Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/499

Rh about this existing state. Every event is a means to an end; it is purposive. Either some seemingly unimportant event has widened into numerous ends or the many events have united to produce a given end. According to this point of view, the historian eliminates factors which seemingly have no purposive relation to the result. These effects are employed to explain causes rather than that causes are shown blindly to produce effects. As Mr. Freeman constantly insisted:

The present is the purposed end and is to be explained by the means which brought it into being. The past is the means and can only be understood in the light of the end which it is to bring about. In the natural sciences there is no such view of phenomena as this predominating. Chemical affinities are not regarded as means to bring about ends, but as forces which produce effects blindly and necessarily and will do so on all occasions; there is nothing arbitrary about the individual result; but in history we are dealing with human society, where movement is caused by volition, by "individual will acts." As far as man can perceive, history is made, not entirely, of course, but very materially by purposive ideas and not wholly by the blind action of chemical-physical forces.

Instinctively one asks whether this teleological view corresponds with the actual state of society, and the answer must be negative. Studying society carefully before any great historical movement, it would seem that out of it any number of events might emerge. There are possibilities of many great movements from the conditions present; and, after we know the outcome, we have a case of double sixes appearing when the dice are thrown. We may argue from the double sixes back to the cause, if we will; but from the causes ascertained by us, double twos might have resulted as well. The solution of a problem in probabilities is the final result of any science which studies human dynamics.

We have hit upon the weakness in any argument to prove history a science comparable to the natural sciences. The scientist believes in the universal reign of causality and fixes as the goal of his search the establishment of causal relations between his phenomena which have truth in reality, that is, objective truth. The belief in the persistency of such causal relations assures him that there lurks no subjective element in his result. Now the phenomena of developing society are of such a nature that any association of causal relation between them will generally contain an element of uncertainty, because there is lacking an objective criterion; and hence the mind hesitates to assume that a knowledge of the complete cause is ascertained or that the effect must have followed the causes which can be determined. That all which happens in society is the result of effective causes can not be denied by