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 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 cause, beginning and alleged cause
was reserved for Polybius. No canon of historian 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 courtiers and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs influence
– particulars interesting, no doubt, to those who would ascribe the Reformation
to Anne Boleyn’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 part 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 overlooks.”
Nor can the scientific investigator of
history isolate the particular elements, which he desires to examine, from
disturbing and extraneous causes, as in the case of lunatic asylums 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 we 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 economists, have to be modified largely before they come to
correspond with what we know was the 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 (the 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 – I mean the conception of a society as a sort of human organism
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 it 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.
And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous
simplicity in the elements under consideration is the result of the employment
of the abstract method, even within the limit thus obtained a certain selection
must be made, and a selection involves a theory. For the facts of life