VIII
THE CONTINGENT AND THE UNFORESEEN
The relative size of things depends upon perspective. The scrub oak and the towering maple that contrast so sharply in the valley are hardly distinguishable when viewed from the mountain-top. Similarly, when we survey the fortunes of a people from a great distance, important facts of variety are overlooked, and the disparities between great men and little are flattened out.
To the question: what is the proper perspective from which history should be viewed—a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium?, our answer must be that there is no such thing as a “proper” perspective independent of a problem. The posing of the problem already presupposes that we have limited our inquiry to a definite time span. For purposes of comparative analysis, an intelligible account of an entire culture can be written in brief compass, without reference to the causal influences of outstanding personalities or to other contingent happenings. But it does not follow from this that the history of any limited period within the culture can dispense with such references.
To a mind sensitive to possibilities and lovingly curious of detail, the aspect of contingency in history will loom much larger than to those whose eyes make century sweeps over the record. When we view the life of a man, not as it appears to a biographer, but as a history of a human being compared to a history of the Earth, the seas, or the stars, it can be described in simple formulas. These will not say much more than did the Chinese counsellors to their aging emperor, who early in his reign had set them to fathom “the secret” of man. On his deathbed they reported to him that man is born, lives, suffers, and dies. Change any detail of his life, make him beggar or king, warrior or saint, and it still remains true. Change the man, his country, his period, the same pattern can be traced in all the changes. Such reflections are relevant to the human estate in which each man counts for any other; applied to the history of any particular man they are worthless except where the tale would make us believe that he is more than man.
