Problems in Philosophy

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... XII. A Philosophy Of History. A GREAT river offers a conspicuous example of innumerable and obscure, yet determinate and obvious, forces present in a plain, yet immeasurable, fact. It is a favorable example of the concurrence of many conditions, remote from each other in time and in place, in a result which, in despite of delay, change, and variety, is of a very assured order. It presents, moreover, an illustration of a constant characteristic of human knowledge, when applied to complex facts: the general conditions and forces involved are readily understood, while the precise form in which they are at any one moment offered to us is quite beyond our scope of apprehension. Distant mountain ranges, snows, rains, forests, the character of soils, intervening plains, temperature, climate, the silt the river carries with it, the marshy levels that delay it, the rocky beds that precipitate it, the geologic events long passed which outlined the regions through which it finds its way,--these are a few of the more obvious conditions which concur in its general formation and precise states. Human history is the most extended, the most mobile, the most complicated conjunction of near and remote energies which anywhere offers itself to us. The physical, the intellectual, the social, the spiritual worlds are all put under contribution to furnish its controlling forces, and all find their latest, fullest, and most subtile expression in it. Human history, like the river, is not to be perfectly understood and measured in any one movement or at any one time in the nature and the sources of the forces taking part in it; it is to be comprehended, so far as it is capable of comprehension, under general conditions and primary impulses, which disclose themselves here and there in def...