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Hypothetical Hippopotamus. Dryly reporting on knotty puzzles ("If I know that Y is the case, is it possible for me not to know that I know it?"), Ved Mehta often makes the philosophers sound like an act from Beyond the Fringe, never more so than in his scattered notes on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 after helping to father the linguistic movement, and who is regarded as a giant by most British philosophers. "What is your aim in philosophy?" Wittgenstein once asked himself, and promptly replied, "To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." Wittgenstein emerges as the kind of brilliant eccentric who will always seem unutterably comic to the layman. "He maintained, for example," Fellow Philosopher Bertrand Russell once reported, "that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced."
Telescope or Microscope. Historians quarrel more than philosophers in Ved Mehta's book, but they seem easier to read (and write) about, perhaps because their haggling hinges upon some old and recognizable problems: What is history? How should it be studied?
From history seen (by Arnold Toynbee) as the cyclical flowering and dying of contemporaneous cultures to history presented merely as a patternless step-by-step unfolding of events, all the old theories still persist. And between Toynbee's long-range telescope and the microscope of such historians as C. V.
Wedgwood, there is room for a voluble difference in views. Moralists like Sir Isaiah Berlin insist that historians must pass judgment on the past. A.J.P. Taylor, who has been roundly attacked for implying that Hitler operated on power principles just as serious and rational as those of Churchill, thinks the past can be judged only on its own terms. Between them lies a determinist like E. H.
Carr (author of What is History?), who insists that the past passes judgment on itself by what happened—the victorious forces in history, he seems to say, are the right ones.
Scourge of them all is terrible-tempered H. R. Trevor-Roper, Regius professor of modern history at Oxford.
Trevor-Roper writes little history himself but angrily blitzes the offerings of his contemporaries. Determinists are wrong, Trevor-Roper growls, because they leave no room in history for decisive accidents and strange contingencies. Toynbee, he says, is just as foolish in believing that Western society may one day be saved through the growth of a syncretic faith blending half a dozen contemporary religions.
Finding no ground for agreement, Ved Mehta disconsolately turned for a summation to Dutch Historian Pieter Geyl. "History," said Geyl (proving that, if nothing else, he has studied his fellow historians), "is an argument without end."