THE DETERMINATION OF PARTICULAR FACTS
Critical analysis yields in the result a number of conceptions and
statements, accompanied by comments on the probability of the facts
stated being accurate. It remains to examine how we can deduce from
these materials those particular historical facts which are to form the
basis of scientific knowledge. Conceptions and statements are two
different kinds of results, and must be treated by different methods.
I. Every conception which is expressed in writing or by any illustrative
representation is in itself a definite, unimpeachable fact That which is
expressed must have first been present in the mind of some one--if not
in that of the author, who may have reproduced a formula he did not
understand, then in the mind of the man who originated the formula. The
existence of a conception may be learnt from a single instance and
proved from a single document. Analysis and interpretation are thus
sufficient for the purpose of drawing up the complete list of those
facts which form the basis of the history of the arts, the sciences, or
of doctrines.[167] It is the task of external criticism to localise
these facts by determining the epoch, the country, the author of each
conception. The duration, geographical distribution, origin, and
filiation of conceptions belong to historical synthesis. Internal
criticism has nothing to do here; the fact is taken directly from the
document.
We may advance a step farther. In themselves conceptions are nothing but
facts in psychology; but imagination does not create its objects, it
takes the elements of them from reality. Descriptions of imaginary facts
are constructed out of the real facts which the author has observed in
his experience. These elements of knowledge, the raw material of the
imaginary description, may be sought for and isolated. In dealing with
periods and with classes of facts for which documents are
rare--antiquity, for example, and the usages of private life--the
attempt has been made to lay under contribution works of literature,
epic poems, novels, plays.[168] The method is legitimate, but only
within the limits of certain restrictions which one is very apt to
forget.
(1) It does not apply to social facts of a psychological order, the
moral or artistic standards of a society; the moral and aesthetic
conceptions in a document give at most the individual standards of the
author; we have no right to conclude from these to the morals or the
aesthetic tastes of the age. We must at least wait till we have compared
several different authors of the same period.
(2) Descriptions even of physical facts and objects may be products of
the author's imagination. It is only the _elements_ of them which we
know to be certainly real; all that we can assert is the separate
existence of the irreducible elements, form, material, colour, number.
When the poet speaks of golden gates or silver bucklers, we cannot infer
that golden gates and silver bucklers ever existed in reality; nothing
is certain beyond the separate existence of gates, bucklers, gold, and
silver. The analysis must therefore be carried to the point of
distinguishing those elements which the author must necessarily have
taken from experience: objects, their purpose, ordinary actions.
(3) The conception of an object or an action proves that it existed, but
not that it was common; the object or action may have been unique, or
restricted to a very small circle; poets and novelists are fond of
taking their models from an exceptional world.
(4) The facts yielded by this method are not localised in space or time;
the author may have taken them from a time or country not his own.
All these restrictions may be summarised as follows: before drawing any
inference from a work of literature as to the state of the society in
which the author lived, we should ask ourselves what would be the worth
of a similar inference as to contemporary manners drawn from a modern
novel.
With the facts yielded by conceptions we may join those indifferent
facts of an obvious and elementary character which the author has
stated almost without thinking. Logically we have no right to call them
certain, for we do sometimes meet with men who make mistakes about
obvious and elementary facts, and others who lie even on indifferent
matters. But such cases are so rare that there is not much danger in
admitting as certain facts of this kind which are supported by a single
document, and this is how we deal, in practice, with periods of which
little is known. The institutions of the Gauls and Germans are described
from the unique texts of Caesar and Tacitus. Facts so easy to discover
are forced upon the authors of descriptions much as realities are forced
upon poets.
II. On the other hand, a statement in a document as to an objective fact
is never enough to establish that fact. The chances of falsehood or
error are so many, the conditions which gave rise to the statement are
so little known, that we cannot be sure that none of these chances has
taken effect. The critical examination provides no definitive solution;
it is indispensable if we are to avoid error, but it is insufficient to
conduct us to truth.
Criticism can _prove_ no fact; it only yields probabilities. Its end and
result is to decompose documents into statements, each labelled with an
estimate of its value--worthless statement, statement open to suspicion
(strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, statement
of unknown value.
Of all these different kinds of results one only is definitive--_the
statement of an author who can have had no information on the fact he
states is null and void_; it is to be rejected as we reject an
apocryphal document.[169] But criticism here merely destroys illusory
sources of information; it supplies nothing certain to take their place.
The only sure results of criticism are _negative_. All the positive
results are subject to doubt; they reduce to propositions of the form:
"There are chances for or against the truth of such and such a
statement." Chances only. A statement open to suspicion may turn out to
be true; a statement whose truth is probable may, after all, be false.
Instances occur continually, and we are never sufficiently well
acquainted with the conditions under which the observation was made to
_know_ whether it was made ill or well.
In order to obtain a definitive result we require a final operation.
After passing through the ordeal of criticism, statements present
themselves as probable or improbable. But even the most probable of
them, taken by themselves, remain mere probabilities: to pass from them
to categorical propositions in scientific form is a step we have no
right to take; a proposition in a science is an assertion not open to
debate, and that is what the statements we have before us are not. It is
a principle common to all sciences of observation not to base a
scientific conclusion on a single observation; the fact must have been
corroborated by several independent observations before it is affirmed
categorically. History, with its imperfect modes of acquiring
information, has less right than any other science to claim exemption
from this principle. An historical statement is, in the most favourable
case, but an indifferently made observation, and needs other
observations to corroborate it.
It is by combining observations that every science is built up: a
scientific fact is a centre on which several different observations
converge.[170] Each observation is subject to chances of error which
cannot be entirely eliminated; but if several observations agree, this
can hardly be in virtue of a common error: the more probable explanation
of the agreement is that the observers have all seen the same reality
and have all described it correctly. Errors are personal and tend to
diverge; it is the correct observations that agree.
Applied to history, this principle leads to a last series of operations,
intermediate between purely analytical criticism and the synthetic
operations--the comparison of statements.
We begin by classifying the results yielded by critical analysis in such
a way as to bring together those statements which relate to the same
fact. The operation is facilitated mechanically by the method of slips.
Either each statement has been entered on a separate slip, or else a
single slip has been assigned for each fact, and the different
statements relating to it entered upon the slip as met with in the
course of reading. By bringing the statements together we learn the
extent of our information on the fact; the definitive conclusion depends
on the relation between the statements. We have, then, to study
separately the different cases which may occur.
