THE PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY REVIEW. JUNE, 1854. No. IX. ARTICLE I. THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. THE subject of this Essay, the Problem of the Philosophy of human History, and the conditions of its right solution, cannot, perhaps, be more appropriately introduced, than by recalling one of the most significant legends of medieval Europe, as illustrated in one of the most vivid creations of the modern school of German art. Kaulbach, in his picture of the Battle of the Huns, brings before our vision a wide plain, strewed with the corpses of Huns and Romans, who had fallen in a sanguinary contest, while the whole upper air is depicted as filled with living combatants, whose mysterious strife is lighted up only by the dim rays of the pale queen of night. The legend runs, that so fierce was the hostility of the Teutonic and the Latin races, that even the bands of death could not restrain their lust for strife. Even the perturbed spirits of the slain, after the sun had set, left their mangled bodies, to prolong the deadly struggle in the open sky above the ensanguined field of Mars. The perpetuity of the feud of these historic races, at this juncture of times, the angle of modern civilization, is bodied forth in the boldness of the legend. But it also seems to intiVOL. III.-1 mate another fact; that battles fought in the material, are renewed in the spiritual sphere. They end not with the defeat or victory of the hour. They come up again with a wider scope, and under a clearer sky. And thus may this Battle of the Huns be to us an apt image of what is perpetually recurring in respect to all the great battles in the annals of our contesting race. One of the objects of the historic page is to call up the spirits from the realm of the shadowy past, to make their conflicts live again in the minds of the present, that we may see in a rarer atmosphere the elements and the meaning of the struggles in which they ignorantly fought for us. Thus, though All changes, nought is lost; the forms are changed, The turmoil and dust of the conflict pass away; warring passions illustrate permanent principles; the successive contests of races tell us of the victories of truth, and the progress of righteousness. And so human history becomes, in the eloquent description of Cicero "the test of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the rule of life, the messenger of antiquity." One of the peculiar characteristics of the speculations of the nineteenth century, as compared with those of the eighteenth, is seen in the attempts made to understand the present, and even to predict the future, by means of the past. The most remarkable revolution in the method of investigation is probably to be found in the sphere of historical research. To the vain imagination, nurtured by the popular philosophy of the last century, that we are to make all things new, has succeeded the conviction, so well expressed by the inscription on an ancient coin, that "time discovers the riches of antiquity." Even the sciolist has learned to say, with Sir Matthew Hale, "that truth is the daughter of time." That contempt of history, which used to be esteemed the beginning of wisdom, is now seen to be the end of folly. Many a dream of the future has vanished like an unsubstantial pageant, while the forms of the past have come to assume an immortal honor. That super ficial egotism which prated of the sovereignty of the individual, is supplanted by that wiser humility which tells us that "all the world is a wiser man than any man in the world." The individual is seen to be but the nursling of Humanity, and the present as the product of the past. The atomic theory of the race is superseded by the dynamic, thus giving the only condition under which history can assume the dignity of a science. It is studied not as an aggregate of atoms, but as a complex of powers. The race is viewed in the Christian aspect of its unity, and not in the infidel aspect of a mere flock of individuals. It is imaged forth, now, as the life of one man, in its successive periods of youth, of manhood, and of maturity; now, as a growth, through all its stages, like that of a tree with its blossoms and its fruit; again, as a constant ascent in a spiral, steadily aspiring, in spite of alternations, to a high consummation; or, yet again, as the orderly development of one consecutive plan, embracing all nations and races in their progress towards some adequate ultimate end. What is called its antiquity, is seen to be but its youth; antiquitas sæculi, juventus mundi; and its most youthful races are recognized as its most mature, having the heritage of the past. And the object of the whole historic course, the grand historic problem of the destiny of the race; what is it for? whither doth it tend? is inquired after with an earnestness which betokens its impor tance. And accordingly we find the so-called philosophy of history assuming an unwonted space in the meditations of the contemplative, as well as in the dreams of the ardent. Every leading tendency of the times, philosophical, religious, political, moral, and even literary and æsthetic, attempts to justify itself on historic grounds, to construct its philosophy of history. Not mere abstract reason and right are appealed to, but