INTELLECTUAL HISTORYの範圍と方法について

Abstract

Intellectual history is, in a sense, a synthetic history of all cultural sciences. It deals not only with a history of systematized thought such as theology and philosophy, but with the laws of development under which thought, knowledge and values have been actually formed and developed, though not necessarily in certain definite patterns, in human mind. In other words, it deals with the problem how they have been influenced by and influencing on the natural environment, economy, politics and social conditions in which they have been formed and developed. In the demand for such an inclusive study as intellectual history, like in other new movements in cultural sciences, seems to have been clearly reflected the progress which has been made in the fields of cultural sciences and their newly-discovered research areas in the borderlands between various sciences. The four main problems in intellectual history pointed out by Prof. Baumer may be regarded on the whole to be appropriate. The intellectual historian attempts, moreover, to combine the method of realists with that of idealists, attaching no less importance on literary non-cumulative knowledge than on natural scientfic cumulative knowledge, and to try to find out a direction for us to follow, through a study of the history of Western thought of over two thousand years, not merely as a history of the past as L. v. Ranke had done, but from a standpoint of the present in which we ourselves live. Although we admit that both intellectual history and historical materialism are necessary and useful so far as they go, we cannot but acknowledge that those methods have serious restrictions in that they regard usefulness for the present as everything, and hence cannot well avoid the danger of distorting, under certain circumstances, facts of the past.