III. Most frequently, except in contemporary history, the documents only
supply a single statement on a given fact. In such a case all the other
sciences follow an invariable rule: an isolated observation is not
admitted into science; it is quoted (with the observer's name), but no
conclusions are drawn from it. Historians have no avowable motive for
proceeding otherwise. When a fact is supported by no more than the
statement of a single man, however honest he may be, historians ought
not to assert it, but to do as men of science do--give the reference
(Thucydides states, Caesar says that ...); this is all they have a right
to affirm. In reality they all retain the habit of stating facts, as was
done in the middle ages, on the _authority_ of Thucydides or of Caesar;
many are simple enough to do so in express terms. Thus, allowing
themselves to be guided by natural credulity, unchecked by science,
historians end by admitting, on the insufficient presumption afforded by
a unique document, any statement which does not happen to be
contradicted by another document. Hence the absurd consequence that
history is more positive, and seems better established in regard to
those little known periods which are represented by a single writer than
in regard to facts known from thousands of documents which contradict
each other. The wars of the Medes known to Herodotus alone, the
adventures of Fredegonda related by none but Gregory of Tours, are less
subject to discussion than the events of the French Revolution, which
have been described by hundreds of contemporaries. This is a
discreditable state of things which cannot be ended except by a
revolution in the minds of historians.
IV. When we have several statements relating to the same fact, they may
contradict each other or they may agree. In order to be certain that
they really do contradict each other, we have to make sure that they do
actually relate to the same fact. Two apparently contradictory
statements may be merely parallel; they may not relate exactly to the
same moment, the same place, the same persons, the same episodes of an
event, and they may be both correct.[171] We must not, however, infer
that they confirm each other; each comes under the category of unique
statements.
If the contradiction is real, at least one of the statements is false.
In such cases it is a natural tendency to seek to reconcile them by a
compromise--to split the difference. This peace-making spirit is the
reverse of scientific. A says two and two make four; B says they make
five. We are not to conclude that two and two make four and a half; we
must examine and see which is right. This examination is the work of
criticism. Of two contradictory statements, it nearly always happens
that one is open to suspicion; this should be rejected if the competing
statement has been judged very probably true. If both are open to
suspicion, we abstain from drawing any conclusion. We do the same if
several statements open to suspicion agree together as against a single
statement which is not suspected.[172]
V. When several statements agree, it is still necessary to resist the
natural tendency to believe that the fact has been demonstrated. The
first impulse is to count each document as one source of information. We
are well aware in matters of every-day life that men are apt to copy
each other, that a single narrative often serves the turn of several
narrators, that several newspapers sometimes happen to publish the same
correspondence, that several reporters sometimes agree to let one of
their number do the work for all. We have, in such a case, several
documents, several statements--have we the same number of observations?
Obviously not. When one statement reproduces another, it does not
constitute a new observation, and even if an observation were to be
reproduced by a hundred different authors, these hundred copies would
amount to no more than one observation. To count them as a hundred would
be the same thing as to count a hundred printed copies of the same book
as a hundred different documents. But the respect paid to "historical
documents" is sometimes stronger than obvious truth. The same statement
occurring in several different documents by different authors has an
illusory appearance of multiplicity; an identical fact related in ten
different documents at once gives the impression of being established by
ten agreeing observations. This impression is to be distrusted. An
agreement is only conclusive when the agreeing statements represent
_observations_ which are independent of each other. Before we draw any
conclusion from an agreement we must examine whether it is an agreement
between _independent_ observations. Two operations are thus required.
(1) We begin by inquiring whether the statements are independent, or are
reproductions of one and the same observation. This inquiry is partly
the work of that part of external criticism which deals with the
investigation of sources;[173] but that investigation only touches the
relations between written documents, and stops short when it has
determined which passages of an author are borrowed from other authors.
Borrowed passages are to be rejected without discussion. But the same
work remains to be done in reference to statements which were not
committed to writing. We have to compare the statements which relate to
the same fact, in order to find out whether they proceeded originally
from different observers, or at least from different observations.
The principle is analogous to that employed in the investigation of
sources. The details of a social fact are so manifold, and there are so
many different ways of looking at the same fact, that two independent
observers cannot possibly give completely coincident accounts; if two
statements present the same details in the same order, they must be
derived from a common observation; different observations are bound to
diverge somewhere. We may often apply an _a priori_ principle: if the
fact was of such a nature that it could only be observed or reported by
a single observer, then all the accounts of it must be derived from a
single observation. These principles[174] enable us to recognise many
cases of different observations, and still more numerous cases of
observations being reproduced.
There remains a great number of doubtful cases. The natural tendency is
to treat them as if they were cases of independent observation. But the
scientific procedure would be the exact reverse of this: as long as the
statements are not proved to be independent we have no right to assume
that their agreement is conclusive.
It is only after we have determined the relations between the different
statements that we can begin to count them and examine into their
agreement. Here again we have to distrust the first impulse; the kind of
agreement which is really conclusive is not, as one would naturally
imagine, a perfect similarity between two narratives, but an occasional
coincidence between two narratives which only partially resemble each
other. The natural tendency is to think that the closer the agreement
is, the greater is its demonstrative power; we ought, on the contrary,
to adopt as a rule the paradox that an agreement proves more when it is
confined to a small number of circumstances. It is at such points of
coincidence between diverging statements that we are to look for
scientifically established historical facts.
(2) Before drawing any conclusions it remains to make sure whether the
_different_ observations of the same fact are entirely _independent_;
for it is possible that one may have influenced another to such a degree
that their agreement is inconclusive. We have to guard against the
following cases:--
(_a_) The different observations have been made by the same author, who
has recorded them either in the same or in different documents; special
reasons must then be had before it can be assumed that the author really
made the observation afresh, and did not content himself with merely
repeating a single observation.
(_b_) There were several observers, but they commissioned one of their
number to write a single document. We have to ascertain whether the
document merely gives the statements of the writer, or whether the other
observers checked his work.
(_c_) Several observers recorded their observations in different
documents, but under similar conditions. We must apply the list of
critical questions in order to ascertain whether they were not all
subject to the same influences, predisposing to falsehood or error;
whether, for example, they had a common interest, a common vanity, or
common prejudices.
The only observations which are certainly independent are those which
are contained in different documents, written by different authors, who
belonged to different groups, and worked under different conditions.
Cases of perfectly conclusive agreement are thus rare, except in
reference to modern periods.
The possibility of proving an historical fact depends on the number of
independent documents relating to it which have been preserved, and the
preservation of the documents is a matter of chance; this explains the
share which chance has in the formation of historical science.
The facts which it is possible to establish are chiefly those which
cover a large extent of space or time (sometimes called _general_
facts), customs, doctrines, institutions, great events; they were easier
to observe than the others, and are now easier to prove. Historical
method is not, however, essentially powerless to establish facts of
short duration and limited extent (those which are called _particular
facts_), such as a saying, a momentary act. It is enough that several
persons should have been present when the fact occurred, that they
should have recorded it, and that their writings should have come down
to us. We know what were the words which Luther uttered at the Diet of
Worms; we know that he did not say what tradition puts in his mouth.
This concurrence of favourable conditions becomes more and more frequent
with the organisation of newspapers, of shorthand writers, and of
depositories of documents.
In the case of antiquity and the middle ages historical knowledge is
limited to general facts by the scarcity of documents. In dealing with
contemporary history it is possible to include more and more particular
facts. The general public supposes the opposite of this; it is
suspicious about contemporary facts, with reference to which it sees
contradictory narratives circulating, and believes without hesitation
ancient facts, which it does not see contradicted anywhere. Its
confidence is at its greatest in respect of that history which we have
not the means of knowing, and its scepticism increases with the means of
knowledge.
VI. _Agreement between documents_ leads to conclusions which are not all
of them definitive. In order to complete and rectify our conclusions we
have still to study _the harmony of the facts_.
Several facts which, taken in isolation, are only imperfectly proved,
may confirm each other in such a manner as to produce a collective
certainty. The facts which the documents present in isolation have
sometimes been in reality sufficiently near each other to be connected.
Of this kind are the successive actions of the same man or of the same
group of men, the habits of the same group at different epochs separated
by short intervals, or of similar groups at the same epoch. It is no
doubt possible that one of several analogous facts may be true and
another false; the certainty of the first does not justify the
categorical assertion of the second. But yet the harmony of several such
facts, each proved imperfectly, yields a kind of certainty; the facts do
not, in the strict sense of the word, prove, but they _confirm_[175]
each other. The doubt which attached to each one of them disappears; we
obtain that species of certainty which is produced by the
interconnection of facts. Thus the comparison of conclusions which are
separately doubtful yields a whole which is morally certain. In an
itinerary of a sovereign, the days and the places confirm each other
when they harmonize so as to form a coherent whole. An institution or a
popular usage is established by the harmony of accounts, each of which
is no more than probable, relating to different times and places.
This method is a difficult one to apply. The notion of harmony is a much
vaguer one than that of agreement. We cannot assign any precise general
rules for distinguishing facts which are sufficiently connected to form
a whole, the harmony of whose parts would be conclusive; nor can we
determine beforehand the duration and extent of that which may be taken
to form a whole. Facts separated by half a century of time and a hundred
leagues of space may confirm each other in such a way as to establish a
popular usage (for example, among the ancient Germans); but they would
prove nothing if they were taken from a heterogeneous society subject to
rapid evolution (take, for example, French society in 1750, and again in
1800, in Alsace and in Provence). Here we have to study the relation
between the facts. This brings us to the beginnings of historical
construction; here is the transition from analytical to synthetic
operations.
VII. But it remains to consider cases of discordance between facts
established by documents and other facts established by other methods.
It happens sometimes that a fact obtained as an historical conclusion is
in contradiction with a body of known historical facts, or with the sum
of our knowledge of humanity founded on direct observation, or with a
scientific law established by the regular method of an established
science. In the first two cases the fact is only in conflict with
history, psychology, or sociology, all imperfectly established sciences;
we then simply call the fact _improbable_. If it is in conflict with a
true science it becomes a _miracle_. What are we to do with an
improbable or miraculous fact? Are we to admit it after examination of
the documents, or are we to pass on and shelve the question?
_Improbability_ is not a scientific notion; it varies with the
individual. Each person finds improbable what he is not accustomed to
see: a peasant would think the telephone much more improbable than a
ghost; a king of Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. It is
important to know who precisely it is to whom the fact appears to be
improbable. Is it to the mass who have no scientific culture? For these,
science is more improbable than miracle, physiology than spiritualism;
their notions of improbability are worthless. Is it to the man who
possesses scientific culture? If so, we have to deal with that which
seems improbable to a scientific mind, and it would be more accurate to
say that the fact is contrary to the results of science--that there is
disagreement between the direct observations of men of science and the
indirect testimony of the documents.
How is this conflict to be decided? The question has no great practical
interest; nearly all the documents which relate miraculous facts are
already open to suspicion on other grounds, and would be discarded by a
sound criticism. But the question of miracles has raised such passions
that it may be well to indicate how it affects the historian.[176]
The general tendency to believe in the marvellous has filled with
miraculous facts the documents of nearly every people. Historically the
existence of the devil is much better proved than that of Pisistratus:
there has not been preserved a single word of a contemporary of
Pisistratus saying that he has seen him; thousands of "ocular witnesses"
declare they have seen the devil; few historical facts have been
established by so great a number of independent testimonies. However, we
do not hesitate to reject the devil and to accept Pisistratus. For the
existence of the devil would be irreconcilable with the laws of all the
established sciences.
For the historian the solution of the problem is obvious.[177] The
observations whose results are contained in historical documents are
never of equal value with those of contemporary scientists; we have
already shown why. The indirect method of history is always inferior to
the direct methods of the sciences of observation. If its results do not
harmonise with theirs, it is history which must give way; historical
science, with its imperfect means of information, cannot claim to check,
contradict, or correct the results of other sciences, but must rather
use their results to correct its own. The progress of the direct
sciences sometimes modifies the results of historical interpretation; a
fact established by direct observation aids in the comprehension and
criticism of documents. Cases of stigmata and nervous anaesthesia which
have been scientifically observed have led to the admission as true of
historical narratives of analogous facts, as in the case of the stigmata
of certain saints and the possessed nuns of Loudun. But history cannot
aid the progress of the direct sciences. It is kept at a distance from
reality by its indirect means of information, and must accept the laws
that are established by those sciences which come into immediate contact
with reality. In order to reject one of these laws new direct
observations are necessary. Such revolutions are possible, but they must
be brought about from within. History has no power to take the
initiative in them.
