ABSTRACT
In the following pages I shall try to discuss some of the fundamental problems with which every thinking historian must wrestle now and then. We are told, 2 admittedly, that ‘British historians are not very ready to give an answer’ to what is described as a request, made by the reading public, ‘for a final interpretation of history’ or ‘the question why civilizations rise and fall’. I fully understand this reluctance which is, at least in part, an outcome of some of the best qualities of British historical scholarship, its realism, its soundness, its honesty. But does it necessarily follow that ‘the answers which are given are not put forward by the most learned or the most profound scholars’? I simply cannot believe that this is a fair statement. Is it a token of learnedness or profundity to be able to split one’s own mind so that a person may have certain beliefs and convictions of which he or she as a historian need take no notice? At the risk of being either classified among those historians of minor rank or accused of importing some foreign product, I propose to discuss a few of the fundamental questions and thus to approach, if possible, ‘a more definite judgement upon the pattern of history and the meaning of human existence’.
