‘•0y’7//-^^., i^.nImust now, in public, repeat what I privately expressed to thendirectors of the Ingersoll Foundation: my gratitude for theirnhaving chosen me as the present recipient of this honorificnaward. And I must add another source of my gratification,nwhich is the very phrasing of it: the Richard M. Weaver Awardnfor Scholarly Letters. How much more preferable ScholarlynLetters are to their converse of “Literary Scholarship” nowa-‘ndays, of which there is an unpleasant surfeit, and when there isninflation of what goes under the name of “literary scholarship”nwhile the art of scholarly letters has become lamentablynrare. And since it is customary at such an occasion to attemptnsome kind of a summary of one’s philosophy, let me recallnthe title of Weaver’s famous little book. Ideas Have Consequences—ofncourse, since I am a philosophical idealist as wellnas a historian. But as a historian, I must constantly considernconsequences. Events—a word that I prefer to “facts”—are revealednto us in a lesser way than they are seen by God; we cannjudge thbir importance or their significance (these two arennot necessarily the same) only because of their consequences.nSo it is not only ideas that lead to consequences but consequences,ntoo, lead to ideas—and from this my, perhaps unorthodox,nsense of history follows.nI shall sum up,its component realities very briefly. I sayn”realities,” because ideas are realities, because the opposites arennot the realist and the idealist view of the wodd and of humannJohn Lukacs is a professor of history at Chestnut Hill Collegenin Pennsylvania. Last November he received the IngersollnFoundation’s 1991 Richard M. Weaver Award for ScholarlynLetters, for which this was his acceptance speech.n18/CHRONICLESnVIEWSnThe Patriotic Impulsenby John Lukacsnnnnature but the idealist and the materialist one. There is my beliefnthat history is not a science; that it is not an art, either, exceptnin the sense that if history is an art, then so are all the othernsciences. That human life is more than a material, that it isnan artistic proposition; but that an artistic proposition, too, isninseparable from some kind of a spiritual one. That life isnmore than a product, that it is a task: That what matters innthis wodd is what people think and believe—and that the materialnorganization of the world is the superstructure of that:nthat is, a view of the structure of human events that is thenvery opposite not only of Marx but also of Adam Smith. Thatnour problem is that of our consciousness and not of our socallednsubconscious, since we can only think and speak aboutnthings that we know, and since the modern psychological categoriesnof the “subconscious” are nothing else but projections,nand often illegitimate projections, of intellectual categorizationsnof our consciousness into something that we do notnknow. That “subconscious” will not do as a definition to whatnis unconscious in our lives and in our minds: that truly exists,nwhile the suggestion of the former to the effect that what isndeep and hidden constitutes the truth, does not. That—andnhere I depart from categorical idealism—what men do to ideasnis more important than what ideas do to men, because humannideas do not exist apart from their incarnation in human beings.nThat mind influences, indeed, that it intrudes into mattersnas much as or even more than matter can influence mind.nThat this.is why history differs from evolution. That throughoutnhistory the influence of mind on matter increases, andnthat we must be conscious of this, which is probably why thenevolution of consciousness is the only kind of meaningful evo-n