THE LOGIC OF HISTORY 311 



HUMAN HISTORY NOT AN 'EVOLUTION 



Quite another view of history has been maintained by 

 Hegel, if his explanations about the Entwicldung des 

 objectiven Geistes (" the development of the objective mind ") 

 may be co-ordinated with our strictly logical categories of 

 the possible aspects of history. But I believe we are 

 entitled to say that it was a real evolution of mankind 

 that Hegel was thinking of; an evolution regarding man- 

 kind as spiritual beings and having an end, at least ideally. 

 One psychical state was considered by Hegel to generate 

 the next, not as a mere cumulation of elemental stages, 

 but in such a way that each of the states would represent 

 an elementally and an irreducibility in itself; and he 

 assumed that there was a continuous series of such stages 

 of the mind through the course of generations. Is there 

 any sufficient reason in historical facts for such an 

 assumption ? 



The mind " evolves " itself from error to truth by what 

 might be called a system of contradictions, according to 

 Hegel, with respect to logic as well as to morality; the 

 sum of such contradictions becoming smaller and less 

 complicated with every single step of this evolution. No 

 doubt there really occurs a process of logical and moral 

 refining, so to say, in the individual, and no doubt also, 

 the results of this process, as far as attained, can be 

 handed down to the next generation by the spoken word 

 or by books. But it is by no means clear, I think, that 

 this process is of the type of a real evolution towards an 

 end, so far as it relates to the actual series of generations 

 as such. On the contrary, it seems to me that we have 



