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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2016
An unexamined life is not worth living. Here is one of our great historians reflecting back over 60 plus years of historical research and philosophical wonderings. A little daunting in places, but still a good read. --- The keeper passage in this book: It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. This present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. And so it is with a city, a country, a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. It is the present, not the past, that dies; this present moment, to which we give so much attention, is forever flittering from our eyes and fingers into that pedestal and matrix of our lives which we call the past. It is only the past that lives.
Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, victories and defeats of causes, armies, and athletic teams --- but how, without history, can we understand the events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?
"History," said Lord Bolingbroke, quoting Thucydides, "is philosophy teaching by example." And so it is. It is the laboratory, using the world for its workshop, man for material, and records for its experience. A wise man can learn from other men's experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own. History is other men's experience, in countless number through many centuries. By adding some particles of that moving picture to our vision we may multiply our lives and double our understanding.
Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, victories and defeats of causes, armies, and athletic teams --- but how, without history, can we understand the events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?
"History," said Lord Bolingbroke, quoting Thucydides, "is philosophy teaching by example." And so it is. It is the laboratory, using the world for its workshop, man for material, and records for its experience. A wise man can learn from other men's experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own. History is other men's experience, in countless number through many centuries. By adding some particles of that moving picture to our vision we may multiply our lives and double our understanding.
