7. Scientism in the Writing of History

7 Scientism in the Writing of History PIETER GEYL When I was invited to take part in the Symposium on Scien tism and the Study of Man, I happened to be preparing the vale dictory oration I was to deliver on the occasion of my retirement as Professor of Modern History in the University of Utrecht. The organizers were good enough to allow me to use that paper as my contribution to the symposium but, although it gave rise to an animated, and to me enlightening, discussion, I had felt all along that it was not really very closely related to the central theme of the symposium. What I spoke about to my audience in the Aula of Utrecht University on May 31, 1958, was "The Vitality of Western Civil ization." I used an occasion which was bound to attract attention to speak my mind on a matter that had for a long time irritated me and that I consider to be a danger to our Western community, viz., the irresponsible depreciation of our civilization, the wallow ing in visions of decay, the belief that a new world was beginning, or had begun, in which we should take our tune, if not from the Russians, then from the Asiatics or the Africans·.

That oration of mine 1 should not be interpreted as a hymn of pr.aise to the times we live in; it was not meant as such. Nor did I want to extol Western civilization as the salt of the earth or to 144 Scientism in the Writing of History 145 decree a permanent inferiority for races which are obviously com· ing into their own. I only wanted to affirm, as strongly and per suasively as I could, that no matter what was happening to the rest of the world, we still have a duty to ourselves, above all to believe in ourselves, to believe that we still have a contribution to m.ake, and that the only way in which we can do this is by remain ing faithful to our own traditions. All this seemed to me, and it still seems to me, of such overriding importance, not only becaus.e of the awakening of the Asian and of the African peoples, but especially because there is Russia, or there is Russian-Chinese communism, threatening us directly and ready to make use of all our weaknesses.

We are suffering from weaknesses. Generally speaking, these do not, in my view, spring from factual conditions; they belong to the realm of the spirit. They result from a mood, or a combination of moods. In analyzing these I indicated a variety of sources. One is the disgruntlement of the once dominating class at the irresistible emancipation and growth in material well-being of the working classes. Another is the concern of the religious-minded at what seems like an equally irresistible development of dechristianiza tion. Then there is the anger, the feeling of frustration, of an ex colonial power suddenly thrown out of a position of which it had been proud, not only on account of the wealth and influence that went with it, but on account of the task we had fulfilled, with con· viction, and not without benefit for the peoples under our rule. Anger and a feeling of frustration are not all. Along with them there goes a more complicated psychological reaction of all. oppo site tendency, a feeling of guilt, a feeling of having transgressed against these peoples and of having to make up to them now.

I need hardly say that, while my oration was intended for a Dutch public, all these various factors have their parallels in other, more important, European countries. In expounding the state of mind that I have just adumbrated, and in trying to counter the fallacies to which it gives rise, I spoke as a historian. Or perhaps I should say that, while speaking from a conviction that is rooted in the whole of my outlook on life, or in my personality, I felt my views supported by what I consider to 146 Scientism and Values be true history; in any case, I thought it particularly incumbent upon me to expose the false history so often adduced by the pessi mists. The pessimists? This word, too, stands in need of qualification. Pessimism often enough takes on the appearance of optimism and adopts the tone of cheerfulness and hope. Our civilization is, so we are told (by Marx, for instance, and his followers), in the last stage of decay, but what will come after its final dissolution will be of a higher quali ty and worth all the upsets and the sufferings that we have still to face. Not that this disguise of optimism is required to tempt everyone. There is in human nature an inclina tion which responds to visions of ruin and decay. Against them the divine promise of eternal bliss can shine with greater radiance.

Take Augustinus; take Bilderdijk, the great Dutch counterrevolu tionary poet. But even Spengler's unadulterated pessimism found a receptive public. Now all these prophets of woe and of repentance, and the joyful announcers of a new and blissful dispensation as well, like to appeal to history. History in their hands is made to conform to the system which they need for their gloomy or hopeful visions. It is, I suppose; an ingrained habit of the human mind-and, in deed, it is a noble ambition-to try to construct a vision of history in which chaos, or apparent chaos, is reduced to order. The historical process is made to conform to a line, a rhythm, a regulari ty-a move ment, in other words, which obeys definable and intelligible laws and whose continuation can, therefore, be predicated by the observer beyond the moment of his own life. So I expressed myself, ten years ago, when setting out on a dis cussion of the works of Sorokin and of Toynbee. "A noble ambi tion." But also: "The historical process is made to conform." In other words: Violence is done to the historical process. Some years later, when I was invited to deliver the Terry Lectures at Yale University, I chose the use and. abuse of history for my subject. 2 In dealing with it, I naturally devoted a good deal of attention to Scientism in the Writing of History 147 the problem of scientism, that is, the undue application of the terminology and of the methods of science to the study of man, and I had indeed faced it before, as the passage quoted from my essay of 1949 makes clear. Yet I must confess that until I received the invitation to this symposium, I had not, as a matter of fact, ever dealt with the problem exclusively, let alone exhaustively.

