Mind Association

Philosophical and History, Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer. by Raymond Klibansky; H. J.

Paton
Review by: W. G. de Burgh
Mind, New Series, Vol. 45, No. 180 (Oct., 1936), pp. 514-525
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
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514 CRITICAL NOTICES:

Inductive Rule, that the contraryis the case; and I suspect that my
reading of him must rest upon some misunderstandingof his intent.
(Nevertheless,other writings of his support this construction; e.g.,
Handbuchder Physik (Geigeru. Scheel), Bd. IV, p. 16, 32).
These comments are not Intended to cast doubt upon the fact,
which Prof. Reichenbach has so well emphasized, that the sciences
employ a self-correctivemethod, and that finality is not to be found
in any statement certified on the basis of that method. On the
contrary, it seems to me that he has describedclearly and persuas-
ively a highly important methodological principle employed in
statistical research. I have simply questioned Prof. Reichenbach's
detailed account of that method considered as the exclusive and
universal rule of procedurein the natural sciences. Moreover,his
discussionof induction as a methodologicalpostulate whose use does
not " presuppose" a priori knowledge of the world seems to me
enormously clarifying and in the main correct. Consequently,
while I have found it necessary to question some of the important
theses in this book, there is no doubt in my mind of its high merit
and of the important need it fills in the discussion of probability.
It is to be hoped, however, that Prof. Reichenbachwill not rest on
his laurels, but supply the details in his views which he has thus far
simply sketched.
ERNEST NAGEL.

Philosophyand History, Essays presentedto Ernst Cassirer. Edited

by RAYMOND KLIBANSKY and H. J. PATON. Oxford: at
the Clarendon Press (London, H. Milford), 1936. Pp. xii,
355. 25s. net.
THE twenty-one essays which form this volume are the fitting
tribute of European scholarship to Dr. Ernst Cassireron the oc-
casion of his sixtieth birthday. They are focussed on the problem
of the relation between philosophy and history, a problem of the
first importance in the field of enquiry to which Dr. Cassirerhas
devoted his life. Half a century has elapsed since Dilthey, in
revolt against Kant's exclusive regard for physics as the type of
speculative knowledge, appealed to the newly discovered world of
the Geisteswissenschaften to redress the balance of the old. No
living thinker has done more than Dr. Cassirerto bring Dilthey's
pregnant, but unsystematic, suggestions to fulfilment. It is en-
couraging, at a time when a frenzy of nationalsm threatens inter-
national collaborationeven in things of the mind, to find scholars
from so many countries uniting to do honour to their colleague.
The editors are to be congratulated on the skill with which they
have carriedout their task. It is not easy, with contributorswho re-
presentso many differentschools of thought, to securein the contents
of the volume the unity promisedby the title-page. Yet the reader
R. KLIBANSKY AND H. J. PATON, Essays to Ernst Cassirer. 515

