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; the pretexts, the two
latter merely the occasions of the war. The war was really a legacy left to
Perseus by his father, who was determined to fight it out with Rome (Polybius,
xxii. 22).
Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides had pointed
out the difference between the real and the alleged cause, and the Aristotelian
dictum about revolutions – Not about trivial issues but arising from trivial
causes – draws the distinction between cause and occasion with the brilliancy
of an epigram. But the explicit and rational investigation of the difference
between aitia (cause), arche (beginning) and profasis (alleged cause) was reserved
for Polybius. No canon of historical criticism can be said to be of more real
value than that involved in this distinction, and the overlooking of it has
filled our histories with the contemptible accounts of the intrigues of countries
and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs influence – particulars interesting,
no doubt, to those who would ascribe the Reformation to Anne Boleyin’s pretty
face, the Persian war to the influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from
Atossa, or the French Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any value
for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.
But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to return, is not
yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it may be regarded, and I shall
now proceed to treat of it.
One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian has to contend
is the enormous complexity of the facts which come under his notice: D’Alembert’s
suggestion that at the end of every century a selection of facts should be made
and the rest burned (if it was really intended seriously) could not, of course,
be entertained for a moment. A problem loses all its value when it becomes simplified,
and the world would be all the poorer if the Sybil of History burned her volumes.
Besides, as Gibbon pointed out, “a Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant
fact relations which the vulgar overlook.”
Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the particular elements,
which he desires to examine, from disturbing and extraneous causes, as the experimental
chemist can do (though some times, as in the case of lunatic asylum and prisons,
he is enabled to observe phenomena in a certain degree of isolation). So he
is compelled either to use the deductive mode of arguing from general laws or
to employ the method of abstraction which gives a fictitious isolation to phenomena
never so isolated in actual existence. And this is exactly what Polybius has
done as well as Thucydides. For as has been well remarked, there is in the works
of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive; whatever they
write is penetrated through and through with a specific quality, a singleness
and concentration of purpose, which may contrast with the more comprehensive
width as manifested not merely in the modern mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides,
regarding society as influenced entirely by political motives, took no account
of forces of a different nature, and consequently his results, like those of
most modern political economists, have to be modified largely before they come
to correspond with what we know was actual state of fact. Similarly, Polybius
will deal only with those forces which tended to bring the civilised world under
the dominion of Rome (ix. i), and in the Thucydidean spirit points out the want
of picturesqueness and romance in his pages which is the result of the abstract
method (uniformity of structure), being careful also to tell us that his rejection
of all other forces is essentially deliberate and the result of a preconceived
theory and by no means due to carelessness of any kind.
Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality of its employment
in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the suitable occasion for any
discussion. It is, however, in all ways worthy of note that Polybius is not
merely conscious of, but dwells with particular weight on, the fact which is
usually urged as the strongest objection to the employment of the abstract method
–whose parts are indissolubly connected with one another and all affected when
one member is in any way agitated. This conception of the organic nature of
society appears first in Plato and Aristotle, who apply it to cities. Polybius,
as his wont is, expands to be a general characteristic of all history. It is
an idea of the very highest importance, especially to a man like Polybius, whose
thoughts are continually turned towards the essential unity of history and the
impossibility of isolation.
Further, as regards the particular method of investigating that group of phenomena
obtained for him by the abstract method, he will adopt, he tells us, neither
the purely deductive nor the purely inductive mode but the union of both. In
other words, he formally adopts that method of analysis upon the importance
of which I have dwelt before.
TO BE CONTINUED