Introduction
John Buchan — novelist, wartime spymaster, and Governor-general of Canada — was also a historian in his own right, and the editor-in-chief of the multi-volume Nations of Today just after the Great War. In his introduction, Buchan picked up on George Santayana’s famous warning that ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’.
One charge has been brought against the study of history that it may kill reforming zeal. [...] There is justice in the warning, for a man may easily fall into the mood in which he sees everything as a repetition of the past, and the world bound on the iron bed of necessity, and may therefore lose his vitality and zest in the practical work of to-day. It is a danger to be guarded against, but to me it seems a far less urgent menace than its opposite — the tendency to forget the past and to adventure in a raw new world without any chart to guide us. History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight* in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.*
There is little to sympathise with in the type of mind which is always inculcating a lack-lustre moderation, and which has attained to such a pitch of abstraction that it finds nothing worth doing and prefers to stagnate in ironic contemplation.
* A rushlight is an elementary candle made by dipping the pith of a rush in tallow. For centuries rushlights were a cheap source of artificial light for poor people throughout the British Isles. Buchan is saying that the future is so dark, then anything we can find to cast light on history is welcome, because it gives us a chance to plan to safe course.
* Adapted from a now very well-known quotation from Life of Reason: or, The Phases of Human Progress (1905) by Spanish-American essayist George Santayana (1863-1952): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Précis
John Buchan acknowledged that the study of history might lead some people to neglect the pressing problems of today, but he nonetheless believed that neglecting history was far more dangerous. History, he said, was akin to a navigational chart, and when the future is so dark to us we should be grateful for anything to help plot a safe course. (60 / 60 words)
John Buchan acknowledged that the study of history might lead some people to neglect the pressing problems of today, but he nonetheless believed that neglecting history was far more dangerous. History, he said, was akin to a navigational chart, and when the future is so dark to us we should be grateful for anything to help plot a safe course.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, besides, may, not, otherwise, since, until, whether.
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