is never allowed for long to lose touch with the main theme, which,
as is remarkedin the Preface, is one that, in this country at all events,
has suffered undue neglect. The range of questions that it opens
out is exemplifiedby the two essays in Kunstgeschichte, which wit-
ness, it may be noted, to the interest shown by the Warburg
Institute in the Festschrift. In the first of these, Dr. Saxl, the
Director of the Institute, traces the history of the adage Veritas
filia temporisin the iconographyand pictorialart of the seventeenth
and the two following centuries; in the second, one of his former
associates, Dr. Panoffsky of Princeton, does the like for the legend
Et in Arcadia ego. Judged as original researchesin a special field
of knowledge, these two papers are the most striking in the collec-
tion. But the writers develop their eruditionto wider issues; they
are at pains to show, in consonancewith the purposeof the volume,
how the study of iconography involves that of its context, in
classical philology, in literature, in the vicissitudes of political
and religious history, in the allegorical treatment of speculative
ideas; in a word, in the changing temper and outlook of a whole
epoch of human civilisation. The art of Nicolas Poussin, for
example, gives expression to the Platonic conceptions of truth and
of the Good, and, again, to the idea of metamorphosiswhich, Dr.
Panoffsky tells us, was " central in Poussin's metaphysical creed ".
These two studies illustrate how Art, as well as History, takes rank
among the " Symbolic Forms ", the philosophy of which has been
expounded by Dr. Cassirer in the best-known of his published
writings.'
Most of the writers introduce their subject with a reference to
the history of modern thought. Of the five contributions from
Paris, four (those of MM. Brunschvicg, Gilson, Brehier and Levy-
Bruhl) are wholly concerned with this line of approach. The
establishment by Descartes of the physico-mathematical method
as the universal method of reason, and the consequent exclusion of
history from rational knowledge; the reactions thereby provoked
and the impotence of a philosophy of history as conceivedby Hegel
and by Comte to bridge the gulf; the development of the bio-
logical sciencesand the yet more recent revolutionin physics through
the acceptanceof relativity, which have led to recognitionnot merely
of the claims of history side by side with those of science but of a
historicalfactor in all knowledge: these related themes are handled,
as might be expected from such eminent thinkers, with an origin-
ality and a variety of emphasis that reflect the distinctive interest
of each author. M. Brunschvicg, for instance, stresses what
1 The plates illustrative of both articles are excellent. But is Dr. Saxl
right in saying (204), in reference to the illustrations in Marshall'sGoodly
Prymer and in Marcolino'sCinqueMesse, that " both introduce an enemy
of Truth in the form of a winged monster ". Marcolino's " enemy "# to
judge from Fig. 2, is unwinged. There is a misprint in note 1 on p. 224,
where for " p. 23 f. n. 1 " should be read " p. 237, n. 1" (?p. 233, n. 1).
516 CRITICAL NOTICES:

M. Bergsonhascalledthe " fabulatoryfunction" of history,illustrating

from Pascal the exposition " with unequalled clarity " " of the two
antagonistic forces-the progress of positive science in the domain
of reason which is properly spiritual, the primacy of faith in the
domain of religion which is properly supernatural" (29-30), and
from Hegel the unnatural union of the legacy of theological fable
with the " claimto follow a positive and rationalmethod ". " That "
in his plrilosophy of history " which was called history was not
history; that in it which was called science was not science " (31).
This " fabulatory function ", dominant in Marx and Nietzsche,
assumes "its clearest self-consciousness" in Georges Sorel, who,
*in his Reiflexionssur la violence, " provided a metaphysic for the
dictatorships of the extreme left and of the extreme right which
have established themselves in post-war Europe ".1 M. Brun-
schvicg's somewhat cavalier denunciation of Plato as a traitor to
truth in his use of fable, and of medieval philosophy as " absurdly
subjected to the authority of the ancients", is offset by M. Gilson's
careful analysis of the grounds that led to the Cartesian revolution
against the medieval synthesis in favour of physico-mathematical
science. The scholastics erred in universalising the specifically
biological method which they inherited from Aristotle. Hence the
sterility of the MiddleAges in the domain of physics, to which that
method was inappropriate. [But were they not equally sterile in
the field of biology ?] Descartes, in turn, was guilty of a like error,
when he universalised the method of mathematics, so that- "we
are bound to condemn the scientific sterility of the Middle Ages
for those very reasonswhich to-day make us condemnthe philosophic
sterility of ' scientism' " (71). Descartes' error, indeed, cut deeper
than that of the medievals; for it was rooted in his definitionof ex-
istence in terms of thought and his reificationof concepts, whereas
scholastic conceptualism rested on a thoroughly objective view of
substantialreality transcendingthe sum of concepts abstractedfrom
it. M. Gilson goes on to develop the resulting antinomies, both
in metaphysics and in political theory (e.g., the sheer individualism
that culminates in Nietzsche and the sheer collectivism that cul-
minates in Comte), and the failure of the attempts, from Kant on-
wards to Bergson, to justify philosophy " in an order foreign to
that of rational knowledge". His own solution lies in the idea of
a Christian philosophy, based on the scholastic presupposition of
real being, but freed from error by full recognition of the several
orders of being and of the diversity of methods appropriateto the
science of each order (physics, biology, psychology, etc.). The
reader will, we think, be somewhat startled by M. Gilson's rapid
identificationof metaphysics as the science of being qu4 being with
the theology of Christian Theism. He may wonder, too, what
place could be found, in M. Gilson's scheme of knowledge, with its
1Cf. Mr. ChristopherDawson'sremarkson Sorel in Religionand the
ModernState.
 R. KLIBANSKY AND H. J. PATON, Essays to Ernst Cassirer. 517

