APPENDIX A LXV 



they know nothing about them. East or West, however, it remains true 

 that a fact which calls up no other facts is meaningless. The root 

 of the word "about" is ''out." What lies outside of the thing must 

 be apprehended before the inside of it can be understood. As Carlyle 

 says: "Only in the whole is the partial to be truly discerned." Only 

 through some knowledge of the state of parties at Rome, of the 

 republican traditions of the state, of the civil struggles of the previous 

 thirty or forty years, of Caesar's own career as statesmen and soldier, 

 can we have any true conception of the meaning of his assassination 

 by Brutus, Cassius and the rest. Failing such knowledge he is no 

 more to us than the Akhound of Swat was to the man who set thousands 

 laughing over the not essentially ridiculous fact of his demise. 



The facts of life form a whole, consequently any analysis of them 

 must be more or less artificial. When and where, for example, did the 

 French R3volution begin? When and where did it end? Some doubt 

 whether it has ended yet. We cannot pick an event or a fact off the tree 

 of history as we pick an apple off an apple-tree. The apple will come 

 off by itself, without necessarily disturbing other apples, and, when 

 we get it, we get the whole of it. The fact does not come off by itself, 

 and whole ; it is vitally connected with other facts, and just where to 

 sever it is often a troublesome question. This aspect of the matter 

 must have been present to the mind of Carlyle when he exclaimed : 

 "Consider history, with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into remote 

 time, emerging darkly out of the mysterious eternity!" And again 

 when he wrote: "By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that 

 we call human history — an abbatis of trees and brushwood, a world- 

 wide jungle at once growing and dying — you will find the fibrous roots 

 of this day's occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, 

 of Tubal-cain and Triptolemus. . .At bottom there is no perfect history, 

 there is none such conceivable. Histories are as perfect as the historian 

 is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul." If the Sage of Chelsea 

 and the author of "The Rambler" have met in the Elysian Fields, 

 they may perhaps have thrashed out this matter of the nature and 

 bounds of history. Carlyle had the advantage of being born nearly 

 a century later than Johnson and, it must be admitted, was much the 

 profounder nature of the two. The great German historian Droysen 

 speaks of the moral world as "an endless interlocking of actions, 

 situations, interests and passions." It is clear that, from such an in- 

 terlocking, facts cannot so easily be disengaged. To isolate a fact ab- 

 solutely is almost as impossible as the task which was set Shylock of 

 taking his pound of flesh without shedding a drop of blood. 



Let two men work independently on the same period of history; 

 give them access to the same documents and other sources of information. 