Now, instructive and at times revealing as I have found the four days' discussion to which it has been my privilege to listen and in which I took part, I am still inclined to view scientism pri marily as one method out of several in the service of an attitude of mind-of a mood, be it of a compelling desire to recast the world in conformity with an ideal, or merely of dissatisfaction, of despair. And perhaps it is enough to point to the more general human trait to which I alluded in the passage quoted, a trait stronger in some men than in others, of being liable to be fasci... nated by a system, any system. This tendency, if examined more closely, will generally prove to be connected with the habit of thinking in absolutes, which may be characteristic of a minority of men only, but which can develop great dynamic power and carry away simple-minded multitudes.; or with the craving for certainty which all of us can observe in ourselves, although here again some are less able to bear uncertainty than are others.

Now the historian, as I have insisted time and again (and I never imagined that I was saying anything new or original), moves in a sphere of uncertainty. We keep on trying to get into touch with the realities of past life; the inexhaustible attraction of his tory is in that it does help us to achieve this miracle; yet at the same time its revelations will always be incomplete; there always remains something mysterious and unfathomable. As I wrote in the first page of my essay on Ranke,3 History is infinite. It is unfixable. We are trying all the time to reduce past reality to terms of certainty, but all we can do is to render our own impression of it. No book can reproduce more than a part of that reality, even within the confines of its particular subject; and each book contains something else, which gets mixed up with historical 148 Scientism and Values truth in an almost untraceable manner, which does not necessarily turn it into falsehood, but which nevertheless transforms it into some thing different from the simple truth-I mean the opinion, or the sentiment, or the philosophy of life, of the narrator; or in other words, the personality of the historian.

No certainty, no finality. "History," so I put it in my Napoleon For and Against)4 "is an argument without end." The discussion is not fruitless, far from it. But every conclusion reached, helpful and satisfying as it may be, and seemingly well established, will lead to further questioning, which will reveal in it weak spots or unsuspected implications, and at any rate the debate will continue. The ambitious systems, the philosophies of history as they used to be called, in which the whole of mankind's historic life was sur veyed and the stages,of development categorically indexed, do not really belong to this debate. They were derived by their authors from other sources than the patient and devoted contemplation of the past, sources which promised certainty. 81. Augustine was in spired by the revelations and the prophecies of Holy Writ. In the eighteenth century the French philosophers deified Reason, but in their visions the past was fashioned so as to appear the predes tined preparation of their earthly "heavenly city." 5 Hegel was in a way no more than a secularized St. Augustine. His conception of history, too, is of a purposeful development, its motive force, in stead of the God of the Christians, being the Absolute, realizing itself. Hegel's influence was profound, and he taught generations of historians-especially, but by no means solely, in Germany-to present historical events as the inevitable and predetermined work ing out of ideas or currents governing the epochs. And then, in the nineteenth century, this conception of history, which had at first, in spite of its rationalist appearance, thrived on the support of the spirit of romanticism, entered into a very different, but perhaps even more powerful, alliance with science.

This was largely the doing of Comte. I shall here insert a few comments from Use and Abuse of History: 6 Comte, the father of positivism, had his own system of historical development, in so many stages, a system founded more exclusively Scientism in the Writing of History 149 than that of Hegel on science. The scientific method applied to history -this is his great contribution. "History," he wrote, with the confi dence characteristic of so many philosophers, "has now been for the first time systematically considered as a whole and has been found, like other phenomena, subject to invariable laws." The great task before the historian, he thought, must henceforth be to discover those laws. Given the ever-increasing prestige of science as the nineteenth century saw it advance from one great victory to another, historians must be tempted to tackle the job. To talk the language of science, to pride themselves on having applied its methods, became a habit with historians. The concepts of Darwin, for instance, intended for biology, were eagerly annexed for history. Marxism sailed merrily along on this same current. A pure positivist of Comte's school, Buckle, wrote the ambitious History of Civilization in Eng land) which purported to show the laws by which the progress of civilization toward ever more complete enlightenment is governed.