exclusion of biological concepts from physics, for a theory such as

Prof. Whitehead's " philosophy of organism". M. Brehier natur-
ally surveys the groundfrom the angle of the History of Philosophy.
Two points in his very able paper call for special notice. He sets
in clear relief the constructive service that the Cartesianrevolution
renderedto history. In the relegation of history to belles-lettresand
in its opposition to traditional authority, the thought of the seven-
teenth century was assuredly unhistorical; but by its very polemic
against the reliabilityof history it gave birth to the new science of
historical criticism. The first-fruitsare seen in Spinoza's Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus,and the direct outcome was the scepticism of
1Bayle'sDictionnaire. Bayle's " historical Pyrrhonism", writes M.
Brehier, " has the same destructive effect on what has been given
by tradition and on the evidence for it as that produced by the
Cartesian ' doubt ' on the constructionsof the imagination" (163).
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in fact, an epoch of
serious historical research, in which history securely established its
claim to be a scientific discipline. In the second place, M. Brehier
analyses acutely the reaction which this Pyrrhonism evoked in
the direction of a priori theories of intrinsic continuity in the
successive stages of human thought, as exhibited in Condorcet,
Comte and Hegel. It led in the event to the exclusion from history
of "whatever did not humour their philosophical Messianism"
(170) and to a closing of the door on historical research. M.
Br6hier'sown position rests on a rejection of any narrow rational-
ism and a frank acceptanceof the presenceof contingencyin history:
"in history we have to deal not with pure ideas linked together, but
with persons who make decisions" (170). M. Levy-Bruhl's brief
paper on The CartesianSpirit and History is confinedto expounding
their natural antipathy, which, he notes, is still alive, e.g., in M.
Paul Val'ry's brilliant onslaughts on the pretensions of modern
historians to knowledge. Senior Ortega y Gasset, whose essay on
History as a System is the longest in the volume, employs the
historical approachin order to show how in all ages knowledgehas
rested on an ' operative' faith,-i.e. a collectiveconvictiondominating
the thinking of individuals in a given society and epoch,-whether
in a religious revelation, or in physico-mathematicalreason, or, as
he believes for the time now coming, in historicalreason. " My
purpose", he says (321), " is . . . to discover in history itself its
original autochthonous reason. Hence the expression 'historical
reason' must be understood in all the rigour of the term: not an
extra-historicalreason which appears to be fulfilled in history but,
literally, a substantivereason constitutedby what has happened to
man,the revelationof a reality transcendingman'stheories and which
is himself, the self underlying his theories ". It is for the Geistes-
wissenschaftento make this rational faith " operative ". The place
of faith within the scope of reasonis indicated also by Dr. Klibansky,
in the interesting paper that stands last in the volume (on The
518 CRITICAL NOTICES:

