CALL FOR CAUTION IN GENERALISATION

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28529, 7 March 1958, Page 26

CALL FOR CAUTION IN GENERALISATION

The crew of H,M.S. Pinafore who checked their captairr when he claimed that he was “never, never sick at sea’’ gave a good example of the caution needed in generalisation, said the professor of history at the University of Canterbury (Professor N. C. Phillips) in his presidential address to the Canterbury Historical Association. “Historical generalisation —its limits, its uses and its dangers,” was the subject of the address.

Arguing that history was about particular events fixed in time and place, Professor Phillips denied that it was any part of the historian’s function to discover genera) laws governing change in society. Essentially the historian had a story to tell. If. for example, he wrote a book on the French Revolution, he confined himself to events between 1789 and 1794 and did not bother to add a chapter of conclusions about revolution in general. Professor Phillips contrasted the historian with the scientist, on the one hand, and the poet or novelist, on the other. The scientist aimed to establish universal truths or laws about the material world and was only interested in particulars as means of provoking or confirming these laws, he said. The poet or novelist was also concerned to state universal truths, this time about human nature, but he was not obliged, as the scientist and the historian were, to be accurate about particular things. Mr Pickwick’s birth and death were not registered at Somerset House; yet though fictitious he was not untruthful, because he was a bundle of recognisable human qualities. Vast Amount Used

Although he was not a generaliser in the strict, scientific sense, the historian nevertheless could not do without a vast amount of generalisation, said Professor Phillips. For one thing, only thus could he reduce to understandable order the innumerable “facts” of history The seemingly particular statement that the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18. 1815, was in fact a huge summary of many more particular statements. Concepts like “the Middle Ages” or “the Industrial Revolution” were also necessary general-

isations, by which the historian indicated the common element among a multitude of facts and suggested historical trends.

Every generalisation implied a theory or an interpretation of events. The larger it was the more likely it was to be attacked; but the very controversy it aroused could be fruitful and invigorating. For example, the famous thesis that American democracy was born on the frontier of the unsettled lands was a reaction against the belief in the Teutonic origins of AngloSaxon liberties. In turn it prompted hostile theories of a semi-Marxist nature. Although such theories had to be seriously modified or even rejected, historical writing was all the better for them, if only because they compelled historians to examine their sources more critically. Perils of Generalisation Speaking of the perils of historical generalisations, Professor Phillips warned against using them as a substitute for hard, clear, thinking. It was the most common of fallacies to forget that generalisations were creatures of the historian’s mind and to invoke them to explain the events of which they were only the summary. “The duty clearly lies upon those of us who teach history to make our pupils every now and then unpack their generalisations,” he said. “When they write that collectivism developed in nine-teenth-century England, they should be able to show us some of the samples in that capacious bag—the Factory Acts, the rise of the civil service, the Plimsoll mark, the Pure Food and Drugs Act and so on. “In these times, when men are ridden as never before by the conceited pomps of some types of abstraction, historical studies betray a trust if they fail to breed the sceptical, concrete habit of mind that will probe for the substance beneath the ‘-isms’ and expose the void when it finds one,” Professor Phillips said.

An Indianapolis man. caught m a barber shop at midnight, told police: “I just wanted to be first in line for a haircut in the morning.”