also the concrete testimony of history. The European absolutist and democrat are equally confident on historic grounds. Gervinus is subjected to judicial accusation for lighting that dry light in which he showed that the course of history has been ever, through aristocracy and monarchy, to a democratic rule, in the land in which Schlegel was applauded for teaching, that the supremacy of the Roman Catholic hierarchy is the sense and. aim of the historic course. And the revived activity of the Roman Catholic literature, under Bonald and De Maistre in France, Möhler and Moliter in Germany, Balmes in Spain, Wiseman and Newman in England, has planted itself on this field of investigation, as on no other. By the great modern Protestant theologians and historians, especially of Germany, the very sphere of controversy with the enemies of our faith has been transferred, from the speculative to the historic domain; and our political and social theorists also feel the necessity of finding at least the fulcrum for their levers in that which has been and is. It is almost unconsciously assumed, that every legitimate speculation in respect to government and society, must authenticate its claims by the sure word of history, ere it can be received as a prophecy. Nor is this tendency excluded even from the purely speculative sciences; for from Schelling to Hegel, we have elaborate attempts to show that the whole of history has been ever laboring in the throes of birth with their systems, as the best progeny of time. This characteristic of modern thought, which has led it to throw itself so resolutely upon the solution of the historic problem of the race, is not accidental, and therefore it is not likely to be transient. It is not the product of enthusiasm alone, nor has it been dissipated in mere imaginations. It is rather to be regarded as a legitimate product of that movement of the human mind, inaugurated by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The most general characteristic of that movement, as exemplified, though not exhausted, in its religious reforms, may be said, perhaps, to have been the application of the inductive, in distinction from the too exclusively logical, method of investigation to all the spheres of human knowledge. We call Bacon the father of the Inductive Philosophy, but his service consisted in applying to the study of nature that very method which all the leading reformers had previously applied to the Church and to theology. They only went back to the authentic facts and documents to get at the laws and principles of ecclesiastical authority; they went back from the later to the earlier Fathers, and from these to the original source in the Divine Word. And so Bacon bid men go to nature, to study its authentic records, if they would know what nature was. Thus Descartes taught men to study the mind, if they would know the mind. To know what anything is, you must study that thing itself; first the facts, and then the laws and principles. From the facts learn the laws, and by the laws read the facts; this is the substance of that inductive method which was applied in successive order to the church, to nature, to the mind, to politics, and which is now, in a natural and necessary order, engrossing attention in social inquiries. And last and most difficult of all, it is applied to the solution of the historic problem of the race; in the facts of history to find its laws, and by those laws to read its facts, and to attempt to forecast its destiny. The very pressure of the inductive philosophy leads us to this high inquiry, and it has come up last in order, not only because man must have had a history before he can have a philosophy of history, but also because this is the central stream into which all these other investigations flow. Of the possibility of such a philosophy of history grave doubts are indeed entertained. The vastness of the problem. is confronted with the littleness of our knowledge. The fact that history moves in the sphere of human freedom, leads many to say with Kant, "that even if one should find that humanity has been always advancing, no one could say but that it might to-day begin to decay; for that we have here to do with free beings to whom we may indeed prescribe what they ought to do, but of whom we cannot predict what they will do." And it further seems improbable, that any one could have both that scope of knowledge and that scope of generalization, which are essential in the working out of so broad an investigation. Will not the very pressure of the inquiry force from the brain its own coinage, rather than the image and superscription of the reality itself? And has the race run so far in its course, that we can see the end from the beginning, and that a definitive solution of its historic destiny is possible? While it may be true, as Dugald Stuart argues, that the largest generalizations about human affairs are of the readiest application, is it not also true, that they are to be made with the utmost reserve, since they can only be made with the utmost difficulty? And to these general scruples are added, the doubts especially of Protestant Christians, as they see how the extreme conservative and the extreme radical tendencies of the day, the Romanist on the one hand and the infidel on the other, have |