Buckle is now forgotten, but there was Taine, one of the most brilliant minds among historical writers in the second half of the century. In Taine's system, the influence of Comte predominates although fused with that of Hegel. He solemnly declared history to be dominated by the three factors of race, surroundings, and moment, a formula which has a fine scien tific ring about it, but which can be handled in almost any case with the most widely different results. In successive prefaces he asserted that man is an animal of a superior kind which produces philosophies more or less as silkworms make cocoons; that vice and virtue are products in the same way that vitriol or sugar are; that he regarded his subject, the transformation of French civilization in the course of the eighteenth century, with the eyes of a natural scientist observing the metamorphosis of an insect; while he presented his volume on the Reign of Terror as a treatise on "moral zoology." Renaissance, classi cism, Alexandrine or Christian epoch-"there is here, as everywhere, nothing but a problem of mechanics." "What matters is," he wrote in a private letter twenty years after that statement, "a scientific opinion. My impressions don't count. What I want is to collaborate in a system of research which will in fifty years' time permit honest men to have something better than sentimental or egoistic impressions about the public affairs of their own day."

The fifty years have long passed (the letter was written in 1885), but although the mass of well-established facts relating to innumerable 150 Scientism and Values aspects of the past has constantly grown, and although the severest methods of sifting and testing, comparing and combining have been and are still being applied-although, in short, we historians have done and are still doing our best-few of us will nowadays maintain that the day is near when sentiment or egoism can be eliminated from the interpretation or presentation of the past. The provocative crudity with which Taine expressed himself in these prefaces, and the glaring contradiction presented by the highly sensitive and personal quality, even violent partisanship, of the books they introduced to the public alienated many of his contemporaries. There was particularly Sainte-Beuve, who in the heyday of philosophic or systematized or symbolic history was in the habit of making com ments of astringent and wholesome skepticism, to the effect that the individuality of the actor and the uniqueness of the event in history should not be forgotten, that the observer should humbly remember his human quality and not pretend to be in control of the fortuitous and the unforeseeable.

Today, at any rate, most of us know that it is not so simple. Large regions of history have no doubt proved suitable for methods of re search which may be called scientific. The collaboration of historical scholars can yield valuable results. Yet, notwithstanding, or rather by very reason of, our half-century more of experience, we know that history will not so readily give up her secret at the bidding of the magic word "science." We have grown somewhat wary of this scientific terminology applied to history. The view of history as an organic development has proved extraordinarily fertile; it is still helpful, but it should not be thought that the word "organism" in its biological sense can represent a historical reality. It is no more than a metaphor; it is a token used for a working method. In Taine's own day, how ever, the spirit animating professions of faith such as the ones quoted exercised an influence not often leading to unconditional acceptance, but so extensive as, to set a mark on the period, and this for the whole of the Western world. And, as a matter of fact, that spirit has by no means been cast out, nor has the mark been effaced.

"The spirit has not been cast out." It reigns supreme in the Communist world. At the International Historical Congress, held in Rome in 1955, there appeared a number of Russian historians, and several of them read papers. Their leader, Sidorov, was proud Scientism in the Writing of History 151 to affirm that "the materialistic conception of history has. tri umphed completely in our country and has the unanimous adher ence of historians both of the younger and of the older· genera tion." 7 I shall not enter into the question how unanimity has been achieved in a field that, in my opinion, ought to be dedicated to discussion. But what, in fact, we saw before us in ROIlle was an array of well-drilled historians all speaking of "we Soviet histori ans," "the school to which I belong, of historical materialism," and going on to treat us to an extraordinary display of "certainty." "The materialistic tradition has completely realized its possibili ties in Marxism," Sidorov told us, "and it enabled Lenin to offer new explanations of all great events in Russian history and in modern world history." No lessI And this new history is "scien tific." "By adopting the materialistic conception of history," so Madame Pankratova tells us, "and only thus, can the laws of his torical development be rightly understood and can we learn to apply them towards the solution of contemporary problems." Sim ilarly Nikonov: "History has become .a systematized science"; and he goes on to tell us how, by the light of "modern, progressive historical science," 8 Soviet historiography has succeeded in un ravelling the mystery, by which bourgeois, or reactionary, histori ans still allow themselves to be baffled, of the causation of wars.

