How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [112]
Theories of H istory
We class history, the story of the past, more often under fiction than under science-if it must be affiliated with one or the other. If not, if history, that is, is allowed to rest somewhere in between the two main divisions of the kinds of books, then it is usually admitted that history is closer to fiction than to science.
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This does not mean that a historian makes up his facts, like a poet or story teller. However, we might get into trouble if we insisted too strongly that a writer of fiction makes up his facts. He creates a world, as we have said. But this new world is not totally different from our own-indeed, it had better not be-and a poet is an ordinary man, with ordinary senses by and through which he has learned. He does not see things that we cannot see ( he may see better or in a slightly different way ) . His characters use words that we use ( otherwise we could not believe in them ). It is only in dreams that human beings create really strange new worlds-yet even in the most fantastic dream the events and creatures of the imagination are made up out of elements of everyday experience. They are merely put together in strange new ways.
A good historian does not, of course, make up the past.
He considers himself responsibly bound by some concept or criterion of accuracy or facts. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the historian must always make up something.
He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did. He may have a general theory or philosophy, such as that Providence rules human affairs, and make his history fit that. Or he may abjure any such pattern, imposed as it were from the outside or above, and instead insist that he is merely reporting the real events that have occurred. But in that case he is likely to be forced to assign causes for events and motivations for actions. It is essential to recognize which way the historian you are reading is operating.
The only way to avoid taking either one or the other position is to assume that men do not do things for a purpose, or that the purpose, if it exists, is undiscoverable-in other words, that there is no pattern to history at all.
Tolstoy had such a theory about history. He was not a historian, of course; he was a novelist. But many historians have held the same view, particularly in modem times. The How to Read History 239
causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.
Because theories of history difer, and because a historian's theory affects his account of events, it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of reading history. And it is all the more important if the event in which we are interested has practical significance for us. It is probably of practical significance to all Americans that they know something about the history of the Civil War. We still live in the backwash of that great and sorry conflict; we live in a world it helped to make. But we cannot hope to understand it if we look at it through the eyes of only one man, or one side, or one faction of modem academic historians. The other day we opened a new Civil War history and noted that its author offered it as "an impartial, objective history