THE SENSE OF REALITY

by Isaiah Berlin from The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History p. 1-39

WHEN MEN, as occasionally happens, develop a distaste for the age in which they live, and love and admire some past period with such uncritical devotion that it is clear that, if they had their choice, they would wish to be alive then and not now - and when, as the next step, they seek to introduce into their lives certain of the habits and practices of the idealised past, and criticise the present for falling short of, or for degeneration from, this past - we tend to accuse them of nostalgic 'escapism', romantic antiquarianism, lack of realism; we dismiss their efforts as attempts to 'turn the clock back', to 'ignore the forces of history', or 'fly in the face of the facts', at best touching and childish and pathetic, at worst 'retrograde', or 'obstructive', or insanely 'fanatical', and, although doomed to failure in the end, capable of creating gratuitous obstacles to progress in the immediate present and future.

This kind of charge is made, and apparently understood, easily. It goes with such notions as the 'logic of the facts', or the 'march of history', which, like the laws of nature (with which they are partly identified), are thought of as, in some sense, 'inexorable', likely to take their course whatever human beings may wish or pray for, an inevitable process to which individuals must adjust themselves, for if they defy it they will perish; which, like the Fates in the line by Seneca, 'ducunt volentem ...nolentem trahunt'. (1) And yet this way of thinking seems to presuppose a machinery in the universe which those who think in these terms do not necessarily accept, which indeed they may, if they are students of history rather than metaphysics, seek to refute by means of negative instances drawn from their own and others' experience. Nevertheless, even those who try to rebut this way of thinking find that they cannot 1 I’ draw those who are willing, drag those who are not' adapting Cleanthes. Letters, 107. II,  [2] altogether abandon the concepts in question because they seem to correspond to something in their view of how things happen, although they do not, perhaps, believe in the machinery of determinism which is normally held to be the source of them.

Let me try to make this somewhat clearer. Everyone, no doubt, believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond conscious human control. And when we describe this or that scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be realised in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These are of many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot interfere, for example the solar system or the general realm dealt with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the entities in question nor the laws which they obey. As for the rest of the physical world, dealt with by the various natural sciences, we conceive of the laws which govern them as unalterable by us, but claim to be able to intervene to some degree in altering the states of things and persons which obey these laws. Some believe such interventions are themselves subject to laws: that we ourselves are wholly determined by our past; that our behaviour is in principle wholly calculable; and that our 'freedom' in interfering with natural processes is therefore illusory .Others deny this in whole or in part, but that does not concern us here, since both sides are willing to grant that large portions of our universe, particularly its inanimate portion, is as it is and suffers what it does whether we will it or no.

When we examine the world of sentient beings, some portions of it are certainly thought to be governed by 'necessity'. There are, to begin with, the effects of the interplay of human beings with nature - their own bodies and what is external to them. The assumption is made that there are certain basic human needs, for food, for shelter, the minimum means by which life can be carried on, perhaps for certain forms of pleasure or selfexpression, communication; that these are affected by such relatively fixed phenomena as climate, geographical formation and the products of a natural environment, which take the form of economic, social, religious institutions, and so on, each of which is the combined effect of physical, biological, psychological, geographical factors, and so forth, and in which certain uniformities can be discovered, in terms of which patterns are observable in the lives of both individuals and societies - cyclical patterns of the kind discussed by Plato or Polybius, or nonrecurrent ones, as in the sacred works of [3] the Jews, the Christians, and perhaps Pythagoreans and Orphics, the patterns and chains of being which are to be found in various Eastern religions and philosophies, and in modern days in the cosmologies of such writers as Vico, Hegel, Comte, Buckle, Marx, Pareto, and a good many contemporary social psychologists and anthropologists and philosophers of history .These tend to treat human institutions as not proceeding solely from conscious human purposes or desires; but having made due allowance for such conscious purposes, whether on the part of those who found or those who use and participate in institutions, they stress unconscious or semi-conscious causes on the part of both individuals and groups, and, even more, the by-products of the encounters of the uncoordinated purposes of various human beings, each acting as he does partly for coherent and articulate motives, partly for causes or reasons little known to himself or to others, and thereby causing states of affairs which nobody may have intended as such, but which in their turn condition the lives and characters and actions of men.

On this view, if we consider how much is independent of conscious human policies - the entire realm of insentient nature, the sciences of which take no heed of human issues; and such human sciences as psychology and sociology , which assume some kind of basic human reactions and uniformities of behaviour, both social and individual, as unlikely to be altered radically by the fiats of individuals - if all this is taken into account, a picture emerges of a universe the behaviour of which is in principle largely calculable. Naturally we tend to come under the influence of this picture, to think of history as growing in inevitable stages, in an irreversible direction, ideally, at least, describable as instances of the totality of the laws which between them describe and summarise the natural uniformities in terms of which we conceive of the behaviour of both things and persons. The life of the fourteenth century was as it was because it was a 'stage' reached by the interplay of human and non- human factors - its institutions were those which human needs, half consciously and half quite unawares, caused to come about or to survive, and because the individual and institutional life of the fourteenth century was as it was, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could not but be as they were, and could not resemble, say, the third or the ninth or the thirteenth century , because the fourteenth century had made that quite 'impossible'. We may not know what the laws are which social evolution obeys, nor the [4] precise causal factors which function between the life of the individual and that of the 'social anthill' to which it belongs, but we may be sure that there are such laws and factors. We realise that this is so if we ask ourselves whether we think that history explains anything, that is, that any light is thrown upon the fifteenth century by what occurred in the fourteenth, in the sense that if we grasp the historical links we shall understand what made the fifteenth century what it was. T o grasp this is to see what it is that makes it absurd to suggest that everything in the fifteenth century might have been an exact reproduction of what occurred in the thirteenth century - as if the fourteenth century had never been. And from this there appears to follow that cluster of concepts with which we began. There is a pattern and it has direction; it is not necessarily 'progressive', that is, we need not believe that we are gradually approaching some' desirable' goal, however we define desirable; but we are pursuing a definite and irreversible direction; nostalgia for some past stage of it is eo ipso Utopian; for it is like asking for the reversal of the nexus of causes and effects. We may admire the past, but to try to reproduce it is to ignore this nexus. The oak cannot return to the condition of the acorn; an old man cannot, as it were, unlive what he has lived through and literally be young once more, with the body as well as the heart and mind of youth. Romantic hankerings after past ages are virtually a desire to undo the 'inexorable' logic of events. If it were possible to reproduce past conditions, historical causality would be broken, which, since we cannot help thinking in terms of it, is psychologically impossible as well as irrational and absurd.

We may be told that such expressions as 'anachronism' are surely themselves sufficient to convey this truth: to describe somebody or something as an anachronism is to say that he or it is not characteristic of the general pattern of the age. We do not need much argument to convince us that there is something gravely deficient in a historian who thinks that Richelieu could have done what he did just as well in the 1950s, or that Shakespeare could have written the plays which he wrote in Ancient Rome, or Outer Mongolia. And this sense of what belongs where, of what cannot have happened as against that which could, is said to imply the notion of an irreversible process, where everything belongs to the stage to which it does and is 'out of place' or 'out of time' if mistakenly inserted in the wrong context.

So far so good. We are committed to no more than that there are [5]some criteria of reality - that we have some methods for distinguishing the real from the illusory, real mountain peaks from cloud formations, real palms and springs from mirages in the desert, real characteristics of an age or a culture from fanciful reconstructions, real alternatives which can be realised at a given time from alternatives realisable, it may be, in other places and at other times, but not in the society or period in question. It is in terms of some such principle that various historical theorists stake out their claims. Asked why Shakespeare could not have written Hamlet in Ancient Rome, Hegelians would speak of the Graeco -  Roman spirit, with which such thoughts, feelings and words as Shakespeare's were not compatible. Marxists might refer to 'relationships' and 'forces' of production, which in Rome were such as to have 'inevitably' generated a cultural superstructure in which Virgil could function, and Shakespeare could not have functioned, as he did. Montesquieu would have spoken of geography, climates, the 'dominant spirit' of different social systems; Chateaubriand of the difference made by Christianity, Gobineau of race; Herder, the folk spirit; Taine - race, milieu, the moment; Spengler, the self-contained 'morphology' of mutually exclusive cultures and civilisations; and so forth. To be Utopian, to perpetrate anachronisms, to be unrealistic, 'escapist', not to understand history or life or the world, is to fail to grasp a particular set of laws and formulae which each school offers as the key to its explanation of why what happens must happen ~s it does and not in some other order. What is common to all the schools is a belief that there is an order and a key to its understanding, a plan - either a geometry or a geography of events. Those who understand it are wise, those who do not, wander in darkness.

And yet there is something peculiar about this, both in theory and in practice. In theory , because no attempt to provide such a 'key' in history has worked thus far. No doubt much valuable light has been thrown upon past conditions by emphasis on hitherto neglected factors: before Montesquieu and Vico, the importance of customs and institutions, of language, grammar, mythology , legal systems; of the influence of environmental and other undramatic, continuous causal factors in explaining why men behaved as they did, and indeed as an instrument for revealing how the world looked to men relatively remote in time or space, what they felt and said, and why and how, and for how long and with what effect - all this was largely unrecognised. Marx taught us to pay [6] more attention to the influence of the economic and social condition of individuals; Herder and Hegel to the interrelations of apparently diverse cultural phenomena and to the life of institutions; Durkheim to unintended social patterns; Freud to the importance of irrational and unconscious factors in individual experience; Sorel and lung to the importance of irrational myths and collective emotional attitudes in the behaviour of societies. We have learned a great deal; our perspective has altered; we see men and societies from new angles, in different lights. The discoveries which have led to this are genuine discoveries and historical writing has been transformed by them.

