foreheads": this is the true point of departure which is also the point of arrival, for brute facts are history not only in its construction but in its self-construction. A corollary to this is that from the days of the Greeks (to use a conventional phrase) history has ever been growing richer. We know the causes of civilization as little as did the Greeks, but we know the theory of civilization better than they knew it—we know, for instance, that poetry is an eternal form of the human spirit, and this they did not know or only understood obscurely. And so on through various phases of transcendentalism and false immanence until we come to the philosophy of history fashionable to-day, that of progress and civilization, which by some is believed to depend upon the discoveries of natural science.

But the philosophy of history always carries with it a transcendental element, something external to it, and it is not until this veil, of whatever substance it may be composed, is destroyed, that philosophy of history dies, to be immediately born again as, simply, history. This leads to the consideration of the problem of progress and decadence. What are these? For Croce they cannot be taken separately but if combined yield circularity, which is perpetually identical and perpetually diverse, and thus constitute the notion of development. Thus, too, there is no attainment of a positive end in history external to itself conceived as attainable either in time or only as infinitely to be approximated, but where the end is conceived as internal, that is to say, as development, we must hold that it is attained and a new prospect not yet attained at every instant. Finally, progress from evil to good or decadence from good to evil must be taken as really the passage from good to better, in which evil is "the good itself seen in the light of the better." I omit for reasons of space the illustrative proofs of this given by Croce in which, for instance, he shows how the middle ages really represent an advance upon antiquity, although at the period of the Renaissance the opposite was believed.

Should history take sides? Yes, it should take both sides

and give by thought a judgment upon life that has once been lived. Where patriotism or other practical elements appear we cannot have altogether unbiassed history, and it is probable that all history contains some element of the practical. History cannot be said even to have begun until all feelings of partisanship have been superseded and at least an attempt is made to see that the particular epoch or event in question actually did contribute to the period during which it appeared. All epochs and all events are productive of something, and all represent progress in respect of their predecessors though it is admittedly difficult, for instance, to discern the progress of say the Ninth Century A.D. as compared with the Fourth Century B.C. It is perfectly true that every particular person, institution, work, and thought is destined to perish and that the truth which it represented will also perish, though many people are apt to attach themselves so strongly to what interests them that they "attribute the immortality which belongs to the spirit in universal to one of its particular forms." Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse, is true in one sense—the empirical-false in the other -the universal-for history does not die like the individual who in the words of Alcmæon of Crete is unable τηv åρxǹv Tậ Téλει πρoσáчaι, it lives eternally because "it always joins the beginning to the end.”

IV.

Are there certain facts worthy of history and others which must be banished from its content, as Hegel and others have believed? No, each and every fact may be of value to the historian. There is no logical criterion of choice, "for the criterion is the choice itself conditioned by knowledge of the actual situation." History must not be here confounded with erudition and the methods of the one transferred to the other. There is no fear of being overwhelmed with details because the problem of every historian is prepared for him on every occasion by life and is always solved by thought " which passes from the confusion of life to the distinctness of consciousness" in a

manner similar to the appearance of art emerging from the obscurity of mere feeling to the clarity of representation.

The conception of History as that which has its end and explanation not outside but within itself, which is not external to philosophy but coincides with philosophy, amounts to an identification of History with thought itself which is always both philosophy and history. Thus like an invalid set free from the props and plasters of the doctors history rises-for the first time in the course of history-to its own full height and contemplates philosophy face to face as equal and identical with it. But the objection may here be made: You have truly freed history from its trammels, but what is now left for us, since the individual is shown to be equivalent to the universal, other than absorption in God: mysticism? The answer to this is that mysticism is by nature negative, it is the negation of empirical distinctions, which certainly leave thought free of illusions but not yet full of itself. Mysticism is a violent reaction from naturalism and transcendentalism but retains traces of what it has negated. A really efficacious negation of the above thesis is brought about not by mysticism but by idealism in the unity which is distinction. The act of thought is the consciousness of the spirit as self-consciousness and this implies distinction between "object and subject, theory and practice, thought and will, universal and particular, imagination and intellect, utility and morality." To think is to judge, and the two terms of which such thought consists are not two discreet realities but are the one reality of dialectical unity. Thus when the will-o'-the-wisps of empiricism have been extinguished, darkness does not supervene, because the light of the distinction is to be found in history itself, which is the intrinsic knowledge of facts. Here its unity with philosophy becomes yet more evident, because "the better philosophy penetrates its own distinctions, the better it penetrates the particular, and the closer its embrace of the particular, the closer its possession of its own proper conceptions."

214

BENEDETTO CROCE'S " HISTORIOGRAPHY.”

Since there is no such thing as general or universal history opposed to special histories, the distrust of so-called pure philosophers, pure politicians, pure economists, is explained, for it is felt that these individuals, owing to their one-sidedness, fail to understand even their own speciality, which they have reduced to the form of a skeleton by abstracting from it the flesh and blood of life. Hence the demand that historians shall acquire universal minds, and that their histories, although perforce they will omit very much, shall be also in a way universal.

Read at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Mind Association at Hulme Hall, Manchester, July 16th, 1922.

XIII. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY.

By A. N. WHITEHEAD.

THE most obvious contribution of the scientific doctrine of Relativity to the problems of philosophy is to strengthen the type of argument on which Berkeley relied. Accordingly, those systems of philosophy which rely on this type of argument thereby receive additional support. I will endeavour to explain my meaning, but I am painfully conscious that it would have been better to have had the grounds of this evening's discussion laid out by an adequately trained philosopher.

I presume that the fundamental position of idealism is that all reality can be construed as an expression of mentality. For example, I suppose that Mr. Alexander is a realist because for him mind is one among other items occurring in that evolution of complexes which is the very being of space-time. On the other hand, Mr. Wildon Carr is an idealist because he finds ultimate reality in the self-expression of monadic mentality. The test, therefore, of idealism is the refusal to conceive reality apart from explicit reference to some or all of the characteristic processes of mentality, it may be either thought, or experience, or knowledge, or the expression of valuation in the form of a historical process, the valuation being both the efficient and the final cause of the process. Now Berkeley's argument in favour of this central position of idealism is that when you examine the objects of sense-perception they are essentially personal to the observer. He enforces by a variety of illustrations the doctrine that there is nothing left when you have torn the observer out of the observation. The planet,

S