on the value of history

I like Schopenhauer. I think he put a lot of thought in his work. He was wrong on occasion for example on his view of women but in general, I like to think he was a great thinker and that he needs more recognition than he got during his life and probably even after his demise. He built a monument that should be admired, devoured and understood.

In World as will and representation Vol 3 on the subject of history, he writes

What reason is to the individual, history is to the human race. By virtue of reason, man is not, like the brute, limited to the narrow perceptible present, but also knows the incomparably more extended past, with which it is linked, and out of which it has proceeded, and only thus, has he a proper understanding of the present itself, and can even draw inferences as to the future.

[..] Only through history does a nation become completely conscious of itself. Accordingly history is to be regarded as the rational consciousness of the human race, and is to the race what the reflected and connected consciousness is to the individual who is conditioned by reason, a consciousness through the want of which the brute is confined to the narrow perceptible present.

Therefore every gap in history is like a gap in the re-collective self-consciousness of a person, and in the presence of a monument of ancient times which has outlived the knowledge of itself, as for example the Pyramids, or temples and palaces in Yucatan, we stand as senseless and stupid as the brute in the presence of the action of man, in which it is implicated in his service , or as a man before something written in an old cipher of his own, the key to which he has forgotten.

History is to be regarded as the reason, or reflected self consciousness, of the human race and takes the place of an immediate self consciousness common to the whole race, so that by virtue of it does the human race come to be a whole, come to be a humanity.