I've been pulled back into reading some more John Lukacs, and here I'm going to offer some insightful (at least to my mind) quotes from his book At the End of an Age (2002). This quote goes to the universality of history in the human experience.
All living beings have their own evolution and their won life-span. But human beings are the only living beings who know that they live while they live—who know, and not only instinctively feel, that they are going to die. Other living beings have an often extraordinary sense of time. But we have a sense of our history, which amounts to something else. . . . Scientific knowledge, dependent as it is on scientific method, is by its nature open to question. The existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the past in our minds, is not. We are all historians by nature, while we are scientists only by choice.(50)
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