SOME POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN

HISTORY AND NATURAL SCIENCE

By EDGAR WIND

I
SHALL be concerned here with some, but by no means with all, of
the points of contact between history and the
natural sciences. It is not my intcntion, for instance, to dwell on well-
known facts which have not ceased to be facts for being ignored or
forgotten by professional philosophers. In spite of Fichte—and some
minor autonomists ofthe mind—history (taken in the customary sense of
the term, as history of human fate and achievement) began only at a
certain stage of the develop¬ment of nature. The earth had to separate
from the sun and acquire such motion, shape, and temperature that living
beings could develop on it before History was (to adopt Kant's
phrase¬ology) 'made possible'.
When we, therefore, speak of 'points of contact' between nature and
history, we may begin by recalling the trivial fact that between the two
there is a contact in time and hence a transition. Once the form of this
transition is being inquired into, the most dreaded questions begin to
make their appear-ance. What is the relation between inorganic matter
and organic life? How did we evolve from a state of nature to one of
conscious control? How did 'primitive' man, magically subjecting
him¬self to nature's powers and apparently living in an almost a-
historical form, produce his 'civilized' descendant who, in the moulding
of his surroundings, creates and experiences historic changes ?—I shall
not discuss any of these questions. My problem is far more modest.
Instead of inquiring into cosmic or cultural events which may illustrate
the temporal intersection ofthe worlds of nature and history, I shall
confine myself to indicating some formal points of correspondence
between these two worlds—or, to be more precise, between the scientific
methods which render each of them an object of human knowledge and
experience.
The mere assertion that there are such correspondences may appear
heretical to many.' German scholars have taught for decades that, apart
from adherence to the most general rules of

256 SOME POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN

logic, the study of history and the natural sciences are to each other
as pole and antipole, and that it is the first duty of any historian to
forswear all sympathy with the ideals of men who would like to reduce
the whole world to a mathematical formula. This revolt was no doubt an
act of liberation in its time. To-day it is pointless. The very concept of
nature in opposition to which Dilthey proclaimed his Geisteswissenschaft
has long been aban¬doned by the scientists themselves, and the notion of
a descrip¬tion of nature which indiscriminately subjects men and their
fates like rocks and stones to its 'unalterable laws' survives only as a
nightmare of certain historians.
Thus it need not be symptomatic of a sinful relapse into the method
of thought so generously abused as 'positivistic', if in what follows some
examples are chosen to illustrate how the very questions that historians
like to look upon as their own are also raised in natural science. The all
too sedentary inhabitants of the 'Globus intellectualis' may, it is true,
think it incredible that their antipodes do not stand on their heads.
I. Document and Instrument
In defiance of the rules of traditional logic, circular argu¬ments are
the normal method of producing documentary evidence.
An historian who consults his documents in order to interpret some
political event can judge the value of these documents only if he knows
their place within the very same course of events about which he consults
them.
In the same way, an art-historian who from a given work draws an
inference concerning the development of its author turns into an art-
connoisseur who examines the reasons for attributing this work to this
particular master: and for this purpose he must presuppose the knowledge
of that master's development which was just what he wanted to infer.
This change of focus from the object to the means of inquiry, and the
concomitant inversion of object and means, is peculiar to most historical
studies, and the instances given may be multi¬plied ad lib. An inquiry
concerning the Baroque, which uses Bernini's theoretical utterances as a
source for explaining the style of his works, turns into a study of the role
of theory in the creative process of Bernini. An inquiry concerning
Caesar's monarchy and the principate of Pompey, making use of

