HISTORY AND PSYCHOLOGY 67 



fossilized bones, so the historian of a civiHzation, 'studying some 

 particular part of it, sees in advance and half predicts the character 

 of the rest'. 42 



(3) On the most philosophical level, we 'begin to search for 

 the general laws which regulate, not events only, but classes of 

 events, not such and such religion or literature, but a group of 

 literatures or religions'. And Taine is confident we shall find that 

 each large movement of civilization finds its 'sufficient and neces- 

 sary condition' in some 'moral disposition, or a combination of 

 moral dispositions' — i.e., in a psychological state. ^3 



Though Taine has defined his problem with great eloquence 

 and clarity, he is under no illusion concerning the ease of its 

 solution. True, writing in 1863, he claims that 'History now 

 attempts, or rather is very near attempting this method of re- 

 search', "^^ and works by Montesquieu, Renan, Mommsen, and 

 Tocqueville are cited to give substance to this claim. But he is 

 writing as a pioneer; proposing a method and goal, not boasting 

 o^ 3. fait accompli: 'History must search now-a-days for these rules 

 of human growth; with the special psychology of each special 

 formation it must occupy itself; the finished picture of these 

 characteristic conditions it must now labour to compose. No task 

 is more delicate or more difficult. . . .' Emphasizing that 'history 

 in its elements is a psychological problem', he indicates that, 

 though each personality type involved 'has its moral history and 

 its special structure', much analysis would be necessary to reveal 

 that structure, and 'barely yet has such a method been rudely 

 sketched'. 45 Sainte-Beuve, 'the German critics', and especially 

 Stendhal are cited as examples of what might be done. 



Finally, this conception of literary study, though it has been 

 decried as reducing literature to the role of a 'mere' social docu- 

 ment, actually exalts its subject as the most adequate mirror of 

 life: 'In this light, a great poem, a fine novel, the confessions of a 

 superior man, are more instructive than a heap of historians with 

 their histories. I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hundred 

 volumes of state papers for the memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of 

 St. Paul, the Table-talk of Luther, or the comedies of Aristo- 

 phanes. In this consists the importance of literary works: they are 

 instructive because they are beautiful; their utility grows with 

 their perfection ; and if they furnish documents it is because they 

 are monuments.' ^^ 



Indeed, it is in the very relations between literature and life 



