96	THE  HERO  IN  HISTORY
the innocent into believing that it has a hidden purpose and the
pious into the blasphemy that the judgment of history is the
judgment of God.
If we seek understanding, and not salvation from the pages
of history, we will not fail to recognize the might-have-beens
of the past. Some of them may turn out as relevant to the chances
of the future as a recognized mistake is to the successful action
that follows it. These might-have-beens of history are not
ghostly echoes of what people merely hoped for, but objective
possibilities that were missed—sometimes for want of a hero,
sometimes for want of a horse, sometimes for want of a shoe,
but most of the time for want of intelligence, particularly in
realizing the objective possibilities of good.
We may compare the process of history to a gnarled ancient
tree, still in healthy growth, whose trunk is the human race with
interlacing boughs arching in many directions. Along each
bough, large and then smaller limbs branch off, down to the
very twigs. Here and there signs point to a branch of a twin
stem that had been lopped off, while its other has grown to
tremendous dimensions. At other places, what started out as an
independent bough rounds off to a knotty protuberance. Under
its mass of foliage, dead, rotting limbs can be found. A skilful
gardener might once have trimmed it into a symmetrical form
or other pleasing shapes, but the job would be difficult now.
And it would have to be repeated yearly, for new shoots are put
forth every season. It is exposed to quick destruction by light-
ning and to slow death by poisonous fungi. And there is no
common agreement about the taste of its fruit.
We can easily imagine boughs of the tree in places where
there are none now, less easily the branches that might have
forked from these absent boughs, but we can guess only wildly
at where the twigs and leaves would stem off from our imagined
branches; We can easily see when we look at the living tree,
more readily <-V>an when we experience living history, because
our eyes trace a geometrical pattern, that if any of the actual
boughs had not developed or had been destroyed, everything
that grew on it and out of it would be non-existent. From this
it doe$ not follow, as we have seen, that the trunk "explains"
the bough, the bough the branch, the branch the twig, the twig
the leaf. The first is only the necessary condition of the second.
The architectural pattern of the tree is much simpler than the
casual relationships of history. The tree of history has :oo "true"