Читать книгу Men and Deeds - John Buchan - Страница 5

Table of Contents

I have put before you a few crucial moments in history, when a great event has been determined by some small thing which it is difficult to describe as anything but an accident—something which we cannot explain by reference to profound causes, something which it is not easy to rationalise. My argument is a modest one: simply that we should not attempt to impress our modern whim upon the immutable past, and press our theories of historical processes too far. We must have these theories, and they explain a great deal, but they do not explain everything. We must interpret as well as chronicle, we must attempt to show the interconnection of events; but let us be chary about large mechanical principles of interpretation which explain too much. Let us by all means accept the doctrine of predestination, whether in its metaphysical or theological form, so long as we do not try to show in detail how it works. The danger is not with it, for at bottom it is a poetic or religious conception rather than a scientific. The danger is rather with the pseudo-scientists, the Buckles and Guizots and Taines and their modern counterparts, who dogmatise about the details, and believe that they can provide a neat explanation of everything in the past by subsuming it under a dozen categories; and with the doctrinaires, like Marx and his school, who would fit the centuries into the iron bed of a single formula. The answer is an appeal to facts, to the stubborn nodules of the unrelated and the inexplicable which everywhere confront us. The romantic accident cannot be expelled by the mechanical doctrine. It will still come out of the void, alter the course of history, and disappear before it can be classified.

This parlour game, which I suggest to you for a winter fireside, has its own seriousness. To reflect how easily the course of things might have been different is to learn perspective and humility. The world is bigger and more intricate than we thought, and there are more things in heaven and earth than we can bring within the pale of any copy-book philosophy. To-day, physical science is in a modest mood. It admits frankly a large hinterland of mystery. ‘While Newton,’ David Hume wrote in his Dialogues, ‘seemed to draw off the veil from the mystery of Nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did, and ever will, remain.’ The physical scientist of to-day, though he may not approve the scepticism of Hume’s last sentence, is well aware of the imperfections of a mechanical creed. Philosophy, too, has, I think, learned humility. At any rate she has abated something of her exclusive arrogance, and the lines of Pope have almost become true:

‘Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,

And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense.’

Surely the Muse of History, whose domain has not the rigour of the natural sciences, or the ancient right of metaphysics to dogmatise, should not be behind her sisters in this noble modesty. I suggest as a suitable motto for Clio’s servants some words of one of the greatest of them, a passage of Burke in his Letters on a Regicide Peace:

‘It is often impossible, in these political enquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign, and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance; or, more piously (perhaps more rationally), to the occasional interposition and the irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.’