The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[1] says: "Historic is that which is, or has been, effective. ... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event." The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment — in my terminology, physiognomic fact — is decided by the blood, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does not consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which one moment of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.
Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could acquire — just because for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive — much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably "knew" the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus's revolution, but for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed's milieu signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for us it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history is.
- ↑ "Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte" (Kleine Schriften, 1910), which is by far the best piece of historical philosophy ever written by an opponent of all philosophy.