But the 'key' escapes us. We can neither, as in astronomy or even geology, given initial conditions, confidently reconstruct - calculate either the past or the future of a culture, of a society or class, of an individual or a group - save in instances so rare and abnormal, with such gaps, with the assistance of so many ad hoc hypotheses and epicycles, that direct observation is more economical and more informative than such attempts at scientific inference. If we ask ourselves how much we really can tell about a given period in a culture or a given pattern of human action - a war, a revolution, a renaissance of art or science - from knowledge of even its immediate antecedents or consequences, we must surely answer: scarcely anything at all. No historian, however steeped in sociology or psychology or some metaphysical theory , will attempt to write history in so a priori a fashion. When Hegel attempted this, with the courage of his anti-empirical prejudices, the result was seen as somewhat erroneous even by his followers; so too Spengler , when he insists that the streets of Greek cities were straight and crossed each other at right angles because of the geometrical spirit of the Greeks, is easily shown to be writing rubbish. The theorists of history certainly supposed that they were providing historians with wings enabling them to span great territories rapidly, as compared with the slow pedestrian rate of the empirical factgatherer; but although the wings have been with us now for more than a century, nobody has, as yet, flown; those who, as Henri Poincare remarked in an analogous connection, tried to do so came to a sorry end. The attempts to substitute machines, methods of ~ass production, for the slow manual labour of antiquaries and historical researchers have all broken down; we still rely on those who spend their lives in painfully piecing together their knowledge from fragments of actual evidence, obeying this evidence wherever [7] it leads them, however tortuous and unfamiliar the pattern, or with no consciousness of any pattern at all. Meanwhile the wings and the machinery are gathering dust on the shelves of museums, examples of overweening ambition and idle fantasy, not of intellectual achievement.

The great system-builders have in their works both expressed and influenced human attitudes towards the world - the light in which events are seen. Metaphysical, religious, scientific systems and attitudes have altered the distribution of emphasis, the sense of what is important or significant or admirable, or again of what is remote or barbarous or trivial - have profoundly affected human concepts and categories, the eyes with which men see or feel and understand the world, the spectacles through which they look -  but they have not done the work of a science as they claimed, have not revealed new facts, increased the sum of our information, disclosed unsuspected events. Our belief that events and persons and things belong where they belong inevitably, inexorably, and per contra our sense of Utopia and anachronism, remain as strong as ever; but our belief in specific laws of history , of which we can formulate the science, is not too confident - if their behaviour whether as historians or as men of action is any evidence - even among the minority of those who pursue such topics. It is unlikely, therefore, that the first springs from the second; that our disbelief in the possibility of 'a return to the past' rests on a fear of contradicting some given law or laws of history. For while our attitude towards the existence of such laws is more than doubtful, our belief in the absurdity of romantic efforts at recapturing past glories is exceedingly strong. The latter cannot, therefore, depend upon the former. What, then, is the content of our notion of the inevitable 'march of history', of the folly of trying to resist what we call irresistible ?

Impressed (and to some degree oppressed) by true considerations about the limits of free human action - the barriers imposed by unalterable and little alterable regularities in nature, in the functioning of human bodies and minds - the majority of eighteenth century thinkers and, following them, enlightened opinion in the last century , and to some degree in our own, conceived the possibility of a true empirical science of history which, even if it never became sufficiently precise to enable us to make predictions or retrodictions in specific situations, nevertheless, by dealing with great numbers, and relying on comparisons of rich statistical data, [8 ] would indicate the general direction of, say, social and technological development, and enable us to rule out some plans, revolutionary and reformist, as demonstrably anachronistic and therefore Utopian-  as not conforming to the 'objective' direction of social development. If anyone in the nineteenth century contemplated seriously a return to pre-Raphaelite forms of life it was unnecessary to discuss whether this was or was not desirable; it was surely enough to say that the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution had in fact occurred, that factories could not be dismantled and great mass industries turned back into small-  scale crafts, as if the discoveries and inventions and changes in forms of life which these had brought about had never been, that there had been advance in knowledge and civilisation, in the means of production and distribution, and that whatever might occur next, it was beyond the wit and strength of man to deflect a process which was as uncontrollable as the great uniformities of nature. Opinions might differ as to what the true laws of this process were, but all were agreed that there were such laws, and that to try to alter them or behave as if they were not decisive was an absurd day-dream, a childish desire to substitute for the laws of science those of some whimsical fairy-tale in which everything is possible.

It was true that the great men who had first achieved the triumph of this new scientific attitude - the anti-clerical philosophers and scientists of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century - had over-simplified things. They evidently supposed that men were to be analysed as material objects in space and that their lives and thoughts were in principle deducible from the mechanical laws which governed the behaviour of their bodies. This the nineteenth century felt to be too crude a view, and it was condemned as 'mechanistic' by the German metaphysicians, as 'vulgar materialism' by the Marxists, as non-evolutionary and insufficiently 'organic' by Darwinians and positivists. Such mechanical laws might account for that which is largely unaltered throughout recorded human history - the permanent chemical, physical, biological and physiological consequences of cause and effect, or functional (or statistical) interrelations, or whatever was the central category of these sciences. But history did not consist of mere short-term repetitions: development occurred; a principle was wanted to account for continuous change and not merely for 'static' difference.

The thinkers of the eighteenth century had been too deeply infatuated by Newton's mechanical model, which [9] explained the realm of nature but not that of history .Something was needed to discover historical laws, but as the laws of biology had differed from the laws of chemistry, not merely in applying to a different subject-matter but in being in principle other kinds of laws, so history - for Hegel the evolution of the spirit, for Saint- Simon or Marx the development of social relations, for Spengler or Toynbee (the last voices of the nineteenth century) the development of cultures, less or more isolable ways of life-obeyed laws of its own; laws which took account of the specific behaviour of nations or classes or social groups and of individuals which belonged to them, without reducing these ( or believing that they should or could be reduced) to the behaviour of particles of matter in space, which was represented, justly or not, as the eighteenth-  century - mechanistic - ideal of all explanation.

To understand how to live and act, whether in private or in public life, was to grasp these laws and use them for one's purposes. The Hegelians believed that this was achieved by a species of rational intuition; Marxists, Comtists and Darwinians, by scientific investigation; Schelling and his romantic followers, by inspired 'vitalistic' and 'mythopoeic' insight, by the illumination of artistic genius; and so on. All these schools believed that human society grew in a discoverable direction, governed by laws; that the borderline which divided science from Utopia, effectiveness from ineffectiveness in every sphere of life, was discoverable by reason and observation and could be plotted less or more precisely; that, in short, there was a clock, its movement followed discoverable rules, and it could not be put back.

These beliefs were rudely shaken by the evidence of the twentieth century .The notions, the ideas and forms of life which were considered to be inalienable from, 'organically' necessary to, the particular stage of historical evolution reached by mankind were broken or twisted out of recognition by new and violent leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler. It is true that these acted as they did in the name of their own historical or pseudo-historical theories, the Communists in the name of dialectical materialism, Hitler in the name of racial hegemonism. But there was no doubt that they achieved what had hitherto been regarded as virtually impossible, contrary to the laws of advancing civilisation - a breach of the inexorable laws of human history .It became clear that men of sufficient energy and ruthlessness could collect a sufficient degree of material power to transform their worlds much more radically [10]than had been thought possible before - that if one genuinely rejected those moral, political, legal concepts which were regarded as firm, as much elements of their own historical phase as its material arrangements, and if, moreover, one did not shrink from killing millions of human beings, against accepted beliefs as to what was feasible, against what was thought right by the majority in one's own time, then greater changes could be introduced than the 'laws' allowed for. Human beings and their institutions turned out to be much more malleable, far less resistant, the laws turned out to be far more elastic, than the earlier doctrinaires had taught us to believe. There was talk of a relapse into - a deliberate return to -  barbarism, which according to the earlier revolutionary theories was not merely regrettable but wellnigh impossible.

It was a truth to the reception of which there was every kind of resistance. Thus when in Russia a regime openly and boldly exterminated many of the achievements of Western civilisation -  both in the arts and, to some degree, in the sciences, certainly in politics and morals - on the ground that these belonged to the ideology of a minority condemned by history to destruction, this holocaust had to be represented, not as the reversal which it was, but as the continuation of a revolutionary leap forward of this very civilisation in the direction in which it had been proceeding previously, although in fact (unlike the great French Revolution) what occurred represented an almost total change of direction. This could not be stated, because the doctrines in the name of which the revolution was carried out - and which, ironically enough, the revolution did so much to expose and discredit - were too strongly ingrained as official radical shibboleths to which lip-service was still paid. Hitler, with a better understanding of what he was doing, proclaimed that he was indeed returning to an ancient past, and seeking to undo the effects of the Enlightenment and of 1789; and, although his plan was regarded as a mad dream, a sadistic neo-medieval fantasy which could not be realised in the twentieth century, and largely discounted accordingly by liberals, conservatives and Marxists alike, who shall now say that he totally failed? He ruled for only a dozen years, and in the course of them transformed the outlook and structure of life of his subjects beyond the expectations of the wildest historical and political thinkers of Western (and Eastern) Europe; if he lost in the end, he lost by so narrow a margin that it does not need an eccentric imagination to conceive that he might have won, and that the [11] consequences of his victory would have finally reduced to nonsense the doctrines according to which his rise and his victories demonstrably impossible.

