THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
THESE lectures are Primarily an attempt to offer a contribution to the history of ideas; and Since the term is often used in a Vaguer sense than that which I have in mind, it seems necessary, before Proceeding to the main business in hand, to give some brief account of the province, purpose, and method of the general sort of inquiry for which I should wish to reserve that designation. By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. it is differentiated Primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new group ings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial Procedure may be said though the parallel has its dangers - to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of Philosophi cal doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard~and~iast individual Systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unitideas. The total body of doctrine of any Philosopher or school is almost always a complex and heterogeneou5 aggregate and often in ways which the Philosopher himself does not suspect. It is not only a compound but an unstable compound, though, age after age, each new Philosopher usually forgets this melancholy truth. One of the results of the quest of the unit-ideas in such a compound is, I think, bound to be a livelier sense of the fact that most Philosophic systems are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in their components. When the student reviews the vast sequence of arguments and opinions which fill our historical textbooks, he is likely to feel bewildered by the multiplicity and seeming diversity of the matters presented. Even if the array of material is simplified somewhat by the aid of conventional and largely misleading - classifications of philosophers by schools or -isms, it still appears extremely various and complicated; each age seems to evolve new species of reasonings and conclusions, even though upon the same old problems. But the truth is that the number of essentially distinct philosophical ideas or dialectical motives is - as the number of really distinct jokes is said to be decidedly limited, though, no doubt, the primary ideas are considerably more numerous than the primaryjokes. The seeming novelty of many a system is due solely to the novelty of the application or arrangement of the old elements which enter into it. When this is realized, the history as a whole should look a much more manageable thing. I do not, of course, mean to maintain that essentially novel conceptions, new problems and new modes of reasoning about them, do not from time to time emerge in the history of thought. But such increments of absolute novelty seem to me a good deal rarer than is sometimes supposed. It is true that, juSt as chemical compounds differ in their sensible qualities from the elements composing thcm, so the elements of philosophical doctrines, in differing logical combinations, are not always readily recognizable; and, prior to analysis, even the same complex may appear to be not the same in its differing expressions, because of the diversity of the philosophers' temperaments and the consequent inequality in the distribution of emphasis among the several parts, or because of the drawing of dissirnilar conclusions from partially identical premises. To the common logical or pseudo-logical or affective ingredients behind the surface-dissimilarities the historian of individual ideas will seek to penetrate.
These elements will not always, or usually, correspond to the terms which we are accustomed to use in naming the great historic conceptions of mankind. There are those who have attempted to write histories of the idea of God, and it is well that such histories should be written. But the idea of God is not a unit-idea. By this I do not mean merely the truism that different men have employed the one name to signify superhuman beings of utterly diverse and incongruous kinds; I mean also that beneath any one of these beliefs you may usually discover something, or several things, more elemental and more explanatory, if not more significant, than itself. It is true that the God of Aristotle had almost nothing in common with the God of the Sermon on the Mount - though, by one of the strangest and most momentous paradoxes in Western history, the philosophical theology of Christendom identified them, and defined the chief end of man as the imitation of both. But it is also true that Aristotle's conception of the being to whom he gave the most honorific name he knew was merely one consequence of a certain more general way of thinking, a species of dialectic (of which I shall later speak) not peculiar to him but highly characteristic of the Greek and almost wholly foreign to the ancient Jewish mind - which has historically manifested its influence in ethics and aesthetics, and sometimes even in astronomy, as well as in theology. And it would, in such a case, be to the prior idea, at once more fundamental and more variously operative, that the historian of ideas would apply his method of inquiry. It is in the persistent dynamic factors, the ideas that produce effects in the history of thought, that he is especially interested. Now a formulated doctrine is sometimes a relatively inert thing. The conclusion reached by a process of thought is also not infrequently the conclusion of the process of thought. The more significant factor in the matter may be, not the dogma which certain persons proclaim be that single or manifold in its meaning - but the motives or reasons which have led them to it. And motives and reasons partly identical may contribute to the production of very diverse conclusions, and the same substantive conclusions may, at different periods or in different minds, be generated by entirely distinct logical or other motives.