Cicero's writings as its main source, becomes a study of the part

played by Cicero in the conflict between the Senate and the usurpers.
Generally speaking this might be termed the dialectic of the
historical document: that the information which one tries to gain with the
help of the document ought to be presupposed for its adequate
understanding.
The scientist is subject to the very same paradox. The physicist seeks
to infer general laws of nature by instruments themselves subject to these
laws. For measuring heat, a fluid like quicksilver is chosen as a standard,
and it is claimed that it expands evenly with increasing warmth. Yet how
can such an assertion be made without knowledge of the laws of
thermo¬dynamics? And again, how can these laws be known except by
measurements in which a fluid, e.g. quicksilver, is used as a standard?
Classical mechanics employs measuring rods and clocks that are
transferred from one place to another; the assumption being that this
alteration of place leaves untouched their constancy as measuring
instruments. This assumption, however, expresses a mechanical law (viz.
that the results of measurement are in¬dependent of the state of motion)
the validity of which must be tested by instruments which, in their turn,
are reliable only if the law assumed is valid.
The circle thus proves in science as inescapable as in history. Every
instrument and every document participates in the struc¬ture which it is
meant to reveal.'
II. The Intrusion of the Observer
It is curious that Dilthey should have considered this participa¬tion
as one of the traits which distinguish the study of history from the natural
sciences. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissen¬schaften he admits that
the study of 'social bodies' is less precise than that of 'natural bodies'.
'And yet', he adds, 'all this is more than counterbalanced by the fact that I
who experience and know myself inwardly, am part of this social
body. . . . The individual is, on the one hand, an element in the
interactions
For a more detailed analysis of this fact and an exposition of some of
its wider implications, cp. Das Experiment and die Metaphysik,
Tubingen, 1934, and 'Can the Antinomies be restated?' Psyche, vol. xiv,
934•

258 SOME POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN

of society, . . . reacting to its effects in conscious will-direction and
action, and is at the same time the intelligence contemplat¬ing and
investigating all this' (p. 46 sq.).
That human agents, who form the substance of what Dilthey calls
'the socio-historical reality', experience and know them-selves 'inwardly'
is a bold assertion. It transforms one of the most troublesome moral
precepts (`Know thyself!') into a plain and ordinary matter of fact, which
is contradicted by both ancient and modern experience. Whatever
objections may be made to the current psychology of the unconscious, it
is un¬deniable that men do not know themselves by immediate intui¬tion
and that they live and express themselves on several levels. Hence, the
interpretation of historical documents requires a far more complex
psychology than Dilthey's doctrine of immediate experience with its
direct appeal to a state of feeling. Peirce wrote in a draft of a psychology
of the development of ideas : `it is the belief men betray, and not that
which they parade, which has to be studied."
Once the direct appeal to inner experience is abandoned, Dilthey's
remark ceases to contain anything that a physicist might not apply to
himself: 'I myself, who am handling appa-ratuses and instruments, am a
part of this physical world; the individual (i.e. the physical technician and
observer) is, on the one hand, an element in the interactions of nature, . . .
and he is at the same time the intelligence calculating and investigat¬ing
all this.'
Let it not be objected that by this 'physical travesty' the meaning of
Dilthey's statement is completely destroyed. True, the profundity has
disappeared, and what remains seems to be rather trivial. But what the
statement now conveys is not only simple, but also true: The investigator
intrudes into the process that he is investigating. This is what the supreme
rule of methodology demands. In order to study physics, one must be
physically affected; pure mind does not study physics. A body is needed
—however much the mind may 'interpret'—which transmits the signals
that are to be interpreted. Otherwise, there would be no contact with the
surrounding world that is to be investigated. Nor does pure mind study
history. For that purpose, one must
"Issues of Pragmaticism', in The Monist, xv, , 19o3, p. 485.
Reprinted in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, v, p. 297,
Harvard University Press, x934 (ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss).