    In 1944 a plan was submitted at the Quebec Conference by  Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury, whereby German  industries were to be dismantled and the entire country turned back to pasture. It was a plan which could scarcely be taken seriously, although Roosevelt is said - I do not know how reliably -  to have briefly inclined towards it. Nevertheless, those who were horrified by it and resisted it conceded that it was practicable. Yet the very notion that some such plan could be put into operation would have struck most historians, philosophers, statesmen, most intelligent men in the late nineteenth century - say at any time before 1914 - as wildly Utopian. To this degree Lenin, Hitler and Stalin and their minor followers elsewhere, by their acts rather than their precepts, demonstrated the truth, horrifying to some, comforting to others, that human beings are a good deal more plastic than was hitherto thought, that given enough will-power, fanaticism, determination - and no doubt a favourable conjunction of circumstances - almost anything, at any rate far more than was hitherto thought possible, can be altered.

The banisters upon which the system-builders of the nineteenth century have taught us to lean have proved unequal to the pressure that was put upon them. The techniques of modern civilisation, so far from guaranteeing us against lapses into the past or violent lunges in unpredictable directions, have proved the most effective weapons in the hands of those who wish to change human beings by playing on irrational impulses and defying the framework of civilised life according to some arbitrary pattern of their own. It became a question of where revolutionaries were prepared to stop - a moral more than a psychological question - since the resistance of habit, tradition, 'inexorable' technological progress collapses easily before sufficient and determined assaults. Efforts were made to prove that these assaults themselves followed a pattern, that whether they came from the right or the left, they too - the advances of totalitarianism - were inevitable, as progress towards individual liberty had once been proclaimed to be. But such analyses lacked the old superb conviction of those nineteenth century prophets and seers who thought that they really had, at last, solved the riddle of history , and once and for all; it became all too clear that these were mere half-hearted, dispirited efforts to [12] peer into a crystal ball, so suddenly once again covered with the mist of uncertainty after the lucid mirage of two centuries in which the rays of science were alleged to have pierced through the night of historical ignorance. Now, once more, it was only a movement of shadows, indeterminate and unsubstantial, describable only in terms of approximations, inspired guesswork, short-term conclusions from local phenomena, liable to be upset by too many unknown and apparently unknowable factors.

The obverse side of this was, of course, an increased belief in the efficacy of individual initiative - the notion that every situation was more fluid than had been supposed in more tranquil times - which pleased those who found the scientific and determinist picture or the Hegelian teleology too cut and dried, too stifling, too unpromising of novelty; too narrow for the assertion of revolutionary energies, for the testing of violent new sensations; and terrified those who seek order, tranquillity, dependable values, moral and physical security , a world in which the margin of error is calculable, the limits of change are discoverable, and cataclysms are due to natural causes only - and these in principle predictable with the advance of scientific knowledge. The social world certainly seems more disturbing, fuller of undiscovered perils, than hitherto; but then it would follow that there is a career more open to talents, provided they are audacious, powerful and ruthless enough.

Under these circumstances, it may be asked, why cannot we reproduce, let us say, the conditions of the fourteenth century , if we should wish to do so? True, it is not easy to upset the arrangements of the twentieth century and replace them by something so widely different; not easy, but surely not literally impossible? If Hitler, if Stalin, could transform their societies, and affect the world to so vast a degree in so short a time; if Germany could have been 'pastoralised'; if all the warning voices about how easy it would be to end human civilisation by this or that destructive weapon, how precarious the whole establishment is, are telling the truth; then surely there is a field for creative no less than for destructive capacities ? If things are less fixed than they seemed, do not such terms as 'anachronism', the 'logic of the facts' and the rest begin to lose their force ? If we can, given the opportunity, operate more freely than we once believed that we could, what does divide Utopian from realistic planning? If we really believe that the life of the fourteenth century is preferable to that of the twentieth, then, if we are resolute enough and have enough material resources, [13]  and there are enough of us, and we do not hesitate to commit all that resists us to the flames, why cannot we 'return to the past'? The laws of nature do not prevent us, for they have not altered in the last six centuries. What then is it that stops us - stops, say, neo-medieval fanatics from working their will ? For there is no doubt that something does do so, that even the most extreme among them scarcely believe that they could literally reproduce some past golden age, Merrie England, the Old South, or the world of le vert galant, in the sense in which Communist or Fascist fanatics believe that they can cause the world to go through a transformation no less violent - to divert it, as it were, from its previous path by at least as sharp an angle.

Let us try to imagine what such a return to the past would entail. Supposing a man did get into his head to re-establish the conditions of his favourite time and place - to recreate them as closely as he could -what steps would he take ? To begin with he would have to acquaint himself as minutely as he could with the former life which he wished to re-establish. He must suppose himself to know something about the form of life in question to have fallen so deeply in love with it. Whether his knowledge is real or delusive is for the moment not relevant. Let us assume that he is more than a sentimental enthusiast, that he is a profound student of history and the social sciences; he will then know that, in order to attain to a certain form of life, more must be done than to wear certain types of clothes, eat certain types of food, reorganise our social lives in accordance with certain sorts of patterns, or possess certain religious beliefs. We will not succeed in doing this, but merely go through our parts like actors on a stage, unless the bases of such life, economic, social, linguistic, perhaps geographical and ecological as well, are appropriate, that is, of such a kind as to make his ideal society possible and, indeed, natural and normal. Undaunted he sets about - let us assume him to be, if not omnipotent, at any rate in control of very powerful material resources, and to have to deal with singularly impressionable and docile human beings - he sets about to transform all the required natural and artificial conditions accordingly. If he is fanatical enough and isolates his society sufficiently from contact with the outer world (or, alternatively, if his experiment is world-wide in extent), he may at any rate in theory succeed to some degree. Human lives are radically alterable, human beings can be re-educated and conditioned and turned topsy-turvy - that is the principal lesson of the violent [14] times in which we live. In addition to vast material resources and extraordinary skill in using these, he must also have an astonishing knowledge about the age which he is seeking to reproduce and the causes and factors which made it what it was. But let us assume that he has these too, and understands London in the fourteenth century , let us say, or Florence in the fifteenth, as no one has ever known it before. He will know it better certainly than its own inhabitants could have known it; for they took too much for granted, too much seemed so normal and habitual to them, so that they could not, however self-conscious the most analytical and critical of them may have been, notice the climate, the network of habits and thoughts and feelings in which they lived, in the way in which an outside observer, able to compare it with phenomena sufficiently unlike it to emphasise its peculiarities, can do. Nevertheless, it is clear that however skilful, minute, fanatically thorough such a reconstruction were, it would fail in its principal objective - the literal recreation of some past culture. And that not at all for the most obvious causes - because one's knowledge is liable to error, because one is looking at the golden age from some later vantage-point, different from that from which the Londoners in the fourteenth or Florentines in the fifteenth could possibly view themselves and others - for even if the creator of this world may himself be debarred from observing things from two points of view at once, yet he can skillfully and consciously, using the methods pilloried by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, at any rate manufacture human beings whose viewpoint is transformed in the requisite fashion - nor, again, because of the many obvious practical difficulties in the realisation of so eccentric a scheme: all these could, at least in theory, be disposed of. Nevertheless, however triumphantly these are overcome, the result will always seem curiously artificial - a skilful forgery, a piece of synthetic antiquarianism grafted on inescapably contemporary foundations.

It seems clear that in trying to acquire knowledge about the world, external or internal, physical or mental, we inevitably notice and describe only certain characteristics of it - those which are, as it were, public, which attract attention to themselves because of some specific interest which we have in investigating them, because of our practical needs or theoretical interests: aspects of the world in terms of which communication between men takes place; characteristics which may be misunderstood or misdescribed, knowledge of which is in some degree important, that is, makes a [15] difference to our activity, whether designed for use or pleasure; interested or disinterested objects of action or thought or feeling or contemplation. And we feel that we progress in knowledge as we discover unfamiliar facts and relationships, particularly when these turn out to be relevant to our principal purposes, to survival and all the means thereto, to our happiness or the satisfaction of the many diverse and conflicting needs for the sake of which human beings do what they do and are as they are.

What is left out of such investigations is what is too obvious to need mentioning. If we are anthropologists, and describe human habits or beliefs, we regard as worthy of notice and report those respects in which other tribes differ from us, or those in which they resemble us unexpectedly because their many differences might make us think otherwise. We do not record the obvious: for example the fact that the natives of Polynesia prefer being warm to being cold, or dislike hunger or physical pain; it is too tedious to record this. We take it for granted, quite naturally and justifiably, that if these natives are human beings, this will be true of them as it is of us, and of all the other human beings we have heard of - it is one of the components of normality. Neither do we report that the heads of these Polynesians are three- dimensional and that they have space behind and in front of them - this too almost follows from the definitions of these terms and must be taken for granted.

