{Selective Cycles (2)}[24th September 1990]

[Redbook7:333][19900924:2123c]{Selective Cycles (2)}[24th September 1990]

.2123

[continued]

[A whole-page photocopied extract from Encyclopaedia Britannica which cannot be reproduced here for copyright reasons includes the following highlighted text:]

‘Other famous philosophies, from Vico’s and Hegel’s to Marx’s and Spengler’s, discover a direction in history, or a principle of action, and often a goal or terminus (as in Marx), after which history as we know it shall cease and a kind of second Eden be restored.

‘To the practical writer or reader of history these philosophies appeal by their suggestiveness: they are valued for their scattered insights and analogies. As systems they negate the very spirit of history, which seeks the concrete and particular, the opposite of system and abstraction. True, there have been historians who took a middle course and attempted to find empirical regularities in history – again with occasionally suggestive results – but very soon their methods begin to do violence to the facts in order to group them and count them and treat them like identities in physical science. When the physical world itself has not yet been fully systematised, to assume or “find” a system in history without the means and the liberties that science uses is to think like neither a scientist nor a historian. It is in fact an attempt to remove the difficulty of history at the cost of destroying its unique merit and interest.

‘By the “liberties” that science takes is meant the experimenter’s elimination of all but a very few components in a given trial, so as to ascertain precisely the nature and amount of a given effect. When this is done, the result is usually stated in causal terms – so much of this, under such and such conditions, will produce so much of that.*** Hardly anyone needs to be told that history defies a similar treatment. Its elements cannot be exactly measured, and although each historical situation presents to the discerning eye a variety of clear conditions or factors, the isolating of a cause for what happens is beyond reach.’

*{cf [[Redbook7:180][19900731:2305c]{Selective Cycles (1)}[31st July 1990],] 180}

**E[ncyclopaedia] B[ritannica] 0:341 [from Part 9: The History of Mankind]

(ibid)

***[This seems, especially these days, a greatly over-simplified and somewhat condescending view of science, from cosmology and quantum theory on the one hand to economics, archaeology and genetic research (which do exactly measure elements of history) on the other. But it is probably correct to say that the sort of speculation indulged in within this journal is neither science nor history, though it considers both: it is perhaps, irrespective of merit or otherwise, a kind of philosophy.]

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