Page:The Hero in History.djvu/96

96 the innocent into believing that it has a hidden purpose and the pious into the blasphemy that the judgment of history is the judgment of God.

If we seek understanding, and not salvation, from the pages of history, we will not fail to recognize the might-have-beens of the past. Some of them may turn out as relevant to the chances of the future as a recognized mistake is to the successful action that follows it. These might-have-beens of history are not ghostly echoes of what people merely hoped for, but objective possibilities that were missed—sometimes for want of a hero, sometimes for want of a horse, sometimes for want of a shoe, but most of the time for want of intelligence, particularly in realizing the objective possibilities of good.

We may compare the process of history to a gnarled ancient tree, still in healthy growth, whose trunk is the human race with interlacing boughs arching in many directions. Along each bough, large and then smaller limbs branch off, down to the very twigs. Here and there signs point to a branch of a twin stem that had been lopped off, while its other has grown to tremendous dimensions. At other places, what started out as an independent bough rounds off to a knotty protuberance. Under its mass of foliage, dead, rotting limbs can be found. A skilful gardener might once have trimmed it into a symmetrical form or other pleasing shapes, but the job would be difficult now. And it would have to be repeated yearly, for new shoots are put forth every season. It is exposed to quick destruction by lightning and to slow death by poisonous fungi. And there is no common agreement about the taste of its fruit.

We can easily imagine boughs of the tree in places where there are none now, less easily the branches that might have forked from these absent boughs, but we can guess only wildly at where the twigs and leaves would stem off from our imagined branches. We can easily see when we look at the living tree, more readily than when we experience living history, because our eyes trace a geometrical pattern, that if any of the actual had hot developed or had been destroyed, everything that grew on it and out of it would be non-existent. From this it does not follow, as we have seen, that the trunk “explains” the bough, the bough the branch, the branch the twig, the twig the leaf. The first is only the necessary condition of the second.

The architectural pattern of the tree is much simpler than the casual relationships of history. The tree of history has no “true”