Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/371

 THE SOCIAL WILL 355

doubt at once, in the use of them only as methods there lurk real dangers, since they hide fact. Distinguish nature from man, separate prehistoric man from historic man, identify human life only with its records and institutions and visible signs gener- ally, and you rob it of its very vitality. The prehistoric man, the natural man, the nature with which man is at one, lives now, not merely then, and lives in and with the human creature of history, not outside of him. Of course, the new history, so called, if I do not misunderstand it, resorting as it does to such sciences as psychology and sociology and anthropology, and to still more distinctly natural sciences, such as geology and meteorology and geography, may be said to be admitting prehistoric and natural man to history; but the new history is far from being every his- torian's history, and it is not itself fully awake to its own pre- suppositions.

So the historian may protest; but the cue for the right reply to him really comes from the recent developments in his own field. The proper study of history is man as man, not man merely as then or now, and man as natural in being human. Some may still choose history as a mere story, which is only better for being told artistically, of specific men and specific deeds ; some may prefer history as a great museum of authentic facts from all times and places; but suffice it to say, without any slight to the interest of the story or the worth of the museum, that either an isolated man, a man cut off from his fellows or from nature in time or in space, or a disintegrated man and a scientific history will not mix.

Some historians, too, may still prefer the swinging-pendulum view, criticised perhaps too sharply already, and with this also those wonder-working battles between absolutely independent opponents that have made history, not a story, but a fairy-tale; but these are only details incidental either to the isolation of man that is, the identification of him with some particular form of life or to the disintegration of man. Limit man to only one side of himself, and the changes of his life must be both sudden and rhythmical. Divide him into separate parts, and his oppo- nents must be independent and his battles miraculous.