Nikonov then proceeds to explain to us the origins of World War II. The critical reader will soon be struck by the incredible bias of the account here presented, and he will notice that the real intention of the essay is to excuse the Russian rulers' action in con cluding the pact with Hitler in August, 1939, and to lay the guilt for the outbreak of the war on the shoulders of the "reactionary" politicians of the West. The pretentious introduction and the talk about science and the laws of history are the merest make believe. I have no doubt, however, but that the writer himself took this verbiage quite seriously. It helped him to convince himself of the impeccable accuracy of his garbled presentation of the episode. The magic word Hscience" made him feel virtuous; it confirmed him in his "certainty." This is why scientism is practised so frequently, and this is why it is so dangerous.

152 Scientism and Values It is practised, and it has always been practised, by conservatives as well as by progressives. To deduce from our "fallible under standing of a largely imaginary past or a wholly imaginary future" ... "some fixed pattern" in reality dictated by "absolute categories and ideals," is (I am paraphrasing Isaiah Berlin in his recent inaugural oration) "an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days." 9 Comte's immediate progeny consisted largely of left-wingers, but I mentioned Taine, who, in the name of science, denounced the French Revolution. And I have before this called attention to the .absolutist attitude of mind as well as to the deceptive appeal to science in writers like Sorokin and Toynbee, neither of whom can be regarded as left-wingers. The system in which Sorokin ranges the civilizations rests on the distinction between ideational and sensate characteristics. In order to carry through and support that distinction, he shows tables for which, as I wrote in my essay "Prophets of Doom," 10 the numbers of casualties in wars over twenty-five centuries have been estimated and compared; and so have the' numbers of books or of paintings showing a prevalent percentage either of sensate or of idea tional characteristics in any given period.

I must say that these immensely elaborate tables strike me as en tirely unconvincing. To me it· seems an illusion to think that so com plicated, so many-sided, so protean and elusive a thing as a civilization can be reduced to the bare and simple language of rows and figures. The idea that by such a device the subjective factor in the final judg ment can be eliminated is the worst illusion of all. The criteria by which the classifications are to be made cannot really reduce the hum blest assistant to a machine (for much work is often left to assistants as if it were something mechanical or impersonal). When it comes to comparative statistics ranging over the whole history of the human race, does not Sorokin forget how scanty are the data for some periods, how unmanageably abundant for others? Is it possible, in using the statistical method, to guard against the difficulty presented by the fact that what survives from the remote past are mostly the thoughts and works of art of an elite, while in our view of our own age the activities and idiosyncrasies of the multitude take an infinitely larger, Scientism in the Writing of History 153 but perhaps a disproportionate, place? A balance has to be struck between these and many other aspects of history, that is to say, between the records of human activities in so many countries and in many ages, that are so scrappy, or again so full, so dissimilar, and mutually impossible to equate. The question imposes itself: Can anybody, in attempting this, claim that he is guided by the sure methods of sci ence? Can he embrace with his mind the whole of that immense chaos and derive from it a conclusion which would be evident to every other human intellect, as would a proposition in Euclid?

I doubt it, or rather-I deny it. Statistics are not often used by historians, as is done by Profes sor Sorokin, to support large theories about the world's future (a very dark one, in his view). But statistics are much in vogue with writers of social history nowadays, who believe that with their aid they can get away from the controversial problems raised by ideo logical differences and achieve objectivity. Now I am not arguing against statistics, nor am I, in a more general sense, contending that the methods of science can never be of any use in the study of man. What I am tilting at is the undue application of such methods, which is what I ,understand is meant by scientism. Sta tistics can be useful to the historian. To think, however, that by their me.ans one can avoid ideological issues and make a short cut to objectivity seems to me a dangerous illusion. History can in that way only be devitalized. The historian should be very careful not to be imposed upon by the scientific appearance of an array of figures and of elaborate calculations based upon them, as if the re.ality of the past must now let itself be captured without fail. A striking instance· of the deceptiveness of statistics in history was discussed by Professor Hexter in an essay on the great Tawney Trevor Roper controversy about the gentry which appeared in last year's Encounter.

