3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills
the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and
concerns of social life. The past just as past is no longer our
affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be
only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury their
dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the
present. History deals with the past, but this past is the
history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement
westward, of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United
States as it is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying
it in process of formation makes much that is too complex to be
directly grasped open to comprehension. Genetic method was
perhaps the chief scientific achievement of the latter half of
the nineteenth century. Its principle is that the way to get
insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its
making, -- to follow it through the successive stages of its
growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its
past, is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be
separated from the living present and retain meaning. The true
starting point of history is always some present situation with
its problems.
This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration
of its bearing upon a number of points.
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