16 - ‘A keener glance’

Summary

Boldness means ignorance and reflection brings hesitation.

Thucydides

Every man … has conviction forced upon him …

Johnson

Throughout the final instalment of The Decline and Fall, then, Gibbon is repeatedly and variously made aware that philosophic historiography, for all its apparent critical acuity and sharpness of tone, is in fact a blunt instrument with which to dissect these centuries. It does not cut and display, but obscures by merely bruising and mangling.

It is the tenet of uniformitarianism which irreparably mars the edge of philosophic historical understanding. Uniformitarianism was not, of course, a belief confined to the philosophes. Chesterfield thought that a conviction of the uniformity of human nature was the sober knowledge which came with maturity; while Addison, writing of Chevy–Chase, commented incidentally and as if stating an indubitable truth that ‘Human nature is the same in all reasonable creatures.’ But there is the rub; what if you are dealing with people who in your terms are not ‘reasonable’? Would it be possible, after Hume's demystification of the idea of reason, to dismiss such people as irrational barbarians, thus reposing in the idea of a timeless and unchanging standard of reason of which your age was a perfect possession? Mrs Radcliffe, writing almost contemporarily with Gibbon, is sure not:

… human reason cannot establish her laws on subjects, lost in the obscurity of imagination, any more than the eye can ascertain the form of objects, that only glimmer through the dimness of night.