When one considers how many such facts - habits, beliefs - we take for granted in thinking or saying anything at all, how many notions, ethical, political, social, personal, go to the making of the outlook of a single person, however simple and unreflective, in any given environment, we begin to realise how very small a part of the total our sciences - not merely natural sciences, which work by generalising at a high level of abstraction, but the humane, 'impressionistic' studies, history, biography, sociology, introspective psychology , the methods of the novelists, of the writers of memoirs, of students of human affairs from every angle - are able to take in. And this is not a matter for surprise or regret: if we were aware of all that we could in principle be aware of we should swiftly be out of our minds. The most primitive act of observation or thought requires some fixed habits, a whole framework of things, persons, ideas, beliefs, attitudes to be taken for granted, uncriticised assumptions, unanalysed beliefs. Our language, or whatever symbolism we think with, is itself impregnated by these basic attitudes. We cannot, even in principle, enumerate all that we [16] know and believe, for the words or symbols with which we do so themselves embody and express certain attitudes which are ex hypothesi 'encapsulated' in them, and not easily describable by them. We can make use of one set of symbols in order to uncover the assumptions which underlie another, and even as much as this is a most painful, difficult and crucially important task which only a very few, very subtle, very profound, very serious, penetrating and bold and clear-headed thinkers of genius have succeeded in performing to any degree at all; but we cannot examine the whole of our symbolism and yet employ for this purpose no symbols at all. There is no Archimedean point outside ourselves where we can stand in order to take up our critical viewpoint, in order to observe and analyse all that we think or believe by simply inspecting it, all that we can be said to take for granted because we behave as though we accepted it - the supposition is a self-evident absurdity.

The quality of depth in thinkers who are professional philosophers or novelists, or men of genius of other kinds, precisely consists in penetrating to one of these great assumptions, embedded in some widespread attitude, and isolating that and questioning it - wondering how it might be if it were otherwise. It is when one of these nerves is touched, nerves which lie so deep within us that it is in terms of them that we feel as we feel and think as we think, that we are conscious of those electric shocks which indicate that some genuinely profound insight has occurred. It is only when this unique, immediately recognisable, disturbing experience comes that we are aware that we are in the presence of this peculiar and very rare form of genius, possessed by those who make us conscious of the most pervasive, least observed categories, those which lie closest to us and which for that very reason escape description, however much our emotions, our curiosity, our industry, are mobilised to record the whole of what we know.

Everyone will know the quality I refer to. Newton dealt with problems which had long occupied the attention of philosophers and scientists, and proposed solutions to problems of a notorious difficulty , solutions characterised by a simplicity and a comprehensiveness which are marks of his particular kind of genius. But his results, if they were disturbing, were so only to specialists, other physicists or cosmologists. He altered many men's outlooks, no doubt, but nothing that he said directly touched their innermost private and quintessential thoughts and feelings. But Pascal questioned those categories, touched those half conscious, or altogether [17] unconscious, habits of thought, beliefs, attitudes in terms of which the inner life, the basic components of their own private worlds, presented themselves to the men of his time. He made great discoveries in mathematics, but it is not for this that his thought is credited with unique qualities of depth: in his Pensees there are no formal discoveries, no solutions, not even clear statements of problems with indications of how they are to be investigated. And yet Locke, who did all these things, and was a thinker of unparalleled influence, has never been regarded as an exceptionally profound thinker; this despite his originality, his universality, his massive contribution to philosophy and politics as compared with the isolated fragments left by Pascal. It is so too with Kant. He laid bare categories of a very pervasive, very basic kind - space, time, number, thinghood, freedom, moral personality - and therefore, for all that he was a systematic and often pedantic philosopher, a difficult writer, an obscure logician, a routine professorial meta- physician and moralist, he was in his lifetime recognised to be what he was, not merely a man of genius in many fields but one of the few authentically profound and therefore revolutionary thinkers in human history: one who discussed not merely what others were discussing, saw not merely what others were describing, and answered not merely what was generally being asked, but pierced through a layer of suppositions and assumptions which language itself embodies to habits of thought, basic frameworks in terms of which we think and act, and touched these. Nothing can compare with the experience of being made aware of the characteristics of the most intimate instruments with which one thinks and feels - not of the problems to which one seeks solutions, nor of the solutions, but of the innermost terms, the most deeply ingrained categories with which, and not about which, one thinks; of kinds of ways in which one's experiences occur; not of the nature of the experiences themselves, however remarkable, however instructive an analysis of these last may be.

It seems clear that what is easiest for us to observe and describe is the furniture of the external world -trees, rocks, houses, tables, other human beings. Some people with a meditative cast of mind are able to describe their own feelings and thoughts with sensitiveness and precision; some with keener and more analytical minds can do much to distinguish and describe the main categories in which we think - the differences between mathematical and historical thought, or between the concept of a thing and of a [18] person, or between subject or object, or between acts and feelings, and so on. The concepts and categories involved in formal disciplines which have relatively clear rules - physics or mathematics or grammar or the language of international diplomacy - are comparatively easy to investigate. For those involved in less articulate activities - in the activities of the musician, in writing novels or poetry , in painting, composing, in the everyday intercourse of human beings and the 'common-sense' picture of the world - it is, for obvious reasons, far more difficult. We can construct sciences on the assumption of certain relative invariances; the behaviour of stones, or grass, or plants or butterflies, we assume to have been not so different in dim ages as to stultify the assumptions made today by chemistry or geology or physics or botany or zoology. And unless we believed human beings were sufficiently similar in certain basic and abstractable aspects throughout sufficiently long stretches of time, we should have no grounds for trusting those generalisations which, consciously or not, enter into not merely such proclaimed sciences as sociology, psychology and anthropology , but into history and biography and the art of the novelist, and political theory and every form of social observation.

Some of these generalisations lie too close to us and are too self-evident to be brought up into the light by any save those bold and original and independent men of genius. Pascal and Dostoevsky, Proust, St Augustine have succeeded, in such acts of deep-sea diving, in observing and reporting such basic structural attitudes and categories. Some of these apply to mankind over sufficiently long stretches of time to be regarded as virtually universal; some vary from age to age and culture to culture, and vary , doubtless, to some degree, between persons and groups of persons and at different times and in different circumstances. Provided the small differences are ignored, and what is treated is always some very large number, we can formulate laws which apply literally only to idealised entities, whose relationship to actual objects or persons is always a matter of doubt or intuitive skill on the part of the specialist dealing with the problem, like the application of the general laws of anatomy to an individual disease, only more so. The concept, for example, of a basic 'human' nature, which cannot be radically altered, and is that which makes most human beings human, is a vague effort to convey a notion of a complex of unvarying and unanalysed characteristics which we know by [19] acquaintance, as it were, from the inside, but which is insusceptible to precise scientific formulation or manipulation. Such general terms - human nature, peace, war, stability, freedom, power, rise, decline - are convenient symbols which sum up, are a concentrate of, my observations; but however much the sciences bring under their sway, however detailed, scrupulous, verified, coherent are the accounts of our best historians, an immense amount is necessarily left out at both ends of the scale - both the deepest, the most pervasive categories which enter too much into all our experience to be easily detachable from it for observation, and at the other end those endlessly shifting, altering views, feelings, reactions, instincts, beliefs which constitute the uniqueness of each individual and of each of his acts and thoughts, and the uniqueness too, the individual flavour, the peculiar pattern of life, of a character, of an institution, a mood, and also of an artistic style, an entire culture, an age, a nation, a civilisation.

It is a truism to say that it is the differences and not the similarities that constitute the completeness of an act of recognition, of a historical description, of a personality - whether of an object or an individual or a culture. Vico and Herder, despite all their extravagances and obscurities, taught us once and for all that to be a Homeric Greek or an eighteenth-century German is to belong to a unique society , and that what it is to 'belong' cannot be analysed in terms of something which these persons have in common with other societies or entities in the universe, but only in terms of what each of them has in common with other Homeric Greeks or Germans - that there is a Greek or German way of talking, eating, concluding treaties, engaging in commerce, dancing, gesturing, tying shoelaces, building ships, explaining the past, worshipping God, permeated by some common quality which cannot be analysed in terms of instances of general laws or effects of discoverable causes, recurrent uniformities, repetitions which allow common elements to be abstracted and sometimes experimented upon. The unique pattern in terms of which all acts which are German are interlaced, or which enables us to attribute a painting or even a line of poetry or a witticism to one age rather than another and to one author rather than another - of that no science exists. We recognise these manifestations as we recognise the expressions on the faces of our friends. The interconnection of different activities which are seen to spring from, or constitute, a unique single character or style or historical situation is much more [20] like the unity of an aesthetic whole, a symphony or a portrait; what we condemn as false or inappropriate is much more like what is rejected as false or inappropriate in a painting or a poem than in a deductive system or  a scientific theory, or in the interlinked hypotheses of a natural science. How we perform such acts of identification and attribution it is almost impossible to say. Too many factors enter into the process; they are too evanescent, their links are often too subtle and invisible; the notion that they could be made the subject of a technique and taught to others systematically is plainly absurd, and yet they are among the most familiar experiences we have. They enter into the vast majority of our common-sense judgments and opinions and predictions of the behaviour of others, they are what we live by, our most ingrained methods, our habits 'of thought and feeling, they change and we hardly notice it, they change in others and we may not consciously notice that, but may react to it in a half conscious fashion. The investigation of such presuppositions - of what makes the unique outlook of an age or of a person - plainly needs far more sympathy, interest and imagination, as well as experience of life, than the more abstract and disciplined activities of natural scientists.