PhilosophicCharacterof History),when he shows how in philosophy

and science, as well as in history, " the irrational elements of faith
have found here ", i.e., in their presuppositionswhich defy verifica-
tion, " on the very soil of ratio, a habitation from which ratio can
never drive them away " (336).
History, then, has at long last come into its kingdom; it has
won recognitionas knowledge. But what is its relation, as a form
of knowledge,to other forms and, especially,to philosophy? We are
here face to face with the main question,which admits of very diverse
answers. The phrase " equality of rights " is notoriouslyambiguous,
in theory as in practice. Prof. Alexander and Signor Gentile, for
instance, stand at opposite poles. For the former, all reality and
all knowledge are alike historical; Space-Time is the very stuff
of which the universe with all that is therein, even God, is made.
But, being a realist, he draws a sharp line between the historical
reality and the historical knowledge of it: history, he holds, is
" but one of the sciences which arise from the facts and happenings
of the world " (25). Signor Gentile, on the other hand, roundly
denies any distinction between res gestceand historiarerumgestarum,
maintainingthat all history is contemporaryhistory and that history
and philosophy are identical in the -act of pensieropensante which
" embraces all times and the birth and death of all things " in an
eternal present (99). For history there is nothing timeless; for
philosophy,the time of history belongsto the moment of objectifica-
tion in the Spirit's dialectic and " only lives by dying into thought
and being reborn sub specie ceterni" (105). We shall not dwell
on these two papers, as the doctrines of their distinguishedauthors
are familiar to all readers of MIND from Space Time and Deity and
the Teoria dello Spirito come atto puro. Signor Calogero's remark-
able contribution On the so-called Identity of History and Philosophy
calls for fuller notice.' He begins by criticising Croce's recently-
qualified statement of the doctrine on the grounds (a) that the
identity is reducedto a mutual implication which is in fact a circular
process of give and take between " the universalizing thought of
the methodologistand the individualizingthought of the historian ",
and, especially, (b) that philosophy and history are each called upon
to play a double r6le, since each is at once pure theoriaand the con-
sciousness of all forms-including the theoretic-of spiritualexperi-
ence. Gentile appears to escape these objections by his denial of
the plurality of spiritual forms and the consequent reduction of
the identity in question to that of philosophy with its own history.
The 'real' history of philosophy is "the thinking about past
philosophies which 'is actually going on at the moment in the
mind "; while, if taken to mean " philosophical development
supposed to exist as an independent object preceding and deter-
mining our actual present thought about it ", it falls within the
'Both this paper and Gentile'shave been renderedinto English by
Mr. E. F. Carritt in translations which are masterpieces.
R. KLIBANSKY AND H. J. PATON, Essays to Ernst Cassirer. 519

moment of objectification and is an " unreal " abstraction. But

Gentile's theory presents insuperable difficulty, in that history is
explained away, and philosophy, i.e., the present act of thinking,
is left in exclusive occupation of the field. Moreover,the dualism
detected in Croce reappears in Gentile in altered guise; behind
the philosophy which is asserted to be the single form of the spirit
lies a more fundamentalphilosophy, revealed in the living thought
that formulates that assertion. Signor Calogero's argument is
hard to compress,but his conclusion is that all epistemology must
be self-contradictory,since thought in definingitself must transcend
the limits of the definition. " No theory of knowledge is ever
universal and necessary,since it has always to admit one exception,
namely, the thought it is now thinking. And on the theory that
this thought includes all reality, so that the thought it is now
thinking is the only one which deserves the name of thought at all,
the exception proves to be so considerableas to deprive the rule of
any philosophical application" (42). Signor Calogero appears to
accept Gentile's teaching as final within the realm of epistemology.
c"On the level of pure thinking, everything is a mere idea, as
Berkeley held, and there is no more to be said." He finds refuge
from the impasse in the consciousness of practical activity. The
only absolute philosophy is a philosophy of action, which does
justice to the claim of the future as the realm of open possibilities.
" This difference, between perceived reality and possibilities con-
ceived, forces itself upon us with irresistible self-evidence....
To say that the subject is the eternal synthesis of Vast and future
history, that the necessity of consciousness is the common basis
of reality and of possibility, that the present is incessantly fashioned
by the passageof the future into the past: all these are only different
ways of defining the self, that is to say, the conscious will " (49).
Our dissent both from Signor Calogero's premisses and from his
conclusionin no way diminishesour sense of the value of his paper.
His position is as far removed from the crudities of Pragmatism as
from those of naive Realism; rather he shows us how Italian
Idealism-quod minime reris-can, by a skilful turn of speculation,
profferan eirenicon(e.g.) to Dr. Whitehead'sProcessand Reality.
The last quotation suggests a number of specific questions, rele-
vant to the relation between Philosophy and History, which form
the subjects of other contributions. (I) There is, first, the problem
of Time. Gentile stands alone in holding that the reality of history
involves the denial of its temporal character. It is generally agreed
that history implies the reality of time and, particularly,of the past
as past. "Its purpose", writes Dr. Huizinga, in discussing its
definition, "is to understand the world in and throughthe past "
(5). A few contributors indeed (e.g., Dr. Medicus, 151) coquet
with the view, which most historical scholarswill indignantly reject,
that the historian's interest lies in the bearings of the past upon
the present,ratherthan in the past for its own sake. Prof. Stebbing,
 520 CRITICAL NOTICES:

