ABSTRACT
History does not Comprise all Facts. What is History? Every fact is not of itself an historical fact. A mountain is a fact but not an act, and it is not historical. A thought is both fact and act, but it is not historical so long as it remains merely ‘my thought,’ untranslated into the world of things we see and hear, into the visible and sonorous world. A ‘history of the world’ is truly so called only when it tells of the great process of mundane events, a process of change which, even when non-human, is of profound interest to man and of essential significance in the understanding of his history. If they were unchanging, not even the happy genius of Mr. Wells could hope to treat the ‘eternal hills’ as having a story or a history. But fortunately hills themselves need not be regarded as ‘dead things.’ The record of the activities of Etna or of the creeping desiccation of Rajputana is of more interest to the historian than the biographies of all the individual shepherds of Sicily, or of all the coolies of India, would probably prove to be. 4 History should be no respecter of persons, and no adulator of man. Owing, however, to the anthropocentric prepossessions of orthodox History-writing, it has been customary to treat volcanoes and god-haunted rivers as inactive matter of no consequence, and disconnected from the affairs of History. The result has been to confirm the baseless belief that the study of the affairs of man is. qualitatively distinct from the study of natural events. On the contrary, what is required is a study of happenings which control man, if man does not control them.