The solution is not so clear in the case of facts which do not harmonise
with a body of historical knowledge or with the sciences, still in the
embryonic stage, which deal with man. It depends on the opinion we form
as to the value of such knowledge. We can at least lay down the
practical rule that in order to contradict history, psychology, or
sociology, we must have very strong documents, and this is a case which
hardly ever occurs.
BOOK III
_SYNTHETIC OPERATIONS_
CHAPTER I
GENERAL CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION
The criticism of documents only yields isolated facts. In order to
organise them into a body of science it is necessary to perform a series
of synthetic operations. The study of these processes of historical
construction forms the second half of Methodology.
The mode of construction cannot be regulated by the ideal plan of the
science we desire to construct; it depends on the materials we have at
our disposal. It would be chimerical to formulate a scheme which the
materials would not allow us to carry out; it would be like proposing to
construct an Eiffel tower with building-stones. The fundamental defect
of philosophies of history is that they forget this practical necessity.
I. Let us begin by considering the materials of history. What is their
form and their nature? How do they differ from the materials of other
sciences?
Historical facts are derived from the critical analysis of the
documents. They issue from this process in the form to which analysis
has reduced them, chopped small into individual statements; for a
single sentence contains several statements: we have often accepted some
and rejected others; each of these statements represents a fact.
Historical facts have the common characteristic of having been taken
from documents; but they differ greatly among themselves.
(1) They represent phenomena of very different nature. From the same
document we derive facts bearing on handwriting, language, style,
doctrines, customs, events. The Mesha inscription furnishes facts
bearing on Moabite handwriting and language, the belief in the god
Chemosh, the practices belonging to his cult, the war between the
Moabites and Israel. Thus the facts reach us pell-mell, without
distinction of nature. This mixture of heterogeneous facts is one of the
characteristics which differentiate history from the other sciences. The
sciences of direct observation choose the facts to be studied, and
systematically limit themselves to the observation of facts of a single
species. The documentary sciences receive the facts, already observed,
at the hands of authors of documents, who supply them in disorder. For
the purpose of remedying this disorder it is necessary to sort the facts
and group them by species. But, for the purpose of sorting them, it is
necessary to know precisely what it is that constitutes a _species_ of
historical facts; in order to group them we need a principle of
classification applicable to them. But on these two questions of capital
importance historians have not as yet succeeded in formulating precise
rules.
(2) Historical facts present themselves in very different degrees of
generality, from the highly general facts which apply to a whole people
and which lasted for centuries (institutions, customs, beliefs), down to
the most transient actions of a single man (a word, a movement). Here
again history differs from the sciences of direct observation, which
regularly start from particular facts and labour methodically to
condense them into general facts. In order to form groups the facts must
be reduced to a common degree of generality, which makes it necessary to
inquire to what degree of generality we can and ought to reduce the
different species of facts. And this is what historians do not agree
about among themselves.
(3) Historical facts are localised; each belongs to a given time and a
given country. If we suppress the time and place to which they belong,
they lose their historical character; they now contribute only to the
knowledge of universal humanity, as is the case with facts of folk-lore
whose origin is unknown. This necessity of localisation is also foreign
to the general sciences; it is confined to the descriptive sciences,
which deal with the geographical distribution and with the evolution of
phenomena. It obliges the historian to study separately the facts
belonging to different countries and different epochs.
(4) The facts which have been extracted from documents by critical
analysis present themselves accompanied by a critical estimate of their
probability.[178] In every case where we have not reached complete
certainty, whenever the fact is merely probable--still more when it is
open to suspicion--criticism supplies the fact to the historian
accompanied by a label which he has no right to remove, and which
prevents the fact from being definitively admitted into the science.
Even those facts which, after comparison with others, end by being
established, are subject to temporary exclusion, like the clinical cases
which accumulate in the medical reviews before they are considered
sufficiently proved to be received as scientific facts.
Historical construction has thus to be performed with an incoherent mass
of minute facts, with detail-knowledge reduced as it were to a powder.
It must utilise a heterogeneous medley of materials, relating to
different subjects and places, differing in their degree of generality
and certainty. No method of classifying them is provided by the practice
of historians; history, which began by being a form of literature, has
remained the least methodical of the sciences.
II. In every science the next step after observing the facts is to
formulate a series of questions according to some methodical
system;[179] every science is composed of the answers to such a series
of questions. In all the sciences of direct observation, even if the
questions to be answered have not been put down in advance, the facts
which are observed suggest questions, and require them to be formulated
precisely. But historians have no discipline of this kind; many of them
are accustomed to imitate artists, and do not even think of asking
themselves what they are looking for. They take from their documents
those parts which strike them, often for purely personal reasons, and
reproduce them, changing the language and adding any miscellaneous
reflections which come into their minds.
If history is not to be lost in the confusion of its materials, it must
be made a rule to proceed here, as in the other sciences, by way of
question and answer.[180] But how are the questions to be chosen in a
science so different from the others? This is the fundamental problem of
method. The only way to solve it is to begin by determining the
essential characteristic of historical facts by which they are
differentiated from the facts of the other sciences.
The sciences of direct observation deal with _realities_, taken in their
entirety. The science which borders most closely on history in respect
of its subject-matter, descriptive zoology, proceeds by the examination
of a real and complete animal. This animal is first observed, as a
whole, by actual vision; it is then dissected into its parts; this
dissection is _analysis_ in the original sense of the word ([Greek:
hanalhyein], to break up into parts). It is then possible to put the parts
together again in such a way as to exhibit the structure of the whole;
this is _real_ synthesis. It is possible to watch the _real_ movements
which are the functions of the organs in such a way as to observe the
mutual actions and reactions of the different parts of the organism. It
is possible to compare _real_ wholes and see what are the parts in
which they resemble each other, so as to be able to classify them
according to real points of resemblance. The science is a body of
objective knowledge founded on _real_ analysis, synthesis, and
comparison; actual sight of the things studied guides the scientific
researcher and dictates the questions he is to ask himself.
