Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/51

33 precisely those conceptions of the intricacy of the social relations and of the plasticity of the individual, of which, as we have said, Hume had grasped the first principles. He conceives his problem to be indefinitely more simple than it has actually turned out to be. Human nature has, with him, an artificial, idealized simplicity; the individual is still too much man in the abstract. A juster appreciation of the manifold bonds of connection in which even the simplest and most isolated member of society stands, has shown later thinkers that the notion of man in general, as a complex of passions in general, has little significance for history. The events which history has to explain are always the acts of particular men who have been born and reared in a psychic environment of infinite complexity. Moreover, it is the unique and particular aspect of these acts in which history is interested. The conception of the plasticity of the individual under the influences of his social environment becomes, therefore, a principle both of universality and of individuality. Not only does it explain the necessary dependence of the individual upon the total condition of the society in which he originates, but, when the complexity of this manifold of relations is justly appreciated, it makes evident the fact that a given set of relations can never be duplicated. Individuality ceases, therefore, to mean isolated particularity, and becomes uniqueness of relation and function. As no two beings have exactly the same physical antecedents, so no two have precisely the same training and formative influences brought to bear upon them, and no two stand in exactly the same functional relations to other men. In a word, no two are precisely the same person. The problem of history is just the understanding and interpretation of this concrete particularity of the historical individual.

With this conception of real as opposed to abstract individuality has grown up a psychological method in history radically different from that of Hume. Instead of aiming to understand the individual as a complex of universal psychological laws, it