in an able article on Some Ambiguities in Discussion concerning

Time, concerns herself mainly with McTaggart's doctrines, on
the ground that he " alone makes clear what exactly it is that he
is denying when he denies that Time is real ". We agree with her,
and with McTaggart,that his A-series (of past, present, future) is
fundamental, and that, if this be proved self-contradictory,Time
is doomed. We agree, again, that " temporal succession involves
causal concatenation" and that this view can draw support from
recent speculations on Relativity; though we would ourselves go
further and maintain, what Prof. Stebbing denies, that the causality
implied is that of conscious human agency. But what does she
mean by saying that when we call the B-series (i.e., before and after)
temporal, 'temporal' is " a descriptive epithet of a curious kind " ?
" The B-series she writes, " can be said to be a temporal series
7,

because the terms, arrangedin the timeless order earlier-later, are

events . . . . When the terms are regardedfrom the point of view
of earlier-later, they are regarded as in a serial order which it is
convenient to call 'temporal', since the elements ordered are
temporal. But the order is not temporal; it is timeless." Of
course the temporal series has no position within itself, and there-
fore is not temporal in the sense of having time relations to other
temporals. In this respect it is like any other serial order, such as
the numericalseries or the musical scale. But these other orders
are timeless in a way in which the temporal order is not, in that
their being is not bound up with time-differencesas it is with number
-or tone-differences. This cannot be said of the temporal order.
The order of earlier and later events is timeless only in the sense of
not being an event in time, not in the sense of being what it is
whether there are events or not. Moreover,to say that earlier and
later events are temporal, while their order as earlier and later is
not, seems to ignore the peculiarity which distinguishes temporal
(and spatial) order from all others. We apprehend other orders
through first apprehendingthe different determinate forms which
some genericcharactertakes in differentparticulars; e.g., the lighter
and darker shades of blue, the higher and lower tones of musical
notes. The terms cannot be resolved into their relations within
the order which they form; but their order is grounded in those
very differenceswhich resist such resolution. With the temporal
order it is otherwise. If the terms are instants, this is obvious:
there are no differencesbetween the terms except what the relations
constitute. If the terms are events, as Prof. Stebbing holds, we
are no better off. For, though events differ one from another in
characters which we cannot resolve into their order as earlier and
later, these charactersdo not enable us to order them in time. It
is only as having position in the time-series that anything is an
event. We come back therefore to the same conclusion. In the
order of earlier and later, the terms get their being as terms of the
order through the relations which constitute the order. They and
R. KLIBANSKY AND H. J. PATON, Essays to Ernst Cassirer. 521

