‘Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,’ and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding.  Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement.  If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer.  The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible.  But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature.  What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand.  All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other.  Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or the brief span of time which psychologists have named ’the specious present’.  Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward environment—­in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings.  To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind.  A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are not severed by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in its living and concrete actuality.  This is the fact, the centre to which all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit and with a new hope.  We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision.  What we aim at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what is merely of recent acquisition or growth.  Neither ourselves nor our environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower.  We are not merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages.  As our bodies are but the present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms