Although history is pluralistic, it is not, therefore, discontinuous. We can not divide it in two in such a manner that its parts will be wholly unconnected. Any division we may make, although we make it as plain as the fence which divides a field, gives us a boundary which, like the fence, belongs equally to the parts on either side of it. Novelty and distinction may abound in the world, but nothing is so novel or distinct that it is wholly cut off from antecedents and consequences of some sort. It is this fact which we denote when we speak of the continuity of history. We indicate that every action of time, every conversion of the possible into the actual, is intimately woven into the order of events and finds there a definite place and definite connections. Consequently it becomes easy to represent the movement of history as a kind of progress from earlier to later things, from ancestors to descendants, or from the original or primitive to the derived. If, however, progress is to mean[Pg 59] anything more than just this representation of historical continuity, if, for example, it is to mean, besides a progression from the earlier to the later, some improvement also, clearly a criterion is necessary, by which progress may be judged and estimated. An inquiry is thus suggested into the continuity of history to see in what sense progress may be affirmed of it and by what criteria that affirmation may be warranted. As a preliminary to this inquiry it is advisable to envisage the continuity itself and determine how far it assists in understanding what has happened.

From among the many illustrations which might be cited to bring the fact of historical continuity visibly before us, these from Professor Tylor\'s "Primitive Culture" are particularly suggestive because they deal with familiar things: "Progress, degradation, survival, modification, are all modes of the connection that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he[Pg 60] who knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass between them. Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them; and if the history yet farther behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because we can not clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails of the German postilion\'s coat show of themselves how they came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman\'s bands no longer so convey their history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough till one has seen the intermediate stages through which they came down from the more serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave their name to the \'band-box\' they used to be kept in. In fact, the books of costume, showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual stages and passed into another, illustrate with much force and clearness the nature of the change[Pg 61] and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year to year in more important matters of life. In books, again, we see each writer not for and by himself, but occupying his proper place in history; we look through each philosopher, mathematician, chemist, poet, into the background of his education,—through Leibnitz into Descartes, through Dalton into Priestly, through Milton into Homer.

"\'Man,\' said Wilhelm von Humboldt, \'ever connects on from what lies at hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).\' The notion of the continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study of development, when he declared at the beginning of his \'Positive Philosophy\' that \'no conception can be understood except through its history,\' and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested. [Pg 62]Imagine any one explaining the trivial saying, \'a little bird told me,\' without knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts, to which Dr. Dasent in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so reasonably traces its origin. To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due."[5]

The illustrations are drawn from the domain of human interests. They could be paralleled by others drawn from natural history. The honeysuckle may carry us elsewhere than to Assyria, revealing unsuspected kinships in the world of plants. Biology has made the conception of the continuity of living forms a familiar commonplace, and geology can find in the earth\'s crust the story of countless years. So familiar has the idea of continuity become that terms like "evolution" and "development" have ceased to be technical and have become terms of common speech. We speak readily of the evolution of man, of government, of the steam-engine, of the automobile, and of the atom. The idea has so possessed all departments of[Pg 63] inquiry that a large part of the literature of every subject is occupied with setting forth connections which have gone before. Not only do we go through Milton into Homer, but through yesterday into an ever receding past which grows more alluring the more it recedes. The quest for origins has been of absorbing interest. It would seem that we can never understand anything at all until we have discovered its origin in something which preceded it.

In the first lecture I pointed out how impossible it appears ever to end any history finally. We now seem to face a corresponding impossibility, namely, the impossibility of ever really beginning it successfully. It would appear that we stop only because we do not care to go farther, or lack the means to do so, and not because we can say that we have found a first beginning with no antecedents before it. We may begin the history of philosophy with the Greeks, with Thales of Miletus, but the question has been repeatedly asked, Was not Thales a Semite? Did he not derive his ideas from Egypt and Babylonia? And whence came philosophy itself? Was it not the offspring of religion which preceded it, so that, before we begin its history,[Pg 64] we must pass, as Professor Cornford suggests,[6] from religion to philosophy? Then what of religion itself? What were its antecedents and whence was its descent? So the questions multiply interminably until we must admit that "in the beginning" is a time arbitrarily fixed or only relatively determined. History, being continuous, has neither beginning nor end.

This fact, however, ought not to bewilder any one who contemplates it steadily. It is an obvious consequence of the nature of time, for every present has a past and a future, and a first or last present is, consequently, quite unintelligible. The historian, least of all, should be bewildered. If he has recognized that history is pluralistic, he will recognize also that beginnings and ends are, in any intelligible sense, the termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute first or last in history taken as a whole, for, as we have seen, the attempt to take history as a whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the attempt to define history. It gives us the metaphysics of time, but not an absolute, complete, and finished whole, whose boundaries, although never empirically reached, are ideally conceivable.[Pg 65] Our thinking moves in a direction quite different. It leads us to observe that distinctions begin and end, and begin and end as absolutely as one chooses, but do not, thereby, cut themselves off from all connections. These lectures began to be delivered last Friday, but not the day before; the first word of them was written at a perfectly definite time and place which can never be changed; they will end with a definiteness equally precise; but these beginnings and endings destroy no continuity. Every history is equally continuous, undisturbed by its beginnings and endings. Each action of time is preceded and followed by everything which precedes and follows it, and yet each action of time begins and ends with its own peculiar and individual precision. In affirming this we are affirming, by means of a particular instance, the metaphysical nature of continuity itself. For by continuity we mean the possibility of precise and definite distinctions. The continuity of a line may be divided at its middle point. It is then precisely divided, but is not, thereby, broken into two separate lines.[7] After this[Pg 66] manner the continuity of history is to be conceived. And in the light of this conception we should understand what the continuity of history can explain.

It is tempting to say that it can explain nothing at all, but it is evident that there is an uncertainty of meaning in such a claim. For things may be explained or made clear in a variety of ways with little resemblance to one another. What we mean by a circle may be made clear by defining a circle, or by an algebraical formula, or by drawing a circle. All these ways will be fruitful, but they will be fruitful relatively to the problem which provokes them. To explain anything at all, it is necessary to keep in mind the questions to which the proposed explanation is relevant. If I am asked to draw a circle it will not do simply to define it; and if I am asked to tell what it is algebraically, it will not do simply to draw it. So it is apparent that, when we wish to know what the continuity of history can explain, or when we affirm that it explains nothing, we should have in mind, first of all, the questions to which the continuity of history would be an appropriate answer. There appears to be only one such question, and that is, What have been the antecedents of any[Pg 67] given fact? These antecedents the continuity of history explains in that it makes them clear. It may also make clear what the consequences of a given fact have been or may be. But this explanatory value is a derivative of the preceding or an enlargement of it, through our habit of looking at consequences as derived from their antecedents, and of basing our expectations of what may happen upon our observations of what has happened. Further explanatory value in the continuity of history it seems difficult to find, even if we make the statement of it less general and more precise.

But in saying this, it is not implied that this value is mean or inconsiderable. The continuity of history is both entertaining and instructive. It is entertaining because it reveals unsuspected kinships and alluring connections. It is instructive because it furnishes a foundation for inference and practice. To man it gives the long experience of his race to enjoy and profit by. It guides his expectations and enhances the control of his own affairs. It is the same with the continuities of nature generally. They beget the vision of an ordered world and help to frame rules which are applicable in the control of nature. Accordingly it is not disparagement[Pg 68] which is here intended, but a limitation which should be appreciated.

When we say to our children, "A little bird told me," both we and our children may be quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent\'s introduction to the Norse Tales. We may be quite unconscious that we are using an expression traceable to a time when people believed in such language of birds and beasts as gifted persons could understand. It may be that we repeat the words simply because we remember that our parents once successfully deceived us in our childhood by using them, and that our parents did but follow the example of theirs. But evidently we should not explain the trivial saying simply by following it back endlessly into antiquity unless we concluded that it had always been characteristic of parents to deceive children in this manner. In that case we should have discovered a metaphysical truth about the nature of parents, and no further explanation would be required.