their order are so bound up together that the only sense in which
they and not the order can be termed temporal is that the order is
not one of them. And that is no reason for calling it timeless and
not temporal. We may add that if Prof. Stebbing's argument is
valid, it holds not only for the B-series but for the A-series. That
too can only be called temporal in the same 'curious' sense. Nor
can we allow that it is "nonsense"to say that the orderof the integers
does not change, in the strict meaning of change as change in time,
or, again, to use the expression " true at all times ", on the ground
that the orderof the integers and truth are timeless. ProfLStebbing
seems to us to draw far too rigid a line of demarcationbetween the
timeless and the temporal, making it difficult to bridge the chasm
between the two worlds, and to explain either the ingredience of
Ceternal objects " in temporal " occasions" or the apprehension
by beings in time of those timeless objects (cf. Plato's Parmenides).1
(II) There is also the problem of the relation of history to re-
ligion.. Signor Gentile rules God out of the picture: charging " the
theistic philosopher, whether Platonist or Aristotelian, who pre-
supposes God ", with excluding God from history (92). For
Prof. Alexander, on the other hand, God is on the move; He is
through and through historical. Dr. Clement Webb, writing all
too briefly on Religion, Philosophy and History, after showing how
History and Philosophy alike had their birth in Religion, and
severed themselves, in the course of man's development, from the
parent stock, vindicates at once their autonomy in face of religion
and their close relationship with it. He criticises Croce's view of
religion as immature philosophy on the ground that Croce sees in
religion nothing but a cognitive activity, whereas its function is to
place man in contact " with what he divines to be at once at the
back of all that he experiences and also of his own experiencing
self " (55). The beliefs which express religious experience are not
sacrosanct from philosophical or from historical criticism-far
from it; " religion cannot be satisfied with a false world-view or
with a sense of continuity with a past that was never present "
(59). But no philosophy or history can hold its ground which can
be shown to be inconsistent with the fact of religious experience;
and Dr. Webb insists at the close of his paper that the consciousness
of selfhood revealed in the recognitionof " that all-embracingand
all-permeating reality, at once ' transcendent' and ' immanent ',
which we divine to lie behind and within all which enters into our
experience" must be frankly acknowledged by philosophy as a
fundamentalthat withstandscriticism(60). Its rejectionwouldleave
philosophy with an unsolved enigma on its hands. Perhaps the
most valuable point in this paper is the insistence on the personal
and social character of man's intercourse with God in worship,
which finds expression in the use of the second personal pronoun
1 In these criticismsI owe muchto discussionof Prof. Stebbing'spaper
with Mr. HI.W. B. Joseph.
522 CRITICAL NOTICES:

to replace the third. A similar point is made by Dr. Groethuysen,

in referenceto man's knowledge, not of God but of himself. As
thought works on the datum of naive self-acquaintance, "the
original monologue of self-reflection becomes a dialogue", the
personal " I " being de-individualisedas " he ", till, at a yet higher
stage of self-knowledge, personality is restored through art and
religion, wherein the subject recognises himself as " thou " (77-82).
Dr. Groethuysen'sphilosophy is avowedly anthropological,and the
deity of his religion is the self. Man " seeks his soul, his God, the
'thou' with whom his soul holds converse" (82). For Dr.
Groethuysen, as. for Croce, the consummationlies in a philosophy
which at once criticises and synthesises the other forms of self-
reflection, art, religion and philosophy itself. In this he is at one
with the great majority of contributors, excepting Dr. Webb,
M. Gilson and Dr. Hoffmann (who contributes a scholarly paper
on Platonism in St. Augustine's Philosophy of History); the rest,
if they quit the fence that parts a theistic from a non-theistic meta-
physic, descend upon the side of humanism. This resolute deter-
mination to accept any metaphysical solution, rather than the
theistic, of the speculative-and, we may add, the practical-diffi-
culties in whichthe worldhas been embroiled,ever since its humanistic
aspirationsswung free from their original religiousmoorings,strikes
us as somewhat paradoxical. When Dr. Medicus,for example, tells
us that " history is governed by the destined, though of course
not assured progress of mankind towards humanity " (155)-if
destined, how can it fail to be assured?-and that " the idea of
humanity is the transcendentalprincipleof all historicalknowledges.
It is through it alone that historical knowledge acquires unity "
(151), what precisely does he mean ? If he means merely that the
historian judges the significanceof historical persons and events by
a relative and changing standard of human civilisation, ruling out
of account any explanation by reference to supernaturalintrusion
as beyond the pale of his enquiry, these statements are as true as
they are trivial. But if he means more than this, and claims that
the historical process finds its sole and adequate explanation as a
theodicy of Man universal, towards whose historical consummation
all creation is groaning and travailing together in pain until now,
such a doctrine is both barrenand erroneous. It is but a republica-
tion, in a new metaphysical dress, of the discredited Comtian
apotheosisof humanity. Is it not time that the prophetsof humanism
should take to heart Bradley's strictures on the emptiness of the
concept of humanity, save when integrated with religious faith in
an other-worldly order, and M. Bergson's contention, recently
developed in Les deux sources,that the love of man for man, beyond
the bounds of an actual ' closed' society, is only possible when it
is rooted in the love of God ?
(III) Dr. Medicus'paper On theObjectivityof HistoricalKnowledge
is not the only one that treats of this. problem. Dr. Huitzinga,
R. KLIBANSKY AND H. J. PATON, Essays to Ernst Cassirer. 523