Every person and every age may thus be said to have at least two levels: an upper, public, illuminated, easily noticed, clearly describable surface from which similarities are capable of being profitably abstracted and condensed into laws; and below this a path into less and less obvious yet more and more intimate and pervasive characteristics, too closely mixed with feelings and activities to be easily distinguishable from them. With great patience, industry, assiduity we can delve beneath the surface -novelists do this better than trained 'social scientists' - but the consistency is that of some viscous substance: w~ encounter no stone wall, no insuperable obstacle, but each step is more difficult, each effort to advance robs us of the desire or ability to continue. Tolstoy , Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche have penetrated more deeply than John Buchan or H. G. Wells, or Bertrand Russell; but what we know on this level of half-articulate habits, unexamined assumptions and ways of thought, semi-instinctive reactions, models of life so deeply embedded as not to be felt consciously at all - what we know of this is so little, and likely, because we do not have the time, the subtlety and the penetration, to remain so negligible, that to claim to be able to construct generalisations where at best we can [21] only indulge the art of exquisite portrait-painting, to claim the possibility of some infallible scientific key where each unique entity demands a lifetime of minute, devoted observation, sympathy, insight, is one of the most grotesque claims ever made by human beings.

II

The ideal of all natural sciences is a system of propositions so general, so clear, so comprehensive, connected with each other by logical links so unambiguous and direct that the result resembles as closely as possible a deductive system, where one can travel along wholly reliable, logical routes from any point on the system to any other - wholly reliable because constructed a priori according to rules guaranteed as in a game, because they have been adopted, because it has been decided to keep and not break them. The usefulness of such a system - as opposed to its power or beauty - depends, of course, not on its logical scope and coherence, but on its applicability to matters of fact. This in its turn depends not merely on the skill with which we construct the system, but on the actual behaviour of things and persons in the world, to which the system is applied, or from which the system is generalised or idealised. For this reason it has always been the case that the more general and logically satisfactory a system was, the less useful it was in describing the specific course of the behaviour of a particular entity in the universe - the larger the number of entities, the more accurate the descriptive and predictive power of the system; the smaller the number of instances, the greater the margin of error, of deviation from the norm.

Historians, whose business it is to tell us what actually happened in the world, consequently fight shy of rigid theoretical patterns into which the facts may sometimes have to be fitted with a good deal of awkwardness and artificiality. And this instinct is a sound one. The proper aim of the sciences is to note the number of similarities in the behaviour of objects and to construct propositions of the greatest degree of generality from which the largest number of such uniformities can be logically deduced. In history our purpose is the opposite. When we wish to describe a particular revolution - what actually took place - the last thing we wish to do is to concentrate solely upon those characteristics of it which it has in common with as many other revolutions as we can discover, [22] ignoring the differences as irrelevant to our study; and so what a historian wishes to bring out is what is specific, unique, in a given character or series of events or historical situation, so that the reader, presented with this account, should be able to grasp the situation in what is called its 'concreteness', that is, as it occurred at the particular time, in the particular place, as the result of the particular antecedents, in the framework of the particular events in which it and it alone occurred - the respects in which it differs from everything which has occurred before or is likely to occur after it. The historian is concerned to paint a portrait which conveys the unique pattern of experience, and not an X - ray photograph which is capable of acting as a general symbol for all structures of a similar type.

This truth was understood - and exaggerated - by those thinkers of the romantic movement who complained that previous historians had been too abstract or too pedestrian and mechanical with their lists of reigns and battles and irrelevant, disconnected chroniclers' tales, had failed to clothe these dry bones in the flesh of living reality, to paint either human character or society in such a way as to give the reader a sense of actuality , a sense of the kind of society or kind of character which he could imagine that he could have met or been himself in living relations with; and that historical novelists or painters or other men whose imagination was adequate to their knowledge did this more successfully.

This historical gift consists not merely in establishing facts by means of those recognised techniques, those ways of handling evidence, which specialists - palaeographers, epigraphists, archaeologists, anthropologists and so forth - have developed, which may well entail logical processes not altogether unlike those of the natural sciences, with their tendency to generality and abstraction, and the use of idealised models, but something at the opposite end of the scale, namely an eye for what is unique and unrepeated, for the particular concatenation of circumstances, unique combinations of attributes, which give a person, a situation, a culture, an age its peculiar character, in virtue of which it is possible to attribute this or that political decision, this or that painting or moral view or form of handwriting, to a given civilisation or phase of a civilisation, or even to individuals in it, with a high degree of plausibility.

How is it done? It is not at all easy to say. It requires scrupulous observation, accurate knowledge of facts, but is more than this: it is [23] a form of understanding and not of knowledge of facts in the ordinary sense. When we say that we know someone's character well, that a given action could not have been performed by the man in question; or, alternatively, that we regard something as altogether characteristic of him, precisely the kind of thing which he and only he might do - a perception whic~ at once depends on our knowledge of his style of life, his cast of mind or heart, and increases our understanding of them - what kind of knowledge is it that we are claiming? If we were pressed to set forth the general psychological laws from which we deduce or could have deduced this, and, moreover, the things upon which such generalisations are built, we should break down at once. Whether, theoretically, we could have arrived at our intimate understanding of our friend's (or our enemy's ) unique personality by such scientific means I do not know - it seems evident that no one ever has, so far, arrived at this kind of knowledge by any such method. The sense in which the most learned and accurate psychologist, working purely on the basis of accumulated scientific data, and of hypotheses bolstered up by these, can describe and predict the behaviour of the human being in a concrete situation, from hour to hour and day to day, is very different from that in which someone who knows a man well, as friends and associates and relations do, can do so; it is far more general, far less accurate if applied to a particular situation. A medical chart or diagram is not the equivalent of a portrait such as a gifted novelist or human being endowed with adequate insight -  understanding - could form; not equivalent not at all because it needs less skill or is less valuable for its own purposes, but because if it confines itself to publicly recordable facts and generalisations attested by them, it must necessarily leave out of account that vast number of small, constantly altering, evanescent colours, scents, sounds, and the psychical equivalents of these, the half noticed, half inferred, half gazed- at, half unconsciously absorbed minutiae of behaviour and thought and feeling which are at once too numerous, too complex, too fine and too indiscriminable from each other to be identified, named, ordered, recorded, set forth in neutral scientific language. And more than this, there are among them pattern qualities - what else are we to call them? - habits of thought and emotion, ways of looking at, reacting to, talking about experiences which lie too close to us to be discriminated and classified – of which we are not strictly aware as such, but which, nevertheless, we absorb into our picture of what goes on, and the [24] more sensitively and sharply aware of them we are the more understanding and insight we are rightly said to possess.

   This is what understanding human beings largely consists in. To try to analyse and clearly describe what goes on when we understand in this sense is impossible, not because the process in some way 'transcends' or is 'beyond' normal experience, is some special act of magical divination not describable in the language of ordinary experience; but for the opposite reason, that it enters too intimately into our most normal experience, and is a kind of automatic integration of a very large number of data too fugitive and various to be mounted on the pin of some scientific process, one by one, in a sense too obvious, too much taken for granted, to be enumerable. Our language is not meant to catch them; it is intended to communicate relatively stable characteristics, principally of the external world, in terms of which we deal with one another, which form the frontier of our common world, in the manipulation of which our lives largely consist. It is not intended to describe, either, those characteristics which are too permanent, too much with us, to be noticed, since they are always there - and therefore raise no specific problems, since they accompany all our perceptions (these are the categories which, with a singular effort of self- consciousness, philosophers reveal) - or, at the other end of the scale, those characteristics which are not constant enough, which are too ephemeral, which give its unique flavour to that which passes, which constitute the unique essence of a particular situation, a particular moment of history , which give it its irreplaceable character, the ebb and flow of differences which make each moment, each person, each significant act - and the pattern of each culture or human enterprise - be what it is in itself, uniquely different from everything else whatever. These fleeting properties in their turn presuppose those same constant characteristics, neither too omnipresent to be noticed nor too evanescent to be catalogued, with which the official disciplines deal - the sciences and the parasciences of mankind. And yet what makes men foolish or wise, understanding or blind, as opposed to knowledgeable or learned or well informed, is the perception of these unique flavours of each situation as it is, in its specific differences - of that in it wherein it differs from all other situations, that is, those aspects of it which make it insusceptible to scientific treatment, because it is that element in it which no generalisation, because it is a generalisation, can cover.

[25]

      As I have said above, it is possible to say something about these unique differences - indeed historians and biographers attempt to do so. It is the ability to do this which makes some people profounder students of human beings than others, better advisers to them about their problems than others who are more learned, in possession of more facts and hypotheses. But in the end not everything can be set down, spoken or written: there is too much; it passes too swiftly; it infects the modes of expression themselves and we have no outside vantage- point from which dispassionately to observe and identify it all. What I am attempting to describe is, in short, that sensitive self-adjustment to what cannot be measured or weighed or fully described at all - that capacity called imaginative insight, at its highest point genius - which historians and novelists and dramatists and ordinary persons endowed with understanding of life (at its normal level called common sense) alike display. This is an essential factor in making us admire and trust some historians more than others. It is when a historian so describes the past that we are conscious of having brought before us not merely attested facts, but a revelation of a form of life, of a society presented in sufficiently rich and coherent detail, sufficiently similar to what we ourselves understand by human life or society or men's intercourse, that we can continue - extrapolate -  for ourselves, go on by ourselves, understand why this man did this and that nation that, without having to have it explained in detail, because those of our faculties have been brought into play which operate similarly in our understanding of our own society , as opposed to some inductive or deductive conclusions - it is then that we recognise what we have been given as being history , and not the dry rattle of mechanical formulae or of a loose heap of historical bones.

