History: Its Subject Matter and Tasks

The subject-matter of history is human affairs, men in action, .things which have happened and how they happened; concrete events fixed in time and space, and their grounding in the thoughts and feelings of men—not things universal and generalized; events as complex and diversified as the men who wrought them, those rational beings whose knowledge is seldom sufficient, whose ideas are but distantly related to reality, and who are never moved by reason alone. Yet in all intelligent historical quest there is, underneath, a discreet, tentative search for the typical and recurrent in the psyche and actions of man (even in his unreason), and a search for a morphology of human affairs, curbed though that search be by the recognition that absent from the life of communities is the integration peculiar to living organisms: “fifty men do not make a centipede.” On the practical side history should help man to master the past immanent both in his person and in his social setting, and induce in him a fuller understanding of the present through a heightened awareness of what is, or is not, peculiar to his own age.