for instance, while admitting " the unavoidablesubjectivity implied

in every history ", sees herein no ground for scepticism, any more
than in philosophy or science. " Every civilization ", he tells us,
" has a past of its own ", though he adds, more questionably, that
" our civilization is the first to have for its past the past of the
world, our history is the first to be world-history" (8). As Dr.
Webb truly observes, " the sense of continuity with the particular
past of a communityto which oneselfbelongs " (58) was the primitive
impulse to historical enquiry, and still frequently persists as a
motive in the minds of the most disinterested historians. On the
part played by the historian's mind in knowledge, Dr. luitzinga
-is a little ambiguous. He holds rightly that the historian'sinterest
is "to penetrate to the genuine knowledge of that which truly
happened" (6), and that the purpose of history is "to understand
the world in and through the past " (5). Yet he speaks-loosely,
we fear-of the historian's " imposition of form upon the past "
(5); and tells us that " every civilization " -i.e., the ' thinking
subject' concerned (oh! these abstractions!)-" creates its own
form of history " (7). Dr. Medicus stresses the personal factor in
history in sharp contrast to the impersonality of physical science.
Historical knowledge, he says, rests " on the basis of the personal
historyof the men who are striving after it " (154). The historian's
construction is coloured by his Erlebnisse. His vision, as Goethe
said of himself after studying Herder, is of " eine gefiihlte Welt ".
" Knowledge of the mathematical sciences of nature ", on the other
hand, " is separablefrom the individual who knows it: as objective
knowledge it claims to be valid for consciousness in general
(Bewusstseiniiberhaupt)and so for every subject in the same way "
(ib.). This appearsto us to be very precariousdoctrine. Of course,
the historian's work is conditioned by his limitations, so that his
history is a perspectiveof the past, seen from the angle of the age in
which he lives; but does this preclude impersonality, in the sense
that he cannot make an impartialjudgment ? " It belongsin no way
to the service of truth and humanity " (what has ' humanity' to
do with it ?) " that the historical presentation should be colourless
and neutral, that it should be impartial" (149). An impartial
presentationmay be anything but colourless: it is only false colour,
as in the political propagandajustly criticised by Dr. Medicushim-
self (145, 148), that should be excluded from history, as from science.
As. Dr. Wind points out, in his essay On somePoints of Contactbe-
tweenHistory and Natural Science, in both fields of enquiry the in-
vestigator is part of the world he investigates; the difficulty of
eliminating the personal factor is doubtless harder for the historian
than for the physicist, but it is there for both.' Dr. Medicus'
1 In Dr. Wind's contribution we note two minor errors. It is incorrect
to speak (256) of the " principate " of Pompey, who was merely princeps
sencatus. And " Copernicanemotion " (260) is a misprint for " Copernican
revolution ".
524 CRITICAL NOTICES:

