Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural,
yet was sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the supernatural. He did
not discuss it, but he annihilated by explaining history without it. Polybius
enters at length into the whole question and explains its origin and the method
of treating it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio’s dream. Thucydides
would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it. He is the culmination
of the rational progression of Dialectic. “Nothing,” he says, “shows a foolish
mind more than the attempt to account for any phenomena on the principle of
chance or supernatural intervention. History is a search for rational causes,
and there is nothing in the world – even those phenomena which seem to us the
most remote from law and improbable – which is not the logical and inevitable
result of certain rational antecedents.”
Some things, of course, are to be rejected a priori without entering into the
subject; “As regards such miracles, he says [Polybius, xvi 12], “as that on
a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never falls though the statue stands
in the open air, or that those who enter God’s shrine in Arcadia lose their
natural shadows, I cannot be expected to argue upon the subject. For these things
are not only utterly improbable but absolutely impossible.”
For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain a task as
trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit the possibility of the
supernatural, which is the very point at issue.
What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle is to annihilate
the possibility of history: for just as scientific and chemical experiments
would be either impossible or useless if exposed to the chance of continued
interference on the part of some foreign body, so the laws and principles which
govern history, the causes and phenomena, the evolution of progress, the whole
science, in a word, of man’s dealings with his own race and with nature, will
remain a sealed book to him who admits he possibility of extra-natural interference.
The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on a priori rational grounds,
but in the case of events which we know to have happened, the scientific historian
will not rest till he has discovered their natural causes which, for instance,
in the case of the wonderful rise of the Roman Empire – the most marvellous
thing, Polybius says, which God ever brought about [Polybius, viii 4] – are
to be found in the excellence of their constitution, the wisdom of their advisers,
their splendid military arrangements, and their superstition. For while Polybius
regarded the revealed religion as, of course, objective reality of truth [Polybius
resembled Gibbon in many aspects. Like him he held that all religions were to
the philosopher equally false, to the vulgar equally true, to the statesman
equally useful], he laid great stress on its moral subjective influence, going,
in one passage on the subject, even so far as almost to excuse the introduction
of the supernatural in very small quantities into history on account of the
extremely good effect it would have on pious people.
But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern history which
breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of rationalism as one preserved to
us in the Vatican – strange resting-place for it! – in which he treats of the
terrible decay of population which had fallen on his native land in his own
day, and which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a special judgement
of God, sending childlessness on women as a punishment of the sins of the people.
For it was a disaster quite without parallel in the history of the land, and
entirely unforeseen by any of its political-economy writers who, on the contrary,
were always anticipating that danger would arise from an excess of population
overrunning its means of subsistence, and becoming unmanageable through its
size. Polybius , however, will have nothing to do with either priest or worker
of miracles in this Delphi, Apollo’s shrine, whose inspiration even Thucydides
admitted and before whose wisdom Socrates bowed. How foolish, he says, were
the men who on this matter would pray to God. We must search for the rational
causes, and the causes are seen to be clear, and the method of prevention also.
He then proceeds to notice how all this arose from the general reluctance to
marriage an to bearing the expense of educating which resulted from the carelessness
and avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational principles
the whole of this apparently supernatural judgement.
Now it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as violation
of inviolable laws is entirely a priori – for discussion of such a matter is,
of course, impossible for a rational thinker – yet his rejection of supernatural
intervention rests entirely on the scientific grounds of the necessity of looking
for natural causes. And he is quite logical in maintaining his position on these
principles. For where it is either difficult or impossible to assign any rational
cause for phenomena, or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in
the alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his essentially
scientific method of treating the matter has logically forced on him, approving,
for instance, of prayers for rain, on the express ground that the laws of meteorology
had not yet been ascertained. He would, of course, have been the first to welcome
our modern discoveries in the matter. The passage in question is in every way
one of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of course, as signifying
any inclination on his part to acquiesce in the supernatural, but because it
shows how essentially logical and rational his method of argument was and how
candid and fair his mind.
Having now examined Polybius’s attitude towards the supernatural and the general
ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to examine the method he pursued
in his scientific investigation of the complex phenomena of life. For, as I
have said before in the course of this essay, what is important in all great
writers is not so much the results they arrive at as the methods they pursue.
The increased knowledge of facts may alter any conclusion in history as in physical
science, and the canons of speculative historical credibility must be acknowledged
to appeal rather to that subjective attitude of mind which we call the historic
sense than to any formulated objective rules. But a scientific method is a gain
for all time, and the true if not the only progress of historical criticism
consists in the improvement of the instruments of research. Now first, as regards
his conception of history, I have already pointed out that it was to him essentially
a search for causes, a problem to be solved, not a picture to be painted, a
scientific investigation into laws and tendencies, not a mere romantic account
of startling incident and wondrous adventure. Thucydides, in the opening of
his great work, had sounded the first note of the scientific conception of history.
“The absence of romance in my pages,” he says, “will, I fear, detract somewhat
from its value, but I have written my work not to be the exploit of a passing
hour but as the possession of all time.” [Cf. Polybius, xii. 25] Polybius follows
with words almost entirely similar. If, he says, we banish from history the
consideration of causes, methods and motives (t? d?? ?a? p?? ?a? t???? ?????),
and refuse to consider how far the result of anything is its rational consequent,
what is left is a mere barren exercise, not a significant piece of mental work,
an oratorical essay which may give pleasure for the moment, but which is entirely
without any scientific value for the explanation of the future. Elsewhere he
says that “history robbed of the exposition of its causes and laws is a profitless
thing, though it may allure a fool.” And all through his history the same point
is put forward and exemplified in every fashion.
So far for the conception of history. Now for the groundwork. As regards the
character of the phenomena to be selected by the scientific investigator. Aristotle
had laid down the general formula that nature should be studied in her normal
manifestations. Polybius, true to his character of applying explicitly the principles
implicit in the work of others, follows out the doctrine of Aristotle, and lays
particular stress on the rational and undisturbed character of the development
of the Roman constitution as affording special facilities for the discovery
of the laws of its progress. Political revolutions result from causes either
external or internal. The former are mere disturbing forces which lie outside
the sphere of scientific calculation. It is the latter which are important for
the establishing of principles an the elucidation of the sequences of rational
evolution.
He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important truths of
the modern methods of investigation: I mean that principle which lays down that
just as the study of physiology should precede the study of pathology, just
as the laws of disease are best discovered by the phenomena presented in health,
so the method of arriving at all great social and political truths is buy the
investigation of those cases where development has been normal, rational and
undisturbed.
The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with, the more
difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its progress and to analyse the
separate forces of its civilisation, is one the validity of which is now generally
recognised by those who pretend to a scientific treatment of all history: and
while we have seen that Aristotle anticipated it in a general formula, to Polybius
belongs the honour of being the first to apply it explicitly in the sphere of
history.
I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of his work was
essentially the search for causes; and true to his analytical spirit he is careful
to examine what a cause really is and in what part of the antecedents of any
consequent it is to be looked for. To give an illustration: As regards the origin
of the war with Perseus, some assigned as causes the expulsion of Abrupolis
by Perseus, the expedition of the latter to Delphi, the plot against Eumenes
and the seizure of the ambassadors in Boeotia; of these incidents the two former,
Polybius points out, were merely the pretexts, the two latter merely the occasions
of the war. The war was really a legacy left to Perseus by
TO BE CONTINUED