1 'Locksley Hall' ( 1 842), line 128.
. .. those vast impersonal forces . . . T. S. Eliot1
I
Writing some ten years ago2 in his place of refuge during the German occupation of northern Italy, Bernard Berenson set down his thoughts on what he called the 'Accidental View of History': they 'led me', he declared, 'far from the doctrine, lapped up in my youth, about the inevitability of events and the Moloch still devouring us today, "historical inevitability". I believe less and less in these more than doubtful and certainly dangerous dogmas, which tend to make us accept whatever happens as irresistible and foolhardy to oppose.'3 The famous critic's words are particularly timely at a moment when there is, at any rate among philosophers of history, if not among historians, a tendency to return to the ancient view that all that is, is ('objectively viewed') best; that to explain is ('in the last resort') to justify; or that to know all is to forgive all; ringing fallacies (charitably described as half-truths) which have led to special pleading and, indeed, obfuscation of the issue on a heroic scale.
This is the theme on which I should like to speak; but before doing so I must express my gratitude for the honour done me by the invitation to deliver this, the first of the Auguste Comte Memorial Lectures. For, indeed, Comte is worthy of commemoration and praise. He was in his own day a very celebrated thinker, and if his works are today seldom mentioned, at any rate in this country, that is partly due to the fact that he has
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p- 88.
2 This was written in 1953.
3 Bernard Berenson, Rumour and Reflection: 1941:1944 (London, 1952), p. 116 (entry dated 11 January 1943).
1 I do not wish here to enter into the question of what such procedures are, for example, what is meant by speaking of history as a science - whether the methods of historical discovery are inductive, or 'deductive-hypothetical', or analogical, or to what degree they are or should be similar to the methods of the natural sciences, and to which of these methods, and in which of the natural sciences; for there plainly exists a greater variety of methods and procedures than is usually provided for in textbooks on logic or scientific method. It may be that the methods of historical research are, in at least some respects, unique, and some of them are more unlike than like those of the natural sciences; while others resemble given scientific techniques, particularly when they approach such ancillary enquiries as archaeology or palaeography or physical anthropology. Or again they may depend upon the kind of historical research pursued - and may not be the same in demography as in history, in political history as in the history of art, in the history of technology as in the history of religion. The 'logic' of various human studies has been insufficiently examined, and convincing accounts of its varieties with an adequate range of concrete examples drawn from actual practice are much to be desired.
1 We are further told that we belong to such wholes and are 'organically' one with them, whether we know it or not; and that we have such significance as we do only to the degree to which we are sensitive to, and identify ourselves with, these unanalysable, imponderable, scarcely explicable relationships; for it is only in so far as we belong to an entity greater than ourselves, and are thereby carriers of 'its' values, instruments of 'its' purposes, living 'its' life, suffering and dying for 'its' richer self-realisation, that we are, or are worth, anything at all. This familiar line of thought should be distinguished from the no less familiar but less ethically charged supposition that men's outlooks and behaviour are largely conditioned by the habits of other past and present members of their society; that the hold of prejudice and tradition is very strong; that there may be inherited characteristics both mental and physical; and that any effort to influence human beings and to judge their conduct must take such non-rational factors into account. For whereas the former view is metaphysical and normative (what Karl Popper calls 'essentia- list'), the latter is empirical and descriptive; and while the former is largely found as an element in the kind of ethical or political anti-individualism held by romantic nationalists, Hegelians and other transcendentalists, the latter is a sociological and psychological hypothesis which doubtless carries its own ethical and political implications, but rests its claim on observation of empirical facts, and can be confirmed or refuted or rendered less or more plausible by it. In their
I
To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom - freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, it is a term whose meaning is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist. I do not propose to discuss either the history of this protean word or the more than two hundred senses of it recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to examine no more than two of these senses - but they are central ones, with a great
3 'A free man', said Hobbes, 'is he that ... is not hindered to do what he has a will to.' Leviathan, chapter 21: p. 146 in Richard Tuck's edition (Cambridge, 1991). Law is always a fetter, even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier than those of the law, say some more repressive law or custom, or arbitrary despotism or chaos. Bentham says much the same.
III
The retreat to the inner citadel
I am the possessor of reason and will; I conceive ends and I desire to pursue them; but if I am prevented from attaining them I no longer feel master of the situation. I may be prevented by the laws
2 Kant's psychology, and that of the Stoics and Christians too, assumed that some element in man - the 'inner fastness of his mind' - could be made secure against conditioning. The development of the techniques of hypnosis, 'brainwashing', subliminal suggestion and the like has made this a priori assumption, at least as an empirical hypothesis, less plausible.
1 It is worth remarking that those who demanded - and fought for - liberty for the individual or for the nation in France during this period of German quietism did not fall into this attitude. Might this not be precisely because, despite the despotism of the French monarchy and the arrogance and arbitrary behaviour of privileged groups in the French State, France was a proud and powerful nation, where the reality of political power was not beyond the grasp of men of talent, so that withdrawal from battle into some untroubled heaven above it, whence it could be surveyed dispassionately by the self-sufficient philosopher, was not the only way out? The same holds for England in the nineteenth century and well after it, and for the United States today.
1 Or, as some modern theorists maintain, because I have, or could have, invented them for myself, since the rules are man-made.