counsel, that we should seek the desired objectivity of historical

knowledge in a 'supra-historical standard' of 'pure humanity'
(156-157), is neither fruitful nor convincing. Dr. Klibansky is
surely more illuminating on this question when he argues that the
objections raised against history on the score of its subjectivity
lose their force when it is recognised that the notion of objectivity
is not " a Jixum confronting the thinking consciousness" but " a
pure intention of thought itself ". It is " an idea . . . in a three-
fold signification; in the Stoic sense of a germ of reason, a force
stirring consciousness; in the Kantian sense of a regulative prin-
ciple ordering phenomena; in the Platonic sense of a normative
pattern towards which the empirical form of human knowledge is
directed " (336).
IV. The real differencebetween history and the sciences of nature
surely lies in this, that the interest of the physical scientist is in
the establishment of universal connections, while that of the his-
torian is in tracing unique and unrepeatablepatterns among unique
and unrepeatable events. Here, as everywhere in philosophy, we
are confronted with the secular problem of universals. Dr. Litt,
alone among the contributorsto this volume, sets himself to consider
this problem. We cannot enter, at the close of a long review, upon
the full discussion that his very able essav, On the Universal in the
Structureof Historical Knowledge,deserves. The question, like so
many others in this field, was raised, but not answered adequately,
by Dilthey, who ignored the r6le of universal meanings of words
in history; IRickertremedied the omission, but interpreted these
first linguistic universals as though they were impersonal class-
concepts. They are in fact anything but impersonal, being per-
vaded, as Dr. Litt shows, following Dr. Cassirer,with individuality
of meaning. " The task of historical thinking is to grasp and hold
fast a unique form in its whole concretenessand vivid determinate-
ness. . . . This purpose will be realized, both in the case of the
speaker and in that of him who understandswhat is spoken, exactly
as, and only in so far as, those expressionsare used and understood
as indicating concrete fullness of content, without any thought of
arranging things under classificatory abstractions" (131). But,
over and above these two kinds of universals, Dr. Litt points to a
third kind, of the highest significance for history and the Geistes-
wissenschaftengenerally, " which, though not in the least inferior
in strictness and certainty of inner grounding to the abstractions
of classifyingthought, by no means achievetheir content by revealing
what is 'common ' in a multiplicity of phenomena: they rather
bring to expression a universality, resting on itself and providing
its own ground, that can be grasped, if we look in the right place,
for and in every 'particular' of the spiritual world " (135). Dr.
Litt's remarks on these 'concrete universals', or, in his own more
fitting phrase, " a priori fundamental concepts ", are all too brief and
leave us asking many questions. What, for instance, is their rela-
 H. J. LASKI, The Rise of European Liberalism. 525

tion to the uniquepatterns, such as, e.g., the Reformationin Germany

as conceived and interpretedby von Ranke, which, though assuredly
not a priori are individual concepts, realised, if not throughout
the world of Spirit, " for and in the particulars" which comnpose
them ? Dr. Litt's remarks on the meanings of words connect his
paper with that by Dr. Pos of Amsterdam, in a later part of the
book, on The PhilosophicalSignificance of ComparativeSemantics.
The present reviewer regrets that he is not qualified to do justice
to the interesting views put forward in this article, or to many
other of the varied topics raised throughout the volume. What
has here been written by.way of appreciationand of criticism will
suffice at all events to show the value of the Festschriftfor contem-
porarythought, alike by reasonof the intrinsicmerits of its contents
and its opening out fresh avenues of thought on problems of high
importanceboth to philosophersand to historians.'
W. G. DE BURGH.

The Rise of European Liberalism. By H. J. LASKI. London:

GeorgeAllen & Unwin, Ltd. 1936. Pp. 287. 7s. 6d.
THIS book is an attempt to reinforcethe argument of the author's
previous work, The State in Theory and Practice, by a historical
account. It sets out to describe the development of liberalism in
Europe, beginning with the Reformation and going down through
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These three periods are
fully discussedin the three main chapters of the book. We should
then expect a still fuller discussionof the nineteenth century, which
Prof. Laski describesas " the epoch of liberal triumph ", and which
certainly saw the most complete and significant developments of
the liberal point of view. But, for some reason, this period is
dismissed in a few perfunctory pages in the " Conclusion", which
is mainly concernedwith the beginningof the downfallof Liberalism
in the post-war period: even that is treated comparatively briefly
in what is little more than a summary of the argumentof The State
in Theory and Practice. It is difficult to see any reason for this
neglect of the most important period, and it is certainly a grave
defect in the book.
Judging it by what it does do, one may say that the book shows
many of the characteristicexcellences of the author's work, great
learning, deep earnestnessof purpose,and an attractive and readable
style. Some of the incidental discussions of particular points are
1 A completebibliography of Dr. Cassirer'spublishedwritings,classified
accordingto contents,by Dr. Klibanskyand Dr. Solmitz,is appended
to the contributions.The index is excellent. Praiseis also due to the
varioustranslatorsfor their Englishrenderingsof the articlesby foreign
scholars.