This is what is called bringing a past age to life. The path is beset by treacherous traps: each age, each group of men, each individual has its own perspective, and these do not remain static, but alter, and this must be understood from such evidence as we have, and no final proof that we have understood, in the sense in which the sciences provide it, is here available. The tests of truth and falsehood, of honest methods and deception, of mere imaginative reconstruction and painfully gained, reliable insight, are what they are in ordinary life, where we do distinguish between wisdom and folly, men of genius and charlatans, without the employment of scientific criteria. Moreover, every past perspective itself differs in [26] the perspective of all successive observers. There is the perspective - the unique pattern of attitudes - which is the Renaissance view of things or way of life (that which is common to its own inner variety of outlooks and characters, and so on); and there is, let us say, the eighteenth-century view, the spectacle of the Renaissance as it was viewed by, say, the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century; and this will differ from its appearance to Victorian thinkers, or twentieth-century Communists or neo- Thomists. These perspectives and perspectives of perspectives are there, and it is just as idle to ask which are true and which false as it is to ask which view of the Alps is the true view and which false. But there is a sense in which 'facts', what can be demonstrated by the evidence, as opposed to interpretations, theories, hypotheses, perspectives, must remain the same for all these changing outlooks, otherwise we should have no historical truth at all. And blurred though the frontier may be between fact on the one hand and attitudes and interpretations on the other, yet it exists. Gibbon would not have rejected facts discovered by Ranke or Creighton or Pirenne because they were not what he considered to be facts (nor would Thucydides); he would have rejected them, if he had, only because he might have thought that they were false or trivial or not what he was looking for. Within Western culture there is sufficient agreement about what counts as fact and what is theory or interpretation (despite continual efforts to deny this by relativists and subjectivists of all kinds) to make doubts about the frontiers between them a pseudo-problem. Nevertheless a mere recital of facts is not history , not even if scientifically testable hypotheses are added to them; only the setting of them in the concrete, at times opaque, but continuous, rich, full texture of 'real life' - the intersubjective, directly recognisable continuum of experience - will do.

Yet so difficult are such insights to obtain, so subjective, too, does a succession of perspectives seem, that there is a natural temptation for historians who take their duty seriously to avoid them, or at least reduce them to a minimum. Hence the plea of those austere researchers who declare that to establish that the good King Dagobert or Emperor Leo the Isaurian died on this or that day of this or that year, however trivial and dreary this may seem, is to establish a firm fact, something which no future researchers will need to discover again, a solid brick in the temple of knowledge; whereas an attempt to analyse the 'medieval mind', [27] to give so vivid an account of some portion of Frankish or Byzantine society as to make it possible for the reader to 'enter into it' imaginatively, is, in the end, only conjecture and journalism, a coherent fantasy, conceived, it may be, in impossible modern terms, likely to give way at some not too distant date to some other 'interpretation', no less arbitrary, reflecting all the interests and temperaments of the new interpreters; not history, not science, a piece of capricious self-expression, agreeable, even fascinating, but nicht Wissenschaft, bloß Kunst.

Our intellectual history is a succession of periods of inflation and deflation; when the imagination grows too luxuriant at the expense of careful observation and detail there is a salutary reaction towards austerity and the unadorned facts; when the accounts of these grow so colourless, bleak and pedantic that the public begins to wonder why so dreary an activity , so little connected with any possible human interest, is worth pursuing at all, a Macaulay, a Mommsen, a Michelet, a Pirenne restates the facts in some magnificent synthesis which restores the faith of the weary reader in history as an account of actual human beings, and not merely of some corner of their lives so isolated, so artificially abstracted from the rest as no longer to provide the answer to any possible question which anyone may reasonably be expected to wish to ask about the past. There is an oscillation between attempts to say as little as possible (to play safe- to take the least possible risks with the truth) and attempts to say as much as possible (not to say less than we can - to leave as little as possible out), a perpetual oscillation between horror of saying more than we know for certain, which leads one to say as little as possible, as nearly nothing at all (at any rate of interest) as we humanly can, and per contra the attempt to describe the past in real terms, to give it the look of life, something recognisably human, even at the inevitable risk of saying more than we can know by accredited 'scientific' methods, bringing into play those ways of assessing and analysing facts which are intrinsic to our normal daily experience as human beings in relation to each other - the whole intellectual, imaginative, moral, aesthetic, religious life of men - but which may not pass the scrutiny of a purely fact-establishing enquiry .And historians at a given time incline in favour of one or another of these poles as they react against some excessive earlier tendency towards too much exuberance or fantasy, or too puritanical a hatred of the imagination. [28]

III

History is the account of the relations of humans to each other and to their environment; consequently what is true of history is likely to be true of political thought and action as well. The natural admiration for the triumphs of the sciences since Galileo and Newton has stimulated those forms of political theory which, on the assumption that human beings obeyed discoverable natural laws, and that their ills were due to ignorance or vice and could be cured, like those of their bodies, by the application of the right kind of social hygiene, formulated schemes whereby men could be made happy through, and virtuous by, some particular reorganisation of their lives. And indeed, if what men knew about themselves could be set forth in the same systematic form in which they formulate their knowledge of natural objects, they could perhaps count upon a similar degree of success in altering their lives. The triumphs of technology were rightly attributed to adequate knowledge of the laws of nature, which enabled men to predict the results of their own actions and experiments. They knew that they could not do everything, but they also could foretell, within a reasonable margin of error, how much, within the limits of what can be done, they would achieve. And yet, whenever this same method was applied to human affairs, notably in 1789 and 1792 and 1793, in 1848 and in 1917, the results seldom corresponded to the hopes of those human engineers who conducted the crucial social experiments. The great French Revolution failed to establish what its creators - impregnated with the human sciences of their time - had hoped and expected to create; liberty , equality, fraternity were not realised separately, much less together. What had gone wrong? Had there not been sufficient knowledge of facts ? Had the Encyclopaedists offered mistaken hypotheses ? Had there been a miscalculation in the mathematics involved ?

Those who believed that the lives of human beings could be controlled and planned by scientists thought that they had found the error in insufficient attention to economic facts. This is what Babeuf had thought; this is what had inspired the abortive risings of June 1848 in Paris; but this last was a greater failure than its predecessor. What was responsible for failure on this occasion ? Marxists were ready with an answer: the dominant principle of human development was the clash of economically determined classes; this had been forgotten or ignored by shallow-minded, [29] unworldly politicians. Armed with this final insight the experimenters could not fail; and it was with supreme confidence that all the relevant knowledge was at their command - they knew what they were doing, they could calculate the result - that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was launched and, in due course, failed to bring about what had been expected by its makers, failed on a more spectacular scale than any revolution hitherto.

Not that these revolutions were ineffective: 1789 and 1917 had each destroyed an old world, 'liquidated' entire classes, transformed the world very violently and permanently; but the positive element of the programme - the transformed human beings, the new moral world - conspicuously failed to materialise. Each revolution had been cursed and blessed, but the results seemed equally remote from the darkest forebodings of its victims and the brightest hopes of its leaders. Something had been miscalculated, something had proved recalcitrant to the social arithmetic employed. The makers of the revolution found themselves, in each case, swept on by the forces which they had released in a direction which they had scarcely anticipated. Some were destroyed by these forces, some attempted to control them but were plainly controlled by them, for all their efforts to dominate the elements. Observers of these great events were ready with ad hoc hypotheses to account for or explain away each failure, each frustration. Others fell into a kind of fatalism and gave up all effort to understand the unintelligible. Others again took refuge in generalisations so vast, patterns stretching over so many centuries and millennia, that minor bubbles upon the surface, wars and revolutions, were 'compensated for' in terms of the cosmic curve taken as a whole. The effort of imagination which went into this was grandiose, but its value in explaining specific events - the great revolutions of our time - was correspondingly small.

Plans for human improvement, from the most revolutionary and radical to the mildest reforms, assume some degree of understanding of the way in which social life occurs, together with some hypothesis as to what actions will be followed by what consequences. To the degree to which such views of society and hypotheses about the most efficient methods for transforming it take the form of explicitly held theories, they take into account, solely or principally, those facts of social life which are most noticeable, that is to say, neither - for the reasons we have given above - the most obvious nor the least obvious, but only those which obtrude [30] themselves on our attention (for instance, those which have changed the most in the recent past, or which are the most prominent obstacles or aids to something which I or my class or my Church or my profession wish to promote). Moreover, the facts in question are those which lend themselves most easily to generalisations - and therefore fit most neatly into theories of society, history , political development and change. All theories involve a high degree of abstraction, and those, therefore, who base their actions upon such theories tend to take notice mostly of aspects of the situation that conform to such treatment. This is what we have called the upper level - outer, publicly inspectable social facts. Below them, at various levels of greater and greater complexity , is a complicated network of relationships involving every form of human intercourse, more and more insusceptible to tidy classification, more and more opaque to the theorist's vision as he attempts to unravel their texture, which becomes more and more complex, composed of smaller, more numerous and more elusive particles, as he attempts to analyse any given social unit, more or less arbitrarily defined, in its full individuality - as it actually occurs, uniquely different from every other unit. Nevertheless, it is evident that the distinction between the 'upper' and the 'lower' levels is artificial: each theorist abstracts as he does for his limited purposes, but the number of ways in which this can be done is literally infinite, the strands which connect the elements of social experience, the facets, interrelationships, interactions, are very numerous - certainly incapable of being exhaustively dredged up in any number, however great, of theoretical nets.

