第14单元  鲁滨逊的《新史学》片段

James Robinson

James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), by common consent, did more than any other American historian to develop both academic and popular interest in the historiographical movement called the “New History.” The New History had two principal and related characteristics. It repudiated the study of history for its own sake, placing it instead at the service of comprehension of the present and improvement of the future. Rather than concentrating on political and diplomatic events, the New History gave primary attention to social, economic, and intellectual developments.

       

The New History, Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook, New York: the MacMillan Company, 1912, pp.65-69.

 

The rapidly developing specialization in history, which is the result of more exacting scientific standards, forces upon the historical student a new and fundamental question. If all departments of knowledge have now become historical, what need is there of history in general? If politics, war, art, law, religion, science, literature, be dealt with genetically, will not history tend inevitably to disintegrate into its organic elements? Professor Seeley of the University of Cambridge believed that it would. Twenty years ago he declared that history was after all but the name of '' a residuum which has been left when one group of facts after another has been taken possession of by some science; that residuum which now exists must go the way of the rest, and that time is not very distant when a science will take possession of the facts which are still the undisputed property of the historian." 

Now the last question that I have to discuss is whether history, after gaining the whole world, is destined to lose her own soul. Let us assume that historical specialization has done its perfect work, that every distinct phase of man's past, every institution, sentiment, conception, discovery, achievement, or defeat which is recorded has found its place in the historical treatment of the particular branch of research to which it has been assigned according to the prevailing classification of the sciences. This process of specialization would serve to rectify history in a thousand ways, and to broaden and deepen its operations, but, instead of destroying it, it would rather tend, on the contrary, to demonstrate with perfect clearness its absolute indispensability. Human affairs and human changes do not lend themselves to an exhaustive treatment through a series of monographs upon the ecclesiastical or military organization of particular societies, their legal procedure, agrarian system, their art, domestic habits, or views on higher education. Many vital matters would prove highly recalcitrant when one attempted to force them into a neat, scientific cubby-hole. Physical, moral, and intellectual phenomena are mysteriously interacting in that process of life and change which it falls to the historian to study and describe. 

Man is far more than the sum of his scientifically classifiable operations. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, but it is not like either of them. Nothing could be more artificial than the scientific separation of man's religious, aesthetic, economic, political, intellectual, and bellicose properties. These may be studied, each by itself, with advantage, but specialization would lead to the most absurd results if there were not some one to study the process as a whole; and that some one is the historian. Imagine the devotees of the various social sciences each engaged in describing his particular interest in the Crusades, or the Protestant Revolt, or the French Revolution. When they had finished, would not the historian have to retell the story, utilizing all that they had accomplished, including what they had all omitted, and rectifying the errors into which each of the specialists had fallen on account of his ignorance of the general situation? 

It would seem at first sight as if those most familiar with each special subject of research — such as constitutional law, botany, theology, philology, painting, chemistry, economics, medicine — would be the only properly qualified persons to trace its history; but the scientific specialist is likely to suffer from two disadvantages. In the first place, his very familiarity with the principles of his particular branch of knowledge makes it difficult for him to conceive remote and unfamiliar conditions which historically lie back of the conceptions which he entertains. In the second place, the discovery, use, and interpretation of historical material seem to require a somewhat prolonged and special training, which only the professional historical student is likely to possess. He is constantly shocked by a certain awkwardness which those inexperienced in historical research are almost sure to betray. They make mistakes which he would not make, in spite of their greater knowledge of the subject with which they are dealing. This doubtless accounts for the fact that we have as yet no tolerably satisfactory history of natural science, or even of its special branches. There are, moreover, certain important phases of human thought and endeavor where the trained historian will have no particular difficulty in mastering the technical detail sufficiently to deal satisfactorily with them. Indeed, even the most subtle of the modern sciences, not excluding mathematics, were sufficiently simple two hundred years ago to enable a well-equipped historical student, with some taste for a particular human interest, to trace its development down until very recent times. So it may fall out, as time goes on, that historical students will tend to specialize more and more, and will supply the deficiency which students of contemporary branches of science are not ordinarily in a position to satisfy, — but more will be said on this subject, especially in regard to intellectual history, in a later essay. 

I have frankly revealed the historian's ignorance; he recognizes this in all humility, and is making every effort to remedy it by the application of highly scientific methods. He shares it, moreover, with the representatives of all the social sciences who attempt to carry their work back into the past. The historian will become more and more interested, I believe, in explaining the immediate present, and fortunately his sources for the last two or three centuries are infinitely more abundant and satisfactory than for the whole earlier history of the world. He is criticizing and indexing his sources and rendering them available to an extent which would astonish a layman unfamiliar with the tremendous amount that has been accomplished in this respect during the past fifty years. 

We have now seethed the kid in its mother's milk. We have explained history by means of history. The historian, from a narrow, scientific point of view, is a little higher than a man of letters and a good deal lower than an astronomer or a biologist. He need not, however, repudiate his literary associations, for they are eminently respectable, but he will aspire hereafter to find out, not only exactly how things have been, but how they have come about. He will remain the critic and guide of the social sciences whose results he must synthesize and test by the actual fife of mankind as it appears in the past. His task is so fascinating and so comprehensive that it will doubtless gradually absorb his whole energies and wean him in time from literature, for no poet or dramatist ever set before himself a nobler or a more inspiring ideal, or one making more demands upon the imagination and resources of expression, than the destiny which is becoming clearer and clearer to the historian.