Berlin on the Necessity and Impossibility of History

Isaiah Berlin meditates on the necessity and impossibility of history:

It is difficult enough to develop an adequate consciousness of what we are and what we are at, and how we have arrived where we have done, without also being called upon to make clear to ourselves what such consciousness and self-consciousness must have been like for persons in situations different from our own; yet so no less is expected of the true histories. . . . [I]maginative projection of ourselves into the past, the attempt to capture concepts and categories not altogether like ours by means of concepts and categories that cannot but be our own, is a task that we can never be sure that we are even beginning to achieve, yet are not permitted to abjure. We seek to apply scientific tests to our conclusions, but this will take us but a little way. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physicist, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but without this, normal—as well as historical—thinking cannot function at all.

—Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,”
I History and Theory 1 at 26-7 (1961).