Toynbee, in his Study of History) does not deal in statistics so much, but occasionally he prints, to illustrate his argument, tables which are similarly intended to set upon it the mark of scientific precision and order. "It looks beautifully 'simple,' " was my com ment on one such table in Volume IX.ll "I shall say no more than 154 Scientism and Values that I have rarely seen a more arbitrary juggling with the facts of history." Toynbee, the prophet of a world one in the love of God, pro vides a· classic example of systematic scientism. This is what I had said about him a few years earlier: 12 The worst of Toynbee's great attempt is that he has, presented it under the patronage of a scientific terminology. A patently aprioris tically-conceived, Augustinian-Spenglerian scheme of the history of mankind he wants to pass off as the product of the empirical method, built up out of what he calls facts, without troubling to analyze their precise nature or test their reliability for the purposes of system con struction. When, in a radio debate with him in January, 1948, I remarked upon the bewildering multiplicity as well as, baffling in tangibility of historical data, he asked: "Is history really too hard a nut for science to crack?" and added: "The human intellect, sighs Geyl, 'is not sufficiently comprehensive.' " Of course I had not sighed; why should I sigh about what I regard as one of the fundamental truths of life? But Toynbee's rejoinder was: "We can't afford such defeatism; it is unworthy of the greatness of man's mind." In short, he belongs to those who obstinately blind themselves to the limitations of our comprehension of history.

In all my various essays devoted to A Study of History I have attempted to show the insufficiency, or the complete irrelevance, of Toynbee's pretended scientific arguments, formulations, and conclusions. Here, for instance, is a passage in which I derided his portentous use of the word "laws." In arguing that civilizations thrjve on challenges, he admits that sometimes challenges are so severe as to be deadly. The growth of civilization, therefore, is best served by the "Golden Mean." Or, "in scientific terminology," what is needed is "a mean between a deficiency of severity and an excess of it." Now follows my comm.ent: 13 So here we have a "law," scientifically established, or at least scien tifically formulated. But what next? When we try to apply it, we shall first of all discover that in every given historical situation it refers to only one element, out of many, one which, when we are concerned Scientism in the Writing of History 155 with historical presentation, cannot be abstracted from the others.

Moreover, is. it not essential to define what is too mllch and what too little, to stipulate where the golden mean lies? As to that, the "law" has nothing to say. That has to be defined anew each time by obser vation. But indeed, these "laws" of Toynbee's, which in some cases he has had to formulate in so distressingly vague a manner, rest on very inse cure foundations. They are, if we will take the author's word for it, the result of an investigation carefully proceeding from fact to fact. But what are facts in history? I contend (so I wrote some years ago) 14 that his conception of what a historical fact really is, of what a historical fact is worth, of what can be done with it, is open to very grave objections. Toynbee, with his immense learning, has a multitude of historical illustrations at his fingers' ends at every turn of his argument, and he discourses with never-failing brilliance and never-failing confidence on careers, and personalities of statesmen or thinkers, on tendencies, movements of thought, social conditions, wars, customs of all coun tries and of all ages. Now the critical reader will feel that each single one of his cases might give rise to discussion. Each could be represented in a slightly or markedly different way so as no longer to substantiate his argument. They are not facts; they are subjective presentations of facts; they are combinations or interpretations of facts. As the founda tions of an imposing superstructure of theory, they prove extraordi narily shifting and shaky, and this in spite of the dexterity and assur ance with which Toynbee handles them.

Now let me say explicitly that I am far from wanting to confine history within the narrow bounds of the factual account. In another essay I wrote: 15 I don't mean that the historian (as he is sometimes advised) should "stick to the facts": The facts are there to be used. Com binations, presentations, theories, are indispensable if we want to understand. But the historian should proceed cautiously in using the facts for these purposes. It goes without saying that he should try to ascertain the facts as exactly as possible; but the important thing is that he should remain conscious, even then, of the ele ment of arbitrariness, of subjectivity, that necessarily enters into all combinations of facts, if only because one has. to begin. by se156 Scientism and Values lecting them; while next, one has to order them according to an idea which must, in part at least, be conceived in one's own mind.

