Mankind, Humboldt suggests, resembles a plant, an analogy which was not entirely fortunate since a plant possesses an internal structure which Humboldt apparently denies to the history of man. The individual person’s relation to the nation is comparable to a leafs relation to the tree. Mankind consists of a ladder of individualities from the individual through the collective bodies to the race as a whole. Each individuality (whether individual person or nation) receives its unique character not in slow stages, but by sudden spontaneous generation. The birth of an individuality is also the beginning of its decline. The individuality dies, but its spirit survives. Thus, it is “the most important thing in world history to preserve this spirit as it endures, changes form, and in some cases becomes extinct.”55
There is indeed a purpose to world history, but it is not to be found in a progressive perfection of man. We must not expect man to attain an abstractly conceived end, Humboldt warns; rather, we must hope that the “creative power of nature and ideas remains inexhaustible.”56 Mankind as a “whole” existed only “in the never attainable totality of all the individualities which in the course of time become real.”57 The intent of history is that all energies express themselves and develop clear expressions of their individual characters. There is no higher purpose. Individual lives are not parts of a superpattern. “The fates of human generations roll past like the streams which flow from the mountains to the sea.”58
In sharp contrast to German Idealist philosophers or even to Herder, Humboldt denies any meaningful development in history. Here the analogy with the plant seemingly ends. For every individual at his spontaneous birth contains something radically new. Again the genius, “a great mind or a mighty will,” might suddenly give rise to something “new and never experienced,” completely incapable of “mechanical” explanation.59 Certain uniformities do exist in nature and even in man, Humboldt admits. Without them, no statistics would be possible. But the element of freedom and the continuous creation of novelty make any historical prediction impossible. Indeed, history is chaos. Man, possessing intellect, might carry certain ideas from nation to nation and develop them, “but suddenly,” he warns, “his noblest creations are destroyed again by natural events or barbarism,” for “it is evident that fate does not respect the creations of the spirit. This is the mercilessness of world history.” In studying wars and revolutions the historian does not need to ask about their purposes, but only about their origins which often were “physical or animalistic” in character. Basic in human history is the vitalistic “urge to produce and to reproduce.”60 The historian who primarily approaches world history from the standpoint of the growth of cultures or civilization misunderstands the extent to which man is not a being of reason and understanding, but a product of nature.61
This brings us to the second aspect of Humboldt’s essays. If history is all flux, the individualities remain as a stable element and through them history gains meaning. In his essay “On the Task of the Writer of History, (1822)”62 Humboldt further develops the thought, already expressed in earlier writings, that the individualities are merely the concrete, historical expressions of an underlying metaphysical reality, the ethical ideas.
Yet the term “ideas” must not mislead us, for they are not clear concepts. They are not to be understood in the Platonic sense as pure forms which could find their repeated imitations or approximations in the physical world. Each idea represents the essence or character of an actually existing individuality. In this sense, ideas are conceived as eternal and would survive their physical manifestations. But ideas certainly are not universal in the sense of a Platonic triangle or of the Platonic concept of justice, able to manifest themselves in very different historical situations. Each idea is related to something real in the physical world. Humboldt probably never should have used the term “idea” in this way, for he refers to something thoroughly nonrational; namely, to those elements in natural and historical reality which cannot be explained in terms of rational factors. The doctrine of ideas, as formulated by Humboldt, involves the recognition of the basically irrational character of human history and human life. Indeed, Humboldt’s concept of individuality carries within it elements of the nihilistic notion that history is nothing but a mass of individuals with individual wills.
This doctrine of ideas seems to point at a hopeless chaos of values. Actually, of course, Humboldt was neither a nihilist nor even a thoroughgoing relativist. By seeking the idea in the existing, limited individualities, Humboldt reflects his faith that there is meaning in the midst of flux; that all fits into a divine mystery; that “world history was inconceivable without a cosmic plan governing it.”63 Each idea reflects one aspect of infinity. Although it is impossible for man to understand the “plans of this cosmic government” (Weltregierung), he can intuitively gain glimpses of it (erahnden) through the ideas.64
Thus, despite his insistence upon flux and chaos in history, Humboldt preserves his faith that in a higher sense history is a meaningful drama. Humboldt makes two assumptions fundamental to the optimism that distinguishes the Historismus of the nineteenth century from the radical relativization of values with which historicism has been identified in twentieth-century Germany. He assumes that individuals have an inner structure and character, that they are not merely a bundle of passions. He therefore admonishes: “One must seek the Best and the Highest that the subject has attained in all his diverse activities. This we link together into one Whole, a Whole that we consider to constitute its unique and essential character. Everything that does not fit into this character, we may consider to be incidental.”65 He also assumes that the great diversities in history all fitted in some mysterious way into a harmonious whole; that if left to their free course all historical tendencies were good; and that, in this best of all possible worlds, evil consisted of the attempt to divert the natural tendencies of history.
The third aspect to be found in Humboldt’s essays—recognition of the role of the irrational in history, joined to a faith in an ultimate meaning in the flux of human events—poses special problems for the historian. Humboldt was the first nineteenth-century writer to work out a theory of knowledge which took these insights into account.
A first important methodological consideration arose for Humboldt from the fact that in approaching history the historian is dealing with “living,” not with “dead” matter. Here, similar to later writers, Humboldt makes a distinction between the methods applicable to the “natural sciences” and those proper to the “historical sciences.” However, Humboldt never conceives physical nature to be entirely dead or nonhistorical. The living can never be approached as something static that might be viewed under fixed conditions at one given point of time. To comprehend a living being, we must see it as a totality and understand its inner essence. For Humboldt this cannot be achieved by mere external description, but requires harmonious use of “rational observation” (beobachtender Verstand) and “poetic imagination” (dichtende Einbildungskraft).66
But as Humboldt developed his theory of individuality into a metaphysical doctrine of ideas, these conditions for historical understanding, which he presented at the turn of the century in “The Eighteenth Century,” no longer sufficed. Now, in “On the Tasks of the Writer of History,” he sees history as the only guide to an approximate understanding of the “totality of being.”67
The task of the historian, as presented in the latter essay, is to depict what has happened (Darstellung des Geschehenen). Toward that end he must begin with a simple description. But what has happened (das Geschehene), Humboldt hastens to point out, is “only in part accessible to the senses. The rest has to be felt (empfunden), inferred (geschlossen), or divined (errathen)” Only fragments are apparent to the observer. “What binds these fragments, what puts the individual piece in its true light and gives form to the whole remains beyond the reach of direct observation.” Facts are not enough. “The truth of all that happens requires the addition of that above mentioned invisible element of every fact and this the writer of history must add.”68
The role Humboldt now assigns to the historian is a much more ambitious one than previously outlined in his earlier essay. It involves more than merely grasping the character of an individual personality or of a nation. Through the study of the individual, the