be historically affected; caught by the mass of past experience that

intrudes into the present in the shape of 'tradition' : de¬manding,
compelling, often only narrating, reporting, pointing to other past
experience which has not as yet been unfolded. Again, the investigator is
in the first instance a receiver of signals to which he attends and which he
pursues, but on whose transmission he has only a very limited influence.
The register¬ing and digesting of these signs, the functioning of this
whole `receiving apparatus', cannot be reduced to the vague formula of
traditional antitheses (`body and soul', 'inward and outward') . The only
antithesis that does apply is that between 'part' and `whole'. By his
intrusion into the process that is to be studied, the student himself, like
every one of his tools, becomes part- object of investigation; 'part-object'
to be taken in a twofold sense: he is, like any other organ of
investigation, but a part of the whole object that is being investigated.
But equally it is only apart of himself that, thus externalized into an
instrument, enters into the object-world of his studies.
A limiting case might certainly be imagined where this part of his
person becomes equal to the whole: where the historian ceases to be
anything but a product of the history he imagines himself writing; where
the student of documents is himself at best only another document of the
historical contagion to which he is a prey. Nor will it be denied that this
limiting case is occa¬sionally almost reached; just as there are said to be
physicists whose working process comes alarmingly near to that of the
machines with which they are conversant. But if any one were to look
upon this as the normal condition, and to proclaim the `inescapability of
such material ties'—without a sense of the steps and grades that hold
good here—he would commit the mistake opposite to that which
dissolves all material connexions into mere associations of ideas.
However true it remains that pure mind cannot pursue either history or
physics, because these things do not affect it materially, it is also true that
the material contact does not suffice to supply these sciences with a
conscious agent. If the physicist were nothing but a physical apparatus,
there would be no physics; nor would history exist, if the historian were
merely an historical document. (The very formulation of these sentences
contains a contradiction, for the words 'apparatus' and 'document' cannot
be defined at all without relation to some one who uses them for some
purpose.)

It follows that we must admit a major or minor feat of in-telligence

in every act of measurement or textual criticism, but that we ought to
define this feat of intelligence as a mode of behaviour, that is, as a type of
event. The critical interpretation of a document by an historian,
considered as an act in time, is in the first instance an event, no less than,
say, the anger or joy caused by this document, as a biased contemporary
may have felt it. In the historian, too, if he is enthusiastic about his
sub¬ject, something of this anger or joy will reverberate. However, by
the application of the critical method the raw excitement is refined to a
more thoughtful mode of behaviour. He does not simply follow his
spontaneous emotion, instead he appeals (more or less accurately and
successfully) to a system of grammatical and critical rules, on which he
bases his interpretation and which, in their turn, are tested by being
applied.
Corresponding to these grammatical and critical axioms, the
experimental physicist has his axioms of measurement. He pre-supposes
them and appeals to their rules, in order to show that his method is
correct. But what is the basis of his confidence that these rules will be a
safe guide in the investigation of his subject? A 'pre-established
harmony', in the sense of Leibniz, is unaccept¬able to-day. So is
Spinoza's doctrine of a necessary identity in the order and connexion of
'things' and 'ideas'.' Kant had tried to eliminate the problem by the
'Copernican emotion' in his Critique of Pure Reason, which made the
order of things dependent upon the order of ideas, i.e. the forms of
judgement. Yet, in the Critique of Judgement, the problem of the
'harmony of nature with our understanding' (die Zusammenstimmung der
Natur unserem Erkenntnisvermogen) is again raised; only to be solved
once more by that a priori and generalizing method of reasoning which is
called 'transcendental deduction'. Here we have the crux of all such
theories :—the problem is neither capable, nor in need, of a universal
solution. What is actually an experi¬mental hypothesis has been taken for
a metaphysical or epistemo¬logical principle; which explains why all
these doctrines, without exception, provide a theory of truth, but not of
error.2 Error
Ethica, pars ii, prop. vii: 'Ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo
et connexio rerum.'
2 Cf. Spinoza's `privative' explanation of error (Ethica, pars ii, prop.
xxxv) based on the proposition: `1'slihil in ideis positivum est, propter
quod falsae dicuntur' (prop. xxxiii).