The restrictions, the self-restraint, here indicated, are irksome to those who want to attain certainty or manage to persuade them selves that they have attained it. To me this acknowledgment of limitations seems imposed upon us by the nature of life itself. And let me add that I try to avoid being dogmatic here as well. I know that there will always remain a residuum of uncertainty. There will always remain matter for discussion. But at the same time, "this discussion does lead to a gradual, even though forever par tial, conquest of reality." 16 When, in the exchange of thought at Sea Island, Professor Vivas suggested that in the sciences of man you cannot distinguish betwe~n the true and the pseudo as you can in physical science, I was not prepared to follow him. I do not, of course (so, more or less, ran my reply), dispute that history does not yield absolute and unquestionable results. There are, and there will always be, contending schools, not one of which can claim to represent history to the exclusion of the others,. But they can, all of them, be united by a respect for the true method.

And by the true method I simply mean what was described by Professor Werkmeister as "the scholarly punctiliousness in dealing with facts, the desire to provide rational explanations on sound, logical, orf simply, honest, argumentation." In contradistinction to this, history, that is, a view or an interpretation of the past, can be so dominated by fanaticism, by an emotion, by the craving for a system, by the desire to make it a preface to the future, or rather to the picture of the future of which the historian's mind is full, by detestation, also, of the world and of the direction in which it seems to be moving-that all these safeguards of the true method are thrown to the winds. The past, of course, cannot protest. The unscrupulous historian can fashion it after his fancy. And the myths which are created in this way can have practical effects of the most disturbing or pernicious nature. But the application of unsound methods can be detected, and I regard it as one of the historical scholar's obligations towards the community that he should do what he can to expose such "abuse of history."

I have, in my time, waged a good many fights against what I Scientism in the Writing of History 157 considered to be pseudo history. I was moved, I hope, by a genuine regard for true history, but also, undoubtedly (and I do not think that I have any cause to apologize), by a wish to counter the evil influences which I observed that the false presentations of history were having in the present, by detestation of the particular preju dices or passions which I detected behind them. First, I attacked the misconception of Netherlands history by which it was intended to erect a barrier between the Dutch and the Flemings. 17 Then it was national-socialist historiography that drew my fire.IS Since the last war it has been particularly the gloomy prognostications about Western civilization and the blithe universalist visions, the tend ency of which I regard as no less perniciously defeatist. In all these cases I discerned that the effect was obtained by distortions, omis sions, fantasies, which did not stand the test of criticism in accord ance with the true historical method. Scientism, not always, but frequently, supplied some of the defective links which were needed to make the argument hang together on paper.

History is one of the great conserving forces of our civilization; and it also provides guidance, indispensable if never categoric, in our laborious and adventurous progress towards the unknown fu ture. But in order to fulfill its function, history should stick to its own laws. NOTES 1. "De Vitaliteit van de Westerse Beschaving" (1958), English translation, "The Vitality of Western Civilization," Delta (Amsterdam: 1959, quar terly). The essay will be included in a volume entitled Excursions and Encounters in History to be published by Meridian Books, New York, in 1960. 2. Pieter Geyl, Use and Abuse of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 3. See From Ranke to Toynbee, Smith College Historical Series (1952); or Debates with Historians (1955), (paperback edition, 19~8). 4. Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against (Cape, London, and Yale Uni versity Press, 1949), p. 16. 5. See Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philoso phers (1932).

6. Loc. cit., pp. 45-49. 7. Relazioni (of the Historical Congress at Rome), VI, 391. English version in Editions de ['Academie des Sciences de l'URSS (1955), p. 209. • 158 Scientism and Values 8. See Editions de l'Academie des Sciences de l'URSS (1955), p. 53. 9. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 1958),p. 56. 10. Pieter Geyl, "Prophets of Doom," Virginia Quarterly (1950); see Debates with Historians, p. 134. 11. Pieter Geyl, "Toynbee the Prophet," Journal of the History of Ideas (New York, 1955); see Debates with Historians, p. 175. 12. Pieter Gey1, Use and Abuse of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 13. Pieter Gey1, "Toynbee's Systeem der Beschavingen," Verslag van het historisch Genootschap (1950); English version in Journal of the History of Ideas (1949); see Debates with Historians,· pp. 101-102. 14. Pieter Geyl, "Prophets of Doom"; see Debates with Historians, p. 140.

15. Ibid. . 16. Pieter Geyl, Use and Abuse of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 17. See the "National State and the Writers of Netherland History," Debates with Historians, pp. 179-197. 18. See, for instance, essays on German works edited respectively by H. K10sz and R. P. Oszwald, also on Steding and on Rauschning, published in various Dutch reviews 1938, 1939, and before May, 1940, and repub lished in Historicus in de Tijd (1954).