The political theory in terms of which, say, a revolution is made concentrates upon certain aspects of the upper, public level; with luck, energy, skill, resolution on the part of the revolutionaries, this level i:; radically altered; certain institutions are duly destroyed, others put in their place; human lives are altered, new ideas and policies imposed and acted upon. But this upheaval inevitably stirs up, if we may continue to use the metaphor, the lower levels of life. The texture of a society viewed vertically is continuous. Changes above cause tremors of violent force to run through the entire system. If the revolution at the top is very violent it penetrates to the lowest depths, the obscurest corners of the life of the society . The theorists of the revolution may suppose themselves able to predict the effects of their new model upon the portions of the social structure which they observe more or less clearly - that have [31] a place in their theories - but they cannot discount the results of their acts upon the darker levels, and the way in which these will, in turn, affect the level with which they are familiar. Inevitably their acts affect more than they can possibly know. The less observable processes, which are insufficiently clear to be taken account of, naturally result in by-products which are largely incalculable; with the result that it is the regular history of all great revolutions - violent reversals initiated to create a new heaven and a new earth in obedience to a formula - that although they do indeed at times upset existing forms, and for good, they lead, more often than not, to totally new and unforetold situations equally remote from the expectations of the revolutionaries and of their opponents. The more abstract the formula, the less adapted to the tortuous, tangled lines of actual human relationships, the further the total effect from the cut and dried convictions of the theorists.

The prejudices of most men who regard themselves as practical against the solutions of social programmes urged by the theorists - the popular distrust of intellectuals and doctrinaires - rest upon a feeling that the schemata over-simplify the complex texture of human life, that instead of following their contours they try to alter them, to compel them to conform to the symmetry and simplicity of the schemata themselves, and that this does not pay sufficient heed to the shapeless living reality of human lives; and the less the application of such formulae yields the expected results, the more exasperated the theorists become, the more they try to force the facts into some preconceived mould - the more resistance they encounter, the more violent are the efforts to overcome it, the greater the reaction, confusion, suffering untold, the more the original ends are lost sight of, until the consequences of the experiments are beyond what anybody had wished or planned or expected, too often a bitter and purposeless struggle of planners and their victims in a situation which is too much for them, grown beyond the control of both.

Why should such terms as 'doctrinaire', 'fanatical ideologue', 'abstract theorist' be obvious terms of opprobrium if the doctrine, the ideas, the abstractions can be correct and true - if there is a science of society and we can foretell the results of radical acts with a fair degree of accuracy ? Why should it not be proper to apply them to society ? We do not blame physicists for believing in the doctrines of their science; we do not condemn astronomers for [32] unswerving devotion to mathematical methods; it is when economists or sociologists or political theorists obtain sufficient power to alter our lives that men become suspicious or indignant or violently upset. This may partly be due to natural conservatism, hatred of change, unconscious adherence to 'common-sense' theories of their own, no wit less stupid, unthinking faith in and loyalty to the old establishment, however cruel, unjust, grotesque. But the whole of this resistance to doctrine is not attributable to stupidity and mediocrity and vested interests and prejudices and narrow egoism and ignorance and superstition; in part it is due to beliefs about what kind of behaviour does and what kind of behaviour does not tend to produce successful results - to the memories of failed revolutions, to the oceans of blood which have not led to the Kingdom of Love but to further blood, more misery .And at the back of this is a just feeling that statecraft - the art of governing and altering societies -is unlike either the erudition of scholars or scientific knowledge; that statesmen of genius, unlike the masters of these disciplines, cannot communicate their knowledge directly, cannot teach a specific set of rules, cannot set forth any propositions they have established in a form in which they can be learned easily by others (so that no one need establish them again), or teach a method which, after them, any competent specialist can practise without needing the genius of the original inventor or discoverer. What is called wisdom in statesmen, political skill, is understanding rather than knowledge - some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what: what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know. What makes us distinguish Augustus Caesar or Henry IV of France or Richelieu or Washington or Cavour from such men as John of Leiden or the Emperor Joseph II of Austria or Robespierre or Hitler or Stalin, in some sense certainly no less remarkable? What is the 'secret' of the successes of the former? How did they know what to do, when to do it? Why does their work abide, while the work of men no less resolute, knowledgeable, fearless has crumbled, and, as often as not, left only untold human misery as its memorial ?

    Once we ask what the secret is, it becomes plain that there is and can be none, that we are wondering what key these men had to the mysteries of their own situations when, in fact, there is no key. [33]  Botany is a science but gardening is not; action and the results of action in situations where only the surface is visible will be successful, partly, no doubt, as the result of luck, but partly owing to 'insight' on the part of the actors, that is, the kind of understanding of the relations of the 'upper' to the 'lower' levels, the kind of semi-instinctive integration of the unaccountable infinitesimals of which individual and social life is composed ( of which Tolstoy spoke so well in the Epilogue to War and Peace), in which all kinds of skills are involved - powers of observation, knowledge of facts, above all experience - in connection with which we speak of a sense of timing, sensitiveness to the needs and capacities of human beings, political and historical genius, in short the kind of human wisdom, ability to conduct one's life or fit means to ends, with which, as Faust found, mere knowledge of facts - learning, science - was not at all identical. Trial and error occur here, as in the sciences, as in the growth of scholarship. What Karl Popper calls the hypothetico-deductive method plays a central part here, and so do deduction and induction in their orthodox senses. But there is an element of improvisation, of playing by ear, of being able to size up the situation, of knowing when to leap and when to remain still, for which no formulae, no nostrums, no general recipes, no skill in identifying specific situations as instances of general laws can be a substitute. (1) 1 This kind of knowledge, or practical genius, which statesmen and historians equally need if they are to succeed in understanding the societies of their own or other times, of the past and perhaps of the future, is not the same as that referred to in the celebrated distinction drawn by Gilbert Ryle betWeen knowing that and knowing how. To know how to do something-  to possess or acquire a skill or a knack-  does not imply an ability to describe why one is acting as one is; a man who knows how to ride a bicycle need not be able to explain what he is doing or why his behaviour leads to the results he desires. But a statesman faced with a critical situation and forced to choose between alternative courses, or a historian who rejects some explanation of past events as fanciful or superficial because events cannot have happened in the manner indicated, or because the explanation does not disclose the relationships of the truly crucial factors, does in some sense judge the situation, assess it so that he can answer objectors, can give reasons for rejecting alternative solutions, and yet cannot demonstrate the truth of what he is saying by reference to theories or systems of knowledge, except to some inconsiderable degree - certainly not in a sense in which scientists or scholars must be ready to do it. And yet in scholarship, for instance, there are strong analogies to the kind of understanding of which I speak. The scholar's process of, say, amending a corrupt text seems to me not altogether unlike the analysis or diagnosis of a social situation. Here, too, no doubt, one cannot do without method, scientific system: marks in manuscripts are compared to other marks, structures of sentences to other structures; induction can take the place of memory, hypothetico-deductive tests the place of guesswork. Yet when Porson amended the text of Aristophanes with such spectacular success, his sense of Aristophanes' style - an awareness of what Aristophanes could and what he could not have said - could not have been performed by an 'artificial brain', no matter how many general propositions about ancient Greek comedy had been fed into it, how many manuscripts and papyri and critical editions had been added thereto, Had he not possessed his prodigious learning Porson might not have conceived his solutions; but his capacity for finding them depended on an ability to co-ordinate an untold number of dimly articulated data - and then to take the crucial step, or undergo the crucial experience - to discriminate and articulate to himself a pattern which provided all or many of the desiderata. That is what is meant by calling his guesswork inspired. In principle a great many of the characteristics of Aristophanes' style which entered into his imaginative activity in a semi- conscious fashion could be laid bare, enumerated and labelled, and their connections systematically worked out. In practice this is obviously impossible, because the facts are too minute, there are too many of them, too few persons are adept at such pearl-diving operations, and so forth. Much the same is the case with regard to solutions of problems of history and human action. There is, in one sense, no empirical reason why such processes should not be fully describable and reducible to sciences; why the work of genius, inspiration, imagination - both that of generalisation on the one hand, and that of scrupulous minute fitting of fragments into a pattern on the other - should not be done by machines. But our experience would have to be altogether different - its multi- faceted, 'many-level' structure would have to be radically altered for this to be possible. And when possibilities as radical as this are contemplated - which the imagination can scarcely compass - it is perhaps improper to call them empirical. They belong to the ultimate, most general characteristics of normal human experience, which we cannot assume, on the basis of human experience to date, to be alterable; these characteristics are sometimes known as categories rather than empirical facts.[34] The rationalists of the eighteenth century have often been accused, and with reason, of ignoring this truth, and of supposing that the phenomena of social and individual life could be deduced from initial conditions plus scientific laws, like heavenly bodies in the Newtonian system. The truth they ignored was the existence of too great a gap between the generalisation and the concrete situation - the simplicity of the former, the excessive complexity of the latter. But some among their critics are in no better case. No doubt Helvetius and Robespierre and Comte and Lenin erred in supposing that applied science would solve all human ills. But Burke and Maistre and Tolstoy and T. S. Eliot, who perceive the fallacies of this position, tend themselves to suggest that although the key of science is no key, yet a true method of unlocking the mystery exists - in reliance upon tradition, or revelation and faith, [35] or an 'organic' view of life, or utter simplicity and simple Christian faith, or divining the hidden stream of Christian civilisation. But if we are right all such solutions are false in principle. There is no substitute for a sense of reality. (l) Many activities may be propaedeutic to it, as archaeology and palaeography are to history. Historians and men of action draw their information whence they can. Scientific, statistical methods and microscopic biographical detail - none of these is irrelevant, all may increase this sense of what belongs where. Indeed, without a minimum of plain information of this type there is nothing but ignorance. Nevertheless, the sense of reality or of history which enables us to detect the relationships of actual things and persons is acquaintance with particulars, while all theory deals with attributes and idealised entities - with the general.