In history there is nothing like this. One is apt to say that history is
the "vision" of past events, and that it proceeds by "analysis": these
are two metaphors, dangerous if we suffer ourselves to be misled by
them.[181] In history we see nothing real except paper with writing on
it--and sometimes monuments or the products of art or industry. The
historian has nothing before him which he can analyse physically,
nothing which he can destroy and reconstruct. "Historical analysis" is
no more real than is the vision of historical facts; it is an abstract
process, a purely intellectual operation. The analysis of a document
consists in a _mental_ search for the items of information it contains,
with the object of criticising them one by one. The analysis of a fact
consists in the process of distinguishing _mentally_ between its
different details (the various episodes of an event, the characteristics
of an institution), with the object of paying special attention to each
detail in turn; that is what is called examining the different "aspects"
of a fact,--another metaphor. The human mind is vague by nature, and
spontaneously revives only vague collective impressions; to impart
clearness to these it is necessary to ask what individual impressions go
to form a given collective impression, in order that precision may be
attained by a successive consideration of them. This is an indispensable
operation but we must not exaggerate its scope. It is not an objective
method which yields a knowledge of real objects; it is only a subjective
method which aims at detecting those abstract elements which compose our
impressions.[182] From the very nature of its materials history is
necessarily a subjective science. It would be illegitimate to extend to
this intellectual analysis of subjective impressions the rules which
govern the real analysis of real objects.
History, then, must guard against the temptation to imitate the method
of the biological sciences. Historical facts are so different from the
facts of the other sciences that their study requires a different
method.
III. Documents, the sole source of historical knowledge, give
information on three categories of facts:
(1) _Living beings and material objects._ Documents make us acquainted
with the existence of human beings, physical conditions, products of art
and industry. In all these cases physical facts have been brought
before the author by physical perception. But we have before us nothing
but intellectual phenomena, facts seen "through the author's
imagination," or, to speak accurately, mental images representative of
the author's impressions--images which we form on the _analogy_ of the
images which were in his mind. The Temple at Jerusalem was a material
object which men saw, but we cannot see it now; all we can now do is to
form a mental image of it, analogous to that which existed in the minds
of those who saw and described it.
(2) _Actions of men._ Documents relate the actions (and words) of men of
former times. Here, too, are physical facts which were known to the
authors by sight and hearing, but which are now for us no more than the
author's recollections, subjective images which are reproduced in our
minds. When Caesar was stabbed the dagger-thrusts were seen, the words of
the murderers were heard; we have nothing but mental images. Actions and
words all have this characteristic, that each was the action or the word
of an individual; the imagination can only represent to itself
_individual_ acts, copied from those which are brought before us by
direct physical observation. As these are the actions of men living in a
society, most of them are performed simultaneously by several
individuals, or are directed to some common end. These are collective
acts; but, in the imagination as in direct observation, they always
reduce to a sum of individual actions. The "social fact," as recognised
by certain sociologists, is a philosophical construction, not an
historical fact.
(3) Motives and conceptions. Human actions do not contain their own
cause within themselves; they have _motives_. This vague word denotes
both the stimulus which occasions the performance of an action, and the
_representation_ of the action which is in the mind of a man at the
moment when he performs it. We can imagine motives only as existing in a
man's mind, and in the form of vague interior representations, analogous
to those which we have of our own inward states; we can express them
only by words, generally metaphorical. Here we have _psychic_ facts,
generally called feelings and ideas. Documents exhibit three kinds of
such facts: (_a_) motives and conceptions in the authors' minds and
expressed by them; (_b_) motives and ideas attributed by the authors to
contemporaries of theirs whose actions they have seen; (_c_) motives
which we ourselves may suppose to have influenced the actions related in
the documents, and which we represent to ourselves on the model of our
own motives.
Physical facts, human actions (both individual and collective), psychic
facts--these form the objects of historical knowledge; they are none of
them observed directly, they are all _imagined_. Historians--nearly all
of them unconsciously and under the impression that they are observing
realities--are occupied solely with images.
IV. How, then, is it possible to imagine facts without their being
wholly imaginary? The facts, as they exist in the historian's mind, are
necessarily subjective; that is one of the reasons given for refusing to
recognise history as a science. But subjective is not a synonym of
unreal. A recollection is only an image; but it is not therefore a
chimera, it is the representation of a vanished reality. It is true that
the historian who works with documents has no personal recollections of
which he can make direct use; but he forms mental images on the model of
his own recollections. He assumes that realities (objects, actions,
motives), which have now disappeared, but were formerly observed by the
authors of the documents, resembled the realities of his own day which
he has himself seen and which he retains in his memory. This is the
postulate of all the documentary sciences. If former humanity did not
resemble the humanity of to-day, documents would be unintelligible.
Starting from this assumed resemblance, the historian forms a mental
representation of the bygone facts of history similar to his own
recollection of the facts he has witnessed.
This operation, which is performed unconsciously, is one of the
principal sources of error in history. The things of the past which are
to be pictured in imagination were not wholly similar to the things of
the present which we have seen; we have never seen a man like Caesar or
Clovis, and we have never experienced the same mental states as they. In
the established sciences it is equally true that one man will work on
facts which another has observed, and which he must therefore represent
to himself by analogy; but these facts are defined by precise terms
which indicate what invariable elements ought to appear in the image.
Even in physiology the notions which occur are sufficiently clear and
fixed for the same word to evoke in the minds of all naturalists similar
images of an organ or a movement. The reason is that each notion which
has a name has been formed by a method of observation and abstraction in
the course of which all the characteristics which belong to the notion
have been precisely determined and described.
But in proportion as a body of knowledge is more nearly concerned with
the invisible facts of the mind, its notions become more confused and
its language less precise. Even the most ordinary facts of human life,
social conditions, actions, motives, feelings, can only be expressed by
vague terms (_king_, _warrior_, _to fight_, _to elect_). In the case of
more complex phenomena, language is so indefinite that there is no
agreement even as to the essential elements of the phenomena. What are
we to understand by a tribe, an army, an industry, a market, a
revolution? Here history shares the vagueness common to all the sciences
of humanity, psychological or social. But its indirect method of
representation by mental images renders this vagueness still more
dangerous. The historical images in our minds ought, then, to reproduce
at least the essential features of the images which were in the minds of
the direct observers of past facts; but the terms in which they
expressed their mental images never tell us exactly what these essential
elements were.
Facts which we did not see, described in language which does not permit
us to represent them in our minds with exactness, form the data of
history. The historian, however, is obliged to picture the facts in his
imagination, and he should make it his constant endeavour to construct
his mental images out of none but correct elements, so that he may
imagine the facts as he would have seen them if he had been able to
observe them personally.[183] But the formation of a mental image
requires more elements than the documents supply. Let any one endeavour
to form a mental representation of a battle or a ceremony out of the
data of a narrative, however detailed; he will see how many features he
is compelled to add. This necessity becomes physically perceptible in
attempts to restore monuments in accordance with descriptions (for
example, the Temple at Jerusalem), in pictures which claim to be
representations of historical scenes, in the drawings of illustrated
newspapers.
Every historical image contains a large part of fancy. The historian
cannot get rid of it, but he can take stock of the real elements which
enter into his images and confine his constructions to these; they are
the elements which he has derived from the documents. If, in order to
understand the battle between Caesar and Ariovistus, he finds it
necessary to make a mental picture of the two opposing armies, he will
be careful to draw no conclusions from the general aspect under which he
imagines them; he will base his reasonings exclusively on the real
details furnished by the documents.
V. The problem of historical method may be finally stated as follows.
Out of the different elements we find in documents we form mental
images. Some of these, relating entirely to physical objects, are
furnished to us by illustrative monuments, and they directly represent
some of the physical aspects of the things of the past. Most of them,
however, including all the images we form of psychic facts, are
constructed on the model either of ancient representations, or, more
frequently, of the facts we have observed in our own experience. Now,
the things of the past were only partially similar to the things of the
present, and it is precisely the points of difference which make history
interesting. How are we to represent to ourselves these elements of
difference for which we have no model? We have never seen a company of
men resembling the Frankish warriors, and we have never personally
experienced the feelings which Clovis had when setting out to fight
against the Visigoths. How are we to make our imagination of facts of
this kind harmonise with the reality?
Practically, what happens is as follows. Immediately on the reading of a
sentence in a document an image is formed in our minds by a spontaneous
operation beyond our control. This image is based on a superficial
analogy, and is, as a rule, grossly inaccurate. Any one who searches his
memory may recall the absurd manner in which he first represented to
himself the persons and scenes of the past. It is the task of history to
rectify these images gradually, by eliminating the false elements one by
one, and replacing them by true ones. We have seen red-haired people,
bucklers, and Frankish battle-axes (or at least drawings of these
objects); we bring these elements together, in order to correct our
first mental image of the Frankish warriors. The historical image thus
ends by becoming a combination of features borrowed from different
experiences.
It is not enough to represent to oneself isolated persons, objects, and
actions. Men and their actions form part of a whole, of a society and of
a process of evolution. It is, therefore, further necessary to represent
to oneself the relations between different men and different actions
(nations, governments, laws, wars).
But in order to imagine relations it is necessary to have a conception
of collectivities or wholes, and the documents only give isolated
elements. Here again the historian is obliged to use a subjective
method. He imagines a society or a process of evolution, and in this
imaginary framework he disposes the elements furnished by the documents.
Thus, whereas biological classification is guided by the objective
observation of physical units, historical classification can only be
effected upon subjective units existing in the imagination.
The realities of the past are things which we do not observe, and which
we can only know in virtue of their resemblance to the realities of the
present. In order to realise the conditions under which past events
happened, we must observe the humanity of to-day, and look for the
conditions under which analogous events happen now. History thus becomes
an application of the descriptive sciences which deal with humanity,
descriptive psychology, sociology or social science; but all these
sciences are still but imperfectly established, and their defects retard
the establishment of a science of history.
Some of the conditions of human life are, however, so necessary and so
obvious that the most superficial observation is enough to establish
them. These are the conditions common to all humanity; they have their
origin either in the physiological organisation which determines the
material needs of men, or in the psychological organisation which
determines their habits in matters of conduct. These conditions can
therefore be provided for by the use of a set of general questions
applicable to all the cases that may occur. It is with historical
construction as with historical criticism--the impossibility of direct
observation compels the use of prearranged sets of questions.
The human actions which form the subject-matter of history differ from
age to age and from country to country, just as men and societies have
differed from each other; and, indeed, it is the special aim of history
to study these differences. If men had always had the same form of
government or spoken the same language, there would be no occasion to
write the history of forms of government or the history of languages.
But these differences are comprised within limits imposed by the general
conditions of human life; they are but varieties of certain modes of
being and doing which are common to the whole of humanity, or at least
to the great majority of men. We cannot know _a priori_ what was the
mode of government or the language of an historical people; it is the
business of history to tell us. But that a given people had a language
and had a form of government is something which we are entitled to
assume, before examination, in every possible case.
By drawing up the list of the fundamental phenomena which we may expect
to find in the life of every individual and every people, we shall have
suggested to us a set of general questions which will be summary, but
still sufficient to enable us to arrange the bulk of historical facts in
a certain number of natural groups, each of which will form a special
branch of history. This scheme of general classification will supply the
scaffolding of historical construction.
The set of general questions will only apply to phenomena of constant
occurrence: it cannot anticipate the thousands of local or accidental
events which enter into the life of an individual or a nation; it will,
therefore, not contain all the questions which the historian must answer
before he can give a complete picture of the past. The detailed study of
the facts will require the use of lists of questions entering more into
detail, and differing according to the nature of the events, the men, or
the societies studied. In order to frame these lists, we begin by
setting down those questions or matters of detail which are suggested by
the mere reading of the documents; but for the purpose of arranging
these questions, often indeed for the purpose of making the list
complete, recourse must be had to the systematic _a priori_ method.
Among the classes of facts, the persons, and the societies with which we
are well acquainted (either from direct observation or from history), we
look for those which resemble the facts, the persons, or the societies
which we wish to study. By analysing the scheme of arrangement used in
the scientific treatment of these familiar cases we shall learn what
questions ought to be asked in reference to the analogous cases which we
propose to investigate. Of course the model must be chosen
intelligently; we must not apply to a barbarous society a list of
questions framed on the study of a civilised nation, and ask with regard
to a feudal domain what agents corresponded to each of our ministers of
state--as Boutaric did in his study of the administration of Alphonse of
Poitiers.
This method of drawing up lists of questions which bases all historical
construction on an _a priori_ procedure, would be objectionable if
history really were a science of observation; and perhaps some will
think it compares very unfavourably with the _a posteriori_ methods of
the natural sciences. But its justification is simple: it is the only
method which it is possible to employ, and the only method which, as a
matter of fact, ever has been employed. The moment an historian attempts
to put in order the facts contained in documents, he constructs out of
the knowledge he has (or thinks he has) of human affairs a scheme of
arrangement which is the equivalent of a list of questions--unless,
perhaps, he adopts a scheme which one of his predecessors has
constructed in a similar manner. But when this work has been performed
unconsciously, the scheme of arrangement remains incomplete and
confused. Thus it is not a case of deciding whether to work with or
without an _a priori_ set of questions--we must work with such a set in
any case--the choice merely lies between the unconscious use of an
incomplete and confused set of questions and the conscious use of a
precise and complete set.
VI. We can now sketch the plan of historical construction in a way which
will determine the series of synthetic operations necessary to raise the
edifice.
The critical analysis of the documents has supplied the
materials--historical facts still in a state of dispersion. We begin by
_imagining_ these facts on the model of what we suppose to be the
analogous facts of the present; by combining elements taken from reality
at different points, we endeavour to form a mental image which shall
resemble as nearly as possible that which would have been produced by
direct observation of the past event. This is the first operation,
inseparable in practice from the reading of the documents. Considering
that it will be enough to have indicated its nature here,[184] we have
refrained from devoting a special chapter to it.
The facts having been thus imagined, we _group_ them according to
schemes of classification devised on the model of a body of facts which
we have observed directly, and which we suppose analogous to the body of
past facts under consideration. This is the second operation; it is
performed by the aid of systematic questions, and its result is to
divide the mass of historical facts into homogeneous portions which we
afterwards form into groups until the entire history of the past has
been systematically arranged according to a general scheme.
When we have arranged in this scheme the facts taken from the documents,
there remain gaps whose extent is always considerable, and is enormous
for those parts of history in regard to which documents are scanty. We
endeavour to fill some of these gaps by _reasoning_ based on the facts
which are known. This is (or should be) the third operation; it
increases the sum of historical knowledge by an application of logic.
We still possess nothing but a mass of facts placed side by side in a
scheme of classification. We have to condense them into _formulae_, in
order to deduce their general characteristics and their relation to each
other. This is the fourth operation; it leads to the final conclusions
of history, and crowns the work of historical construction from the
scientific point of view.
But as historical knowledge, which is by nature complex and unwieldy, is
exceptionally difficult to communicate, we still have to look for the
methods of expounding historical results in appropriate form.
VII. This series of operations, easy to conceive in the mind, has never
been more than imperfectly performed. It is beset by material
difficulties which theories of methodology do not take into account, but
which it would be better to face, with the purpose of discovering
whether they are after all insurmountable.
The operations of history are so numerous, from the first discovery of
the document to the final formula of the conclusion, they require such
minute precautions, so great a variety of natural gifts and acquired
habits, that there is no man who can perform _by himself_ all the work
on any one point. History is less able than any other science to
dispense with the division of labour; but there is no other science in
which labour is so imperfectly divided. We find specialists in critical
scholarship writing general histories in which they let their
imagination guide them in the work of construction;[185] and, on the
other hand, there are constructive historians who use for their work
materials whose value they have not tested.[186] The reason is that the
division of labour implies a common understanding among the workers, and
in history no such understanding exists. Except in the preparatory
operations of external criticism, each worker follows the guidance of
his own private inspiration; he is at no pains to work on the same lines
as the others, nor does he pay any regard to the whole of which his own
work is to form a part. Thus no historian can feel perfectly safe in
adopting the results of another's work, as may be done in the
established sciences, for he does not know whether these results have
been obtained by trustworthy methods. The most scrupulous go so far as
to admit nothing until they have done the work on the documents over
again for themselves. This was the attitude adopted by Fustel de
Coulanges. It is barely possible to satisfy this exacting standard in
the case of little-known periods, the documents relating to which are
confined to a few volumes; and yet some have gone so far as to maintain
the dogma that no historian should ever work at second hand.[187] This,
indeed, is what an historian is compelled to do when the documents are
too numerous for him to be able to read them all; but he does not say
so, to avoid scandal.
It would be better to acknowledge the truth frankly. So complex a
science as history, where facts must ordinarily be accumulated by the
million before it is possible to formulate conclusions, cannot be built
up on this principle of continually beginning afresh. Historical
construction is not work that can be done with documents, any more than
history can be "written from manuscripts," and for the same reason--the
shortness of time. In order that science may advance it is necessary to
combine the results of thousands of detail-researches.
But how are we to proceed in view of the fact that most researches have
been conducted upon methods which, if not defective, are at least open
to suspicion? Universal confidence would lead to error as surely as
universal distrust would make progress impossible. One useful rule, at
any rate, may be stated, as follows: The works of historians should be
read with the same critical precautions which are observed in the
reading of documents. A natural instinct impels us to look principally
for the conclusions, and to accept them as so much established truth; we
ought, on the contrary, to be continually applying analysis, we ought to
look for the facts, the _proofs_, the fragments of documents--in short,
the materials. We shall be doing the author's work over again, but we
shall do it very much faster than he did, for that which takes up time
is the collection and combination of the materials; and we shall accept
no conclusions but those we consider to have been proved.
CHAPTER II
THE GROUPING OF FACTS
I. The prime necessity for the historian, when confronted with the chaos
of historical facts, is to limit the field of his researches. In the
ocean of universal history what facts is he to choose for collection?
Secondly, in the mass of facts so chosen he will have to distinguish
between different groups and make subdivisions. Lastly, within each of
these subdivisions he will have to arrange the facts one by one. Thus
all historical construction should begin with the search for a principle
to guide in the selection, the grouping, and the arrangement of facts.
This principle may be sought either in the external conditions of the
facts or in their intrinsic nature.
The simplest and easiest mode of classification is that which is founded
on external conditions. Every historical fact belongs to a definite time
and a definite place, and relates to a definite man or group of men: a
convenient basis is thus afforded for the division and arrangement of
facts. We have the history of a period, of a country, of a nation, of a
man (biography); the ancient historians and those of the Renaissance
used no other type. Within this general scheme the subdivisions are
formed on the same principle, and facts are arranged in chronological
and geographical order, or according to the groups to which they
relate. As to the selection of facts to be arranged in this scheme, for
a long time it was made on no fixed principle; historians followed their
individual fancy, and chose from among the facts relating to a given
period, country, or nation all that they deemed interesting or curious.
Livy and Tacitus mingle accounts of floods, epidemics, and the birth of
monsters with their narratives of wars and revolutions.
