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I

WRITING some ten years ago in his place of refuge during the German occupation of northern Italy, Mr. Bernard Berenson set down his thoughts on what he called the `Accidental View of History': `It 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.'2.1 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 to the Director of this great institution and his colleagues for the honour which they have done me by inviting me 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 done his work too well. For Comte's views have affected the categories of our thought more deeply than is commonly supposed. Our view of the natural sciences, of the material basis of cultural evolution, of all that we call progressive, rational, enlightened, Western ; our view of the relationships of institutions and of public symbolism and ceremonial to the emotional life of individuals and societies, and consequently our view of history itself, owes a good deal to his teaching and his influence. His grotesque pedantry, the unreadable dullness of much of his writing, his vanity, his eccentricity, his solemnity, the pathos of his private life, his dogmatism, his authoritarianism, his philosophical fallacies, all that is bizarre and utopian in his character and writings, need not blind us to his merits. The father of sociology is by no means the ludicrous figure he is too often represented as being. He understood the role of natural science and the true reasons for its prestige better than most contemporary thinkers. He saw no depth in mere darkness; he demanded evidence; he exposed shams; he denounced intellectual impressionism; he fought many metaphysical and theological mythologies, some of which, but for the blows he struck, might have been with us still; he provided weapons in the war against the enemies of reason, many of which are far from obsolete today. Above all he grasped the central issue of all philosophy--the distinction between words (or thoughts) that are about words, and words (or thoughts) that are about things, and thereby helped to lay the foundation of what is best and most illuminating in modern empiricism; and, of course, he made a great mark on historical thinking. He believed in the application of scientific, i.e. naturalistic, canons of explanation in all fields: and saw no reason why they should not apply to relations of human beings as well as relations of things.

This doctrine was not original, and by his time growing some what out of date; the writings of Vico had been rediscovered; Herder had transformed the concepts of nation, society, and culture; Ranke and Michelet were changing both the art and the science of history. The notion that human history could be turned into a natural science by the extension to human beings of a kind of sociological zoology, analogous to the study of bees and beavers, which Condorcet had so ardently advocated and so confidently prophesied--this simple behaviourism had provoked a reaction against itself. It was seen to be a distortion of the facts, a denial of the evidence of direct experience, a deliberate suppression of much of what we knew about ourselves, our motives, purposes, choices, perpetrated in order to achieve by hook or by crook a single, unitary method in all knowledge. Comte did not commit the enormities of a La Mettrie or a Büchner. He did not say that history was, or was reducible to, a kind of physics; but his conception of sociology pointed in that direction--of one complete and all embracing pyramid of scientific knowledge; one method; one truth; one scale of rational, `scientific' values. This naive craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience is with us still.


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