Western History
Man the Measure : A New Approach to History. By Erich Kahler (Cape. 30s.) Man the Measure : A New Approach to History. By Erich Kahler (Cape. 30s.)
IN this grandiose volume of 640 pages (exclusive of a long closely printed bibliography and index) the author undertakes to elucidate the significance of human development in the history of western civilisation from its beginnings in Egypt and Sumeria up to the present. (He omits the further east from his survey.) Rightly he sees that history has no unity unless man through the ages has a distinctively recognisable character' and this is found in his "faculty of going beyond himself." From this point of view we are given a panoramic survey of the stages in the growth of the formation, first of "the human individual," then of "the human collective," leading up to the world-state which (the author hopefully pleads) is within our reach if only science is enabled to achieve its perfect work. "The sciences have a great responsibility : they altine can furnish the picture of the whole, the teaching of the whole, on which man's mastery of his world depends." The author's point of view is frankly humanist, positivist and Freudian.
It is perhaps hardly worth while to ask writers of this school what they mean by this odd personification of " science " or (odder still) of "the sciences," or how a co-ordinated body of fact and theory or a method of inquiry can be said to "have a great responsibility." (Would it make any real difference if this were imputed to scientists?) Many readers are bound to find the author's whole approach narrow and unsatisfying. The author, they will feel, is one of those "Children of the Light" of whom Dr. Reinhold Niehbuhr has recently written, who by their complacent and oversimplified belief in progress and blindness to the mystery of human iniquity play into the hands of the cynical "Children of Darkness." They will value his book rather for its comprehensive conspectus of a vast field of thought and action, illuminated by many striking quotations.
I am afraid it must be added, however, that the author is far from a reliable guide on matters of historical fact. Certainly he presents us with some very surprising assertions : "Until very late in the last stages of the Roman Empire there is no form of life such as we call private life. . . - A man who retired from public life . . . became utterly impossible, indeed even inconceivable." (What of the Cynic3 and the Epicureans?) Again, Cromwell was not "one of the Jacobin, of the English Revolution." The Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century was not "a private Hapsburg possession." Harrington wa- not the author of a " communistic " Utopia. Freud did not "scien- tifically establish" the threefold division of the soul into id, super-ego and conscious ego.
None the less, one cannot but be impressed by the boundles, hospitality of these pages, in which the familiar and the unfamiliar
in fact, person and utterance come together in a by no means inordinate profusion, despite many inexplicable omissions and much disproportionate emphasis. And though many of the author's comments and interpretations are questionable and many trite, some of them are shrewd and penetrating: Thus, of his own countrymen : "However individual-minded American people may be, they are, paradoxically, very collective-natured." . . . Perhaps that paradox will provide a clue to the next stage in the evolution of human society, in which it is likely that the American people will play so determining
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