If, however, we are not willing to admit that parents are such by nature that they will cite birds as sources of information when it is expedient to keep the real source hidden, but insist that this habit be otherwise explained, we ask for an explanation which the continuity of history[Pg 69] alone can not afford. An explanation in contemporaneous terms is required. We do not use the phrase because our ancestors used it, although we may have derived it from them; we use it because of its known efficacy. We may, however, discover that our ancestors—or Norse parents—used it for a different reason, namely, because they believed in a language of beasts and birds. But if we ask why they so believed, it will not profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so doing we come upon the contemporaneous, experimental origin of that belief. For it is evident that if the belief had an origin, there was a time anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can not, therefore, be explained solely in terms of that anterior time. Its origin points, not to continuity, but to action. It indicates not that the originators of the belief had ancestors, but that, in view of their contemporaneous circumstances, they acted in a certain way. To explain the origin of anything, therefore, we can not trust to the continuity of history alone. That continuity may carry us back to the beginnings of beliefs and institutions which have persisted and been transmitted from age to age; it may reveal to us experimental factors which have shaped beliefs and institutions, but which have[Pg 70] long since been forgotten; but it can never, of itself, reveal the experimental origin of any belief or institution whatever. That is, in principle, the limitation by which the explanatory value of historical continuity is restricted. To understand origins we must appeal to the contemporaneous experience of their own age, or to experimental science.[8]

Simple as this consideration is, it has been too much neglected by historians and philosophers in recent times on account of the profound influence of the doctrine of evolution. The great service, which that doctrine has rendered, has been to fix our attention on the evident fact of continuity from which our minds had been distracted by a too exclusive preoccupation with theories of the atomic kind. Through several centuries, philosophy had acquired the habit of thinking generally in terms of elements and their compounds, whenever it addressed itself to a consideration of nature, or of the mind, or of the relation between the two. Its principal problem[Pg 71] was to discover means of connection and unification which might make clear how that which is essentially discrete and discontinuous might, none the less, be combined into a unity of some sort. As it failed, it usually took refuge in the opposite idea, and attempted to conceive an original unity out of which diversity was generated by some impulsion in this initial and primal being. Philosophy thus vibrated between the contrasted poles of the same fundamental endeavor, between the attempt to combine elements into a unity, and the attempt to resolve unity into elements. The latter attempt, especially in men like Hegel and Spencer, had the advantage of involving the idea of continuity, and became the controlling philosophical enterprise of the latter part of the last century. But it was principally the doctrine of evolution or development as set forth by biologists, anthropologists, and historians that made the fact of continuity convincingly apparent and freed philosophy from the necessity of attempting to explain it. Continuity became a fact to be appreciated and understood, and ceased to be a riddle to be solved. The doctrine of evolution thus wrought a real emancipation of the mind.

But this freedom has been often abused.[Pg 72] Relieved of the necessity of explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote ancestors. And this practical advice has sometimes taken the form of metaphysics. If we wish to know the nature of things or to appraise their worth, we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic stuff from which everything has been derived. Thus man and all the varied panorama of the world vanish backward into nebul?, and life disappears into the impulse to live. Not trailing clouds of glory do we come, but trailing the primitive and the obsolete.

[Pg 73]

Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and sophistication. That is the usual result of inquisitions into one\'s ancestry. But disillusionment and sophistication may produce either regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better for us to have lived then when illusions were cherished and vital, than to live now when they are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has been sapped, and we may cry with Matthew Arnold\'s Obermann

"Oh, had I lived in that great day!"

Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.

But progress is not to be construed in terms of a conservatism which is artificial and reactionary, or of a radicalism which is undisciplined[Pg 74] and irresponsible. Conservatism and radicalism are, as already indicated, temperamental affections which a too exclusive and irrational contemplation of our ance............