“Historic culture,”

Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilization already advanced. Not that it affords positive solutions to the new aspect of vital conditions – life is always different from what it was– but that it prevents us committing the ingenuous mistakes of other times. But if, in addition to being old and, therefore, beginning to find life difficult, you have lost the memory of the past, and do not profit by experience, then everything turns to disadvantage. Well, it is my belief that this is the situation of Europe. The most “cultured” people today are suffering from incredible ignorance of history. I maintain that at the present day, European leaders know much less history than their fellows of the XVIII, even of the XVII Century. That historical knowledge of the governing minorities – governing sensu lato – made possible the prodigious advance of the XIX Century. Their policy was thought out – by the XVIII Century – precisely in order to avoid the errors of previous politics, thought out in view of those errors and embraced in its substance the whole extent of experience. But the XIX Century already began to lose “historic culture,” although during the century the specialists gave it notable advance as a science*. To this neglect is due in great part its peculiar errors, which today press upon us. In the last third of the century there began – though hidden from sight – that involution, that retrogression towards barbarism, that is, towards the ingenuousness and primitivism of the man who has no past, or who has forgotten it.

* Here we catch a glimpse of the difference we shall shortly have to treat of between the state of the sciences during a given period and the state of its culture.

Ortega y Gasset