This is perceived by many thinkers, but only Hegel attempted to wed the two by speaking of the universal as 'concrete', by dismissing actual science for dealing with abstractions and propounding the possibility of another altogether superior one which, without ceasing to be general, would enable the scientist (that is, metaphysician) to reason his way by infallible steps to the heart of the concrete particular -the actual situation, which he would understand in all its complexity and fullness and richness, as clearly and exhaustively, and with the same kind of demonstrative certainty, as he grasped rigorously deductive systems. By this monstrous paradox a state of mind was conceived in which contradictory attributes - the formal and the material; theory and practice; deduction and direct acquaintance; that which is here and now, the actual situation, as well as that which is there and then, divided from it by time and space; thought and observation; actual experience and generalisations from it; subject and object; things and words - all were proclaimed to be one and indivisible, the object of a transcendental wisdom, the Geist coming to consciousness of itself, which would supersede all the lame and broken efforts to treat the fragments of reality one by one, or, worse still, as if each contained a whole. Nevertheless, in this very effort to cut through the knot by what, at the best, is a sensational conjuring-trick, Hegel did something towards exposing the exaggerated claims of the positivism of his time, which identified all knowledge

1 T. S. Eliot said that men cannot face too much reality; but great historians, novelists and other artists do face it more than others.

[36] with the methods of the natural sciences, culminating in a system of general propositions covering the universe and accounting for all there was.

   From this kind of positivism most Utopias of our time have flowed. What is it that we mean when we call a thinker Utopian, or when we accuse a historian of giving an unrealistic, over-doctrinaire account of events? After all, no modern Utopian can be accused of wishing to defy the laws of physics. It is not laws like gravitation or electromagnetism that modern Utopians have ignored. What then have addicts to such systems sinned against? Not certainly the laws of sociology, for very few such have as yet been established, even by the least rigorous, most impressionistic of 'scientific' procedures. Indeed, the excessive belief in their existence is often one of the marks of lack of realism - as is shown on every occasion when men of action successfully defy them and knock over yet another false sociological model. It seems truer to say that to be Utopian is to suggest that courses can be followed which, in fact, cannot, and to argue this from theoretical premisses and in the face of the 'concrete' evidence of the 'facts'. That is certainly what Napoleon or Bismarck meant when they railed against speculative theorists.

What are these facts which resist our wishes, which make otherwise desirable schemes seem impracticable to men of sense, which make those who nevertheless urge their realisation liable to be called foolish theorists, blind Utopians? There is no doubt that, in arguing about what can and what cannot be done, we tend to say of this or that plan that 'it will inevitably fail' - that is, that it rests on the assumption that human wills, human organisations, will be strong enough to effect this or that, when in fact they will not, since forces too powerful for them will crush and defeat them. What are these forces ? Forces which, say, Bismarck or Lord Salisbury or Abraham Lincoln understood, we believe, but which mere fanatics obsessed by theories do not.

There is at least one answer to this question which is certainly false, and that is that Bismarck perceived laws which the fanatics do not, that his relation to them is that of Newton or Darwin to pre-scientific astrologers or alchemists. This is not so. If we knew laws, the laws which govern social or individual life, we could operate within them by using them as we use others in conquering nature, by inventing methods which take full account of such forces – of [37] their relationships and costly effects. This dependable social technology is precisely what we lack. No one really supposes that Bismarck knew more laws of social dynamics, or knew them better, than, say, Comte. On the contrary , it is because Comte believed in them and William James did not that the former is condemned as Utopian. When we speak of some process as inevitable, when we warn people not to pit their wills against the greater power of the historical situation, which they cannot alter, or cannot alter in the manner they desire, what we mean is not that we know facts and laws which we obey, but that we do not; that we are aware, beyond the facts to which the potential reformers point, of a dark mass of factors whose general drift we perceive but whose precise interrelations we cannot formulate, and that any attempt to behave as if only the clear 'top level' factors were significant or crucial, ignoring the hinterland, will lead to frustration of the intended reforms, perhaps to unexpected disaster. When we think of Utopians as pathetically attempting to overturn institutions or alter the nature of individuals or States, the pathos derives not from the fact that there are known laws which such men are blindly defying, but from the fact that they take their knowledge of a small portion of the scene to cover the entire scene; because instead of realising and admitting how small our knowledge is, how even such knowledge as we could hope to possess of the relations of what is clearly visible and what is not cannot be formulated in the form of laws or generalisations, they pretend that all that need be known is known, that they are working with open eyes in a transparent medium, with facts and laws accurately laid out before them, instead of groping, as in fact they are doing, in a half-light where some may see a little further than others but where none sees beyond a certain point, and, like pilots in a mist, must rely upon a general sense of where they are and how to navigate in such weather and in such waters, with such help as they may derive from maps drawn at other dates by men employing different conventions, and by the aid of such instruments as give nothing but the most general information about their situation.

It is one of the greatest and most fatal fallacies of the great system-builders of the nineteenth century, Hegelians and Comtists and, above all, the many Marxist sects, to suppose that if we call something inevitable we mean to indicate the existence of a law. In the natural sciences the concept of inevitability is seldom used, and to identify there what is inevitable with that which conforms to a [38] law may perhaps be valid, and is certainly harmless; but in the sphere of human relations the precise opposite seems to be the case. When we speak of forces too great to be resisted we do not mean that we have come up against an 'iron law'. We mean that there is too much that we do not know, but dimly surmise, about the situation, and that our wills and the means at our disposal may not be efficacious enough to overcome these unknown factors, menacing often precisely because they are too difficult to analyse. We rightly admire those statesmen who, without pretending to detect laws, are able to do more than others to accomplish their plans, because of a superior sense of the contours of these unknown and half-known factors, and of their effect upon this or that actual situation. They are the persons who estimate what effect this or that deliberate human act is likely to have on the particular texture which the situation presents to them; and they assess the texture, and how much they or others will be able to modify it by acts of will - a texture compounded of human and non-human factors in their interplay - without the benefit of laws or theories; for the factors in question are below the level of clear scientific vision, are precisely those which are too complex, too numerous, too minute to be distilled into an elegant deductive structure of natural laws susceptible to mathematical treatment, and are 'formidable', 'inexorable" 'inevitable' precisely because the texture is opaque. We cannot tell exactly how plastic it will prove, because every effort to act upon it is a risk and not precisely calculable - the exact opposite of what it would be if there were social laws and we knew them and what we meant by 'inevitable', or that which accorded with them.

The equation which identifies the difficult medium in which we live with something which obeys objective laws, themselves precise, contradicts our normal usage. For Marxists and, indeed, all those who believe that social or individual life is wholly determined by laws at least in principle discoverable, men are weaker than they supposed in their pre-scientific pride; they are calculable, and in principle capable of omniscience. But as we ordinarily think of ourselves, especially as historians or men of action - that is, when we are dealing with particular individuals and things and facts - we see a very different spectacle: of men governed by few natural laws; falling into error, defeated, victims of one another, through ignorance not of laws, but largely of the results of human acts, those being most successful who possess (apart from luck, [39]which is perhaps indispensable) a combination of will-power and a capacity for non-scientific, non-generalising assessment of specific situations ad hoc; which leads to a picture of men as free, sometimes strong, and largely ignorant that is the precise contrary of the scientific view of them as weak, determined and potentially omniscient.

The glaring failure of the latter view to conform with what we see life to be like is what causes such suspicion to fall on scientists when they attempt to generalise about history or politics. Their theories are condemned as foolish and doctrinaire and Utopian. What is meant is that all reforms suggested by such considerations, whether of the left or the right, fail to take into account the only method by which anything is ever achieved in practice, whether good or bad, the only method of discovery , the answer to the questions which are proper to historians, namely: What do men do and suffer, and why and how? It is the view that answers to these questions can be provided by formulating general laws, from which the past and future of individuals and societies can be successfully predicted, that has led to misconceptions alike in theory and practice: to fanciful, pseudo-scientific histories and theories of human behaviour, abstract and formal at the expense of the facts, and to revolutions and wars and ideological campaigns conducted on the basis of dogmatic certainty about their outcome - vast misconceptions which have cost the lives, liberty and happiness of a great many innocent human beings.

Scan and ocr: 2004.03.11