have called the Philosophy
of History, because it is the unifying of history. Seen darkly as it is through
the glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more metaphysical than scientific
with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the eagle-flight of speculation,
to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul impatient of those slower and surer
inductive methods which Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his great master,
showed were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of brilliancy
is truth.
What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain for him? Polybius
was one of those many men who are born too late to be original. To Thucydides
belongs the honour of being the first in the history of Greek thought to discern
the supreme calm of law and order underlying the fitful storms of life, and
Plato and Aristotle each represents a great new principle. To Polybius belongs
the office – how noble an office he made it his writings show – of making more
explicit the ideas which were implicit in his predecessors, of showing that
they were of wider applicability and perhaps of deeper meaning than they had
seemed before, of examining with more minuteness the law which they had discovered,
and finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had done the range of
science and the means it offered for analysing the present and predicting what
was to come. His office thus was to gather up what they had left to give their
principles new life by a wider application.
Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the Philosophy of history
appears next, as in Plutarch’s tract on “Why God’s anger is delayed,” the pendulum
of thought had swung back to where it began. His theory was introduced to the
Romans under the cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the philosophical
panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in Latin literature is in the
pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the stable polity formed out of these elements
as a constitution easier to commend than to produce and in no case lasting.
Yet Polybius had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the
rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy fifty years and
more before there was joy in the Julian household over the birth of that boy
who, borne to power as the champion of the people, died wearing the purple of
a king.
No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the means by which
the ancients attained to the philosophy of history. The principle of heredity
can be exemplified in literature as well as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato
and Polybius are the lineal ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin,
of Montesquieu and Tocqueville.
As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out those great
thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of this spirit of historical
criticism. I shall pass over those annalists and chroniclers who intervened
between Thucydides and Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light
on the real nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other
forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character and rise
of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific study of history which
cause a wide gap between these two historians.
Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the Isocratean
school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena for the display of
either pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific investigation into laws.
The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention to form
which made Euripides often like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody
to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy,
that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.
The rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to the aesthetic
value of digressions, the legality of employing more than one metaphor in the
same sentence, and the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of
estimating evidence but by the goodness of the Greek they write.
I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by Alexander
the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more accurate research of geography,
the very splendour of his achievements seems to have brought history again into
the sphere of romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed
invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency to look for
the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical criticism. An Alexander,
a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are thought to be outside the
limiting conditions of rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not
very long ago.
While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which Western and Eastern
thought met with such strange results to both, diverted the critical tendencies
of the Greek spirit into questions of grammar, philology and the like, the narrow
artificial atmosphere of the University town (as we may call it) was fatal to
the development of that independent and speculative spirit of research which
strikes out new methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.
The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an ignorance of the
true principles of research, an enthusiastic spirit for accumulating materials
with a wonderful incapacity to use them. Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or
the Sophists of Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of genius
on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I have a short
time ago dwelt. Born in the serene and pure air of the clear uplands of Arcadia,
Polybius may be said to reproduce in his work the character of the place which
gave him birth.
For, of all the historians – I do not say of antiquity but of all time – none
is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief if the “visions
and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling superstitions and unmanly craving
for the supernatural [Polybius, xii. 24: base superstitions fears and that interest
in the marvellous which is characteristic in women] which he is compelled to
notice himself as the characteristics of some of the historians who preceded
him.
Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less blessed in the wondrous
time of his birth. For, representing in himself the spiritual supremacy of the
Greek intellect and allied in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror
of his day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate “to comprehend,” as
has been said, “more clearly than the Romans themselves the historical position
of Rome,” and to discern with greater insight than all other men could those
two great resultants of ancient civilisation, the material empire of the city
of the seven hills, and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.
Before his own day, he says [Polybius, I.4, viii.4, especially; and really passim],
the events of the world were unconnected and separate and the histories confined
to particular countries. Now, for the first time, the universal empire of the
Romans rendered a universal history possible [he makes one exception]. This,
then, is the august motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this Italian
city from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow strait of Messina
and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the time when Corinth in the East
and Carthage in the West fell before the resistless wave of empire and the eagles
of Rome passed on the wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars
of Hercules to Syria and the Nile.
At the same time he recognised that the scheme of Rome’s empire was worked out
under the aegis of God’s will [Polybius, viii, 4]. For, as one of the Middle
Age scribes most truly says, the Tyche [chance] of Polybius is that power which
we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call it, of his history is
to point out the rational and human and natural causes which brought this result,
distinguishing, as we should say, between God’s mediate and immediate government
of the world.
With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of Man, he will
have nothing to do: still less with any idea of chance as a factor in the phenomena
of life. Chance and miracles he says, are mere expressions for our ignorance
of rational causes. The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus
as a vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a consistent
attitude of mind never argued about or even explained, is by Polybius analysed
and formulated as the great instrument of historical research.
TO BE CONTINUED