When, as an historian, I relive in my own mind a certain experience of Julius Caesar, I am not simply being Julius Caesar; on the contrary, I am myself, and know that I am myself; the way in which I incorporate Julius Caesar’s experience in my own personality is not by confusing myself with him, but by distinguishing myself from him and at the same time making his experience my own. The living past of history lives in the present; but it lives not in the immediate experience of the present, but only in the self-knowledge of the present. This Dilthey has overlooked; he thinks it lives in the present’s immediate experience of itself; but that immediate experience is not historical thought.
Concepts from the three interflowing currents of Russian fascism—Ilyin’s Christian totalitarianism, Gumilev’s Eurasianism, and Dugin’s “Eurasian” Nazism—appeared in Putin’s discourse as he sought an exit from the dilemma he created for his country in 2012.
Etienne Gilson, asked to write his autobiography, responded: “A man of seventy-five should have many things to say about his past, but . . . if he has lived only as a philosopher, he immediately realizes that he has no past.”
In post-1945 France, the choices offered to conservative voters were normality (growing prosperity in a consumer society), pride (national grandeur as France decolonized and Europeanized), or rage (the frustrations of the hard right).
[Edward] Gibbon speaks for the mentality still characteristic of the social sciences: “As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of Mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence which must however determine the actions and opinions of our lives.” Modern defenses of the rationality of historical inferences continue to rely on an objective concept of probability, but do not demand it be quantified.
The notion of probability found in the evaluation of historical evidence pervades Jane Austen’s novels on persuasion, sense, and prejudice. The crucial chapter 36 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet is forced to make humiliating changes to her beliefs in response to the new evidence contained in Mr. Darcy’s letter, is a tour de force of the careful reappraisal of a belief system that has been based on a large body of evidence. As Elizabeth “weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality—deliberated on the probability of each statement . . . reconsidering events, determining probabilities,” she came to see that her previous opinions of Darcy’s and Wickham’s characters were based on vanity and were now insupportable. Austen goes through each piece of evidence carefully, explaining its relation to the whole (“How could she deny that credit to his assertions, in one instance, which she had been obliged to give in the other?—He declared himself to have been totally unsuspicious of her sister’s attachment;—and she could not help remembering what Charlotte’s opinion had always been.—Neither could she deny the justice of his description of Jane”).
Another reason to believe that the problem with discovering mathematical probability lies in the mathematics is the parallel between the history of probability and that of two other abstract and loosely mathematical concepts, continuity and perspective.