Classification of facts by their intrinsic nature was introduced very
late, and has made way but slowly and imperfectly. It took its rise
outside the domain of history, in certain branches of study dealing with
special human phenomena--language, literature, art, law, political
economy, religion; studies which began by being dogmatic, but gradually
assumed an historical character. The principle of this mode of
classification is to select and group together those facts which relate
to the same species of actions; each of these groups becomes the
subject-matter of a special branch of history. The totality of facts
thus comes to be arranged in compartments which may be constructed _a
priori_ by the study of the totality of human activities; these
correspond to the set of general questions of which we have spoken in
the preceding chapter.
In the following table we have attempted to provide a general scheme for
the classification[188] of historical facts, founded on the nature of
the _conditions_ and of the _manifestations_ of activity.
I. MATERIAL CONDITIONS. (1) _Study of the body_: _A._ Anthropology
(ethnology), anatomy, and physiology, anomalies and pathological
peculiarities. _B._ Demography (number, sex, age, births, deaths,
diseases). (2) _Study of the environment_: _A._ Natural geographical
environment (orographic configuration, climate, water, soil, flora, and
fauna). _B._ Artificial environment, forestry (cultivation, buildings,
roads, implements, &c.).
II. INTELLECTUAL HABITS (not obligatory). (1) _Language_ (vocabulary,
syntax, phonetics, semasiology). Handwriting. (2) _Arts_: _A._ Plastic
arts (conditions of production, conceptions, methods, works). _B._ Arts
of expression, music, dance, literature. (3) _Sciences_ (conditions of
production, methods, results). (4) _Philosophy and Morals_ (conceptions,
precepts, actual practice). (5) _Religion_ (beliefs, practices).[189]
III. MATERIAL CUSTOMS (not obligatory). (1) _Material life_: _A._ Food
(materials, modes of preparing, stimulants). _B._ Clothes and personal
adornment. _C._ Dwellings and furniture. (2) _Private life_: _A._
Employment of time (toilette, care of the person, meals). _B._ Social
ceremonies (funerals and marriages, festivals, etiquette). _C._
Amusements (modes of exercise and hunting, games and spectacles, social
meetings, travelling).
IV. ECONOMIC CUSTOMS. (1) _Production_: _A._ Agriculture and
stock-breeding. _B._ Exploitation of minerals. (2) _Transformation,
Transport and industries_:[190] technical processes, division of labour,
means of communication. (3) _Commerce_: exchange and sale, credit. (4)
_Distribution_: system of property, transmission, contracts,
profit-sharing.
V. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS. (1) _The family_: _A._ Constitution, authority,
condition of women and children. _B._ Economic organisation.[191] Family
property, succession. (2) _Education and instruction_ (aim, methods,
_personnel_). (3) _Social classes_ (principle of division, rules
regulating intercourse).
VI. PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS (obligatory). (1) _Political institutions_: _A._
Sovereign (_personnel_, procedure). _B._ Administration, services (war,
justice, finance, &c.). _C._ Elected authorities, assemblies, electoral
bodies (powers, procedure). (2) _Ecclesiastical institutions_ (the same
divisions). (3) _International institutions_: _A._ Diplomacy. _B._ War
(usages of war and military arts). _C._ Private law and commerce.
This grouping of facts according to their nature is combined with the
system of grouping by time and place; we thus obtain chronological,
geographical, or, national sections in each branch. The history of a
species of activity (language, painting, government) subdivides into the
history of periods, countries, and nations (history of the ancient Greek
language, history of the government of France in the nineteenth
century).
The same principles aid in determining the order in which the facts are
to be arranged. The necessity of presenting facts one after another
obliges us to adopt some methodical rule of succession. We may describe
successively either all the facts which relate to a given place, or
those which relate to a given country, or all the facts of a given
species. All historical matter can be distributed in three different
kinds of order: _chronological_ order, _geographical_ order, that kind
of order which is governed by the nature of actions and is generally
called _logical_ order. It is impossible to use any of these orders
exclusively: in every chronological exposition there necessarily occur
geographical or logical cross-divisions, transitions from one country to
another, or from one species of facts to a different species, and
conversely. But it is always necessary to decide which shall be the main
order into which the others enter as subdivisions.
It is a delicate matter to choose between these three orders; our choice
will be decided by different reasons according to the subject, and
according to the public for whom we are working. That is to say, it will
depend on the method of exposition; it would take up too much space to
give the theory of it.
II. When we come to the selection of historical facts for classification
and arrangement, a question is raised which has been disputed with
considerable warmth.
Every human action is by its nature an individual transient phenomenon
which is confined to a definite time and a definite place. Strictly
speaking, every fact is unique. But every action of a man resembles
other actions of the same man, or of other members of the same group,
and often to so great a degree that the whole group of actions receives
a common name, in which their individuality is lost. These groups of
similar actions, which the human mind is irresistibly impelled to form,
are called habits, usages, institutions. These are merely constructions
of the mind, but they are imposed so forcibly on our intellect that many
of them must be recognised and constantly employed; habits are
collective facts, possessing extension in time and space. Historical
facts may therefore be considered under two different aspects: we may
regard either the individual, particular, and transient elements in
them, or we may look for what is collective, general, and durable.
According to the first conception, history is a continuous narrative of
the incidents which have happened among men in the past; according to
the second, it is the picture of the successive habits of humanity.
On this subject there has been a contest, especially in Germany, between
the partisans of the history of civilisation (_Kulturgeschichte_)[192]
and the historians who remain faithful to ancient tradition; in France
we have had the struggle between the history of institutions, manners,
and ideas, and political history, contemptuously nicknamed
"battle-history" by its opponents.
This opposition is explained by the difference between the documents
which the workers on either side were accustomed to deal with. The
historians, principally occupied with political history, read of
individual and transient acts of rulers in which it was difficult to
detect any common feature. In the special histories, on the contrary
(except that of literature), the documents exhibit none but general
facts, a linguistic form, a religious rite, a rule of law; an effort of
imagination is required to picture the man who pronounced the word, who
performed the rite, or who applied the rule in practice.
There is no need to take sides in this controversy. Historical
construction in its completeness implies the study of facts under both
aspects. The representation of men's habits of thought, life, and action
is obviously an important part of history. And yet, supposing we had
brought together all the acts of all individuals for the purpose of
extracting what is common to them, there would still remain a residue
which we should have no right to reject, for it is the distinctively
historical element--the circumstance that a particular action was the
