Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/163

No. 2.] prejudice of any other. The history of the stars is not the history of man. So to conceive it is to make the history of man contributory and incidental to astronomy, and this man as the writer of histories cannot succeed in doing. He can write other histories only as he is willing to become an observer of the world but not a factor in it. He can regard himself as something incidental to another's history only through a kind of forgetfulness of his personality, or by substituting for it a kind of dummy which behaves as he would, but without his reasons.

Xenophanes, we know, sought to disparage man by saying that if lions had hands and could paint they would paint their gods as lions; and this truthful remark has many times since been taken in that same sense of disparagement. Maeterlinck, on the other hand, has represented a dog as calling a boy his god. He thereby made the dog as stupid an animal as the men who call dogs their gods. We may say, consequently, that Xenophanes had the finer poetic feeling, but he appears to have missed altogether the profundity of his remark. Man can construe the world eventually only as his own history. His doing so is saved from egotism, however, so long as he knows what he is doing and why he does it. That knowledge is inconvenient at times. It often disturbs man's mind with thoughts of the rights of other histories. Consequently, he may often attempt to quell this disturbance by trying to write a history of the world which will be totally impersonal and inhuman. Then he becomes a materialist. Or he may convert the fact that he can write only a human history into an epistemology. Then he becomes an idealist. Or he may call upon evolution to explain it all. Then he becomes superstitious. Yet through all his blundering he has sounded the depths of his philosophy. He has discovered the world because he has discovered his history. That means that he has discovered the world to be a history and that any discovery of the world would be the discovery of a history.

Evolution is, therefore, pluralistic, and man tries to write many histories even if eventually he succeeds in writing only his own; but no history of evolution can be written. Every attempt to write one always gives us something other than a