Concepts and Categories by MacIntyre Alasdair Williams Bernard Berlin Isaiah Hardy Henry

Author:MacIntyre, Alasdair, Williams, Bernard, Berlin, Isaiah, Hardy, Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

1 [Aristotle spoke of history (by contrast with poetry) as ‘what Alcibiades did and suffered’: Poetics 1451b11.]

1 Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago (Paris, 1847–9), i 392.

2 ‘In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity: and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results. […] Whoever is at all acquainted with what has been done during the last two centuries, must be aware that every generation demonstrates some events to be regular and predictable, which the preceding generation had declared to be irregular and unpredictable: so that the marked tendency of advancing civilisation is to strengthen our belief in the universality of order, of method, and of law. This being the case, it follows that if any facts, or class of facts, have not yet been reduced to order, we, so far from pronouncing them to be irreducible, should rather be guided by our experience of the past, and should admit the probability that what we now call inexplicable will at some future time be explained. This expectation of discovering regularity in the midst of confusion is so familiar to scientific men, that among the most eminent of them it becomes an article of faith: and if the same expectation is not generally found among historians, it must be ascribed partly to their being of inferior ability to the investigators of nature, and partly to the greater complexity of those social phenomena with which their studies are concerned.

‘[…] The most celebrated historians are manifestly inferior to the most successful cultivators of physical science: no one having devoted himself to history who in point of intellect is at all to be compared with Kepler, Newton, or many others […].

‘[Nevertheless] I entertain little doubt that before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as it now is to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material world.’ Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1857), i 6–7, 31.

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