can only be accounted for if the methodical rules of investiga¬tion

are considered as part of the experimental hypothesis. The investigator
who constructs and manipulates his instruments believing that his method
conforms with the general laws of nature, may be compared with the
driver of a vehicle who, in a country whose language and habits he
knows but imperfectly, assumes that he is conforming with traffic
regulations. An epoch-making event in a laboratory is often not so very
different from an ordinary road accident. However, it is peculiar to the
physicist that—within controllable limits—he does not shun but seeks
these collisions, because by them he learns something of the structure of
the occurrences he wants to investigate, and of the rules of the game
which he hypothetically presupposes. `The physicist about to abandon
one of his hypotheses ought to rejoice, for he finds an unexpected
opportunity for a discovery' (Poincare, Science et Hypothese, iv, p. 9). It
is for the sake of these discoveries that he inserts himself into the
process, and the rules according to which he does so are proved by the
outcome of the experiment to be either true or false, or doubtful.
This intrusion, of which every investigator must be guilty if he
wishes to make any sort of contact with his material and to test the rules
of his procedure, is a thoroughly real event. A set of instruments is being
inserted, and the given constellation is thereby disturbed. The physicist
disturbs the atoms whose composition he wants to study. The historian
disturbs the sleep of the document that he drags forth from a dusty
archive. This word 'disturbance' is not to be taken as a metaphor, but is
meant literally. Even the astronomical physicist acts disturb¬ingly on
nature when he splits up a beam of light that has come from the stars, in
order to infer the direction and speed of their motion. True, he does not
disturb the star, but the nexus of nature in which the star is only a
member. To the historian it might, indeed, sound like a metaphor if he is
told that the document is disturbed by him. For involuntarily he pictures
it as a material piece of paper, which does not mind whether it is lying in
a cupboard or on a table. However, if we look upon it as an historical
object, and consider its present status—viz. how it has been discarded
and forgotten—as part of the historic process itself, then this process is
indeed 'dis¬turbed' by him who brings the forgotten words back to
memory; often a very unpleasant disturbance—as when a traditional

hero-worship is endangered by a disclosure of the hero's weak¬ness.

If the term 'disturbance' is taken in a sufficiently wide sense, so that it
embraces every amplification, confirmation, or intensification, that is to
say, every qualitative as well as every factual alteration of our belief, no
historical inquiry is ever undertaken without the intention of creating
such a disturbance.
It will be noticed that I am now speaking of disturbances that
concern ourselves, our own belief and our own behaviour, rather than the
objective order of historical events, which is the subject of our studies.
But between the objective order of historical events and our own belief
that is directed to and determined by it, no sharp boundary can be drawn.
If I speak of a traditional hero-worship as being disturbed by a
documentary discovery, this can be expressed in two forms, the one
having the objective order of events, the other our own belief, for its
subject:
r. The effect (Nachwirkung) of this man is modified by this
discovery.
2. Our present opinion of this man, owing to this discovery, differs
from that previously held.
Both sentences are perfectly equivalent, and I would strongly protest
were any one to say that the first sentence is meta-phorical, and only the
second can be taken literally. Viewed as an historical event, the 'effect' of
which the first sentence speaks is no less real than, let us say, the
transmission of light from a star, taken as a physical process. It can be
traced in his-torical space and time with the same precision as the
migration of light in the space-time-continuum of physics. It is true that
in the former case the way is not paved with Gaussian co-ordinates that
expand in four interchangeable dimensions, but is marked by symbols of
historical origin; yet they speak a language at least as insistent and
significant as any mathematical equation. In fact, in a competition
between science and history, the his¬torians would be sure to score one
point: in dealing with their symbols, they have long realized what the
physicists, dazzled by the polished appearance of their equations, have
only recently noticed; namely, that every discovery regarding the objects
of their inquiry reacts on the construction of their implements; just as
every alteration of the implements makes possible new discovery. The
'Hermeneutics' of Schleiermacher and Boeckh,

who in the field of philology gave this rule its classic expression,
might have carried as a motto the words that Eddington put at the end of
his book on the modern theory of gravitation: `We have found a strange
foot-print on the shores of the un-known. We have devised profound
theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have
succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And
to ! it is our own."
III. The Self-Transformation of Man
I may be pardoned for returning to the natural sciences with this
anthropomorphic phrase. For it would almost seem as if we had not yet
carried anthropomorphism far enough in this field. With the historical
approach it has proved impossible to separate man from his historical
antecedents. Every change of our ideas about our ancestors entails a
change of our ideas about ourselves and will indirectly affect our
behaviour. In precisely the same way, it ought to be recognized that those
successful disturbances by which we intrude into the natural world which
surrounds us amount in the last resort to dis¬turbances, that is
modifications, of our personal equipment. The dividing line between man
and his surroundings can no more be fixed in this case than the line of
division between man and his antecedents could be fixed in the other.
It is an old puzzle where to draw the line between man and the
objects of his environment. His head, we dare say, quite certainly belongs
to him; without it, he would lose his 'identity'. But how about his hair?
And if we let him have that, how about his hat? If his hat is taken away,
or its shape is altered, is not the entire form of the man altered as well? A
man accustomed to walking with a stick becomes another man if this
stick is taken from him. His gait changes, his gestures, possibly his whole
constitution.2 There is much in the magic doctrines of sympathy which,
after rational sifting and re-interpreting, might help to illuminate this
problem. But there is no need to descend to such gloomy depths to bring
this wisdom to light. Did not Plato dread even art and banish it from the
state, because it trans¬mutes (`charms' is his word) the man who exposes
himself to
= Space, Time and Gravitation, Cambridge, 1929, p. 201.
2 These observations do not refer to the problem of external and
internal rela-tions. The question I am discussing is that of bio-physical,
not of logical, trans-formation.

264 HISTORY AND NATURAL SCIENCE

it? Right up to the most recent times the poets, often without being
aware of it, have agreed with him, and gloried in their power to
transform.'
Scholars have as a rule been more cautious. Their claim is based on
even juster foundations, but its exercise would entail a far greater risk, as
the evidence in their case is more striking. Students of history are still
surprised, though this fact has long been known, that any alteration of our
knowledge of past events may also alter our present behaviour. The
corresponding claim in natural science is more generally recognized. Any
discovery within the domain of what is usually called 'the external world
of physics' may lead to technical innovations which change our personal
behaviour. These technical innovations may at first have ir limited scope.
Perhaps it is only a new way of handling some instrument in the
laboratory. Soon, however, the effect infringes on the pragmatism of
daily life, where it evokes wonder or horror. 'There is no great invention,
from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every
biological invention is a perversion.'2
Until recently, the study of Nature and History was con¬sidered a
'contemplative occupation', confined to men who locked themselves up in
their libraries and laboratories, where they escaped from the turmoil of
the world into the quiet and seclusion of their thoughts. To-day,
intentionally or not, they threaten the world by their 'discoveries'.
In an age when not only reformers but despots as well often base
their prestige less on 'God' than on a limited knowledge of nature and
history, experimental and documentary evidence mould the destiny
which controls our lives for better or for worse. But even those scholars
who desire, now as before, to safeguard their work from the tumults of
the moment, cannot ignore the fact that apparently independent lines of
study converge to-day in one point : this point is the self-transformation
of man who has become lord and victim of his own cognitions.
In the study of this self-transformation, scientific and historical
research have worked too long independently. It is time that they
should be combined.
Translated from the German.
I See the synopsis in 'elcios. Ociflos, Untersuchungen fiber die
Platonische Kunstphilosophie', Zeitschrift far Aesthetik u. allgem.
Kunstwissenschaft, vol. xxvi, 1932, PP. 349-73. 2 J. B. S. Haldane,
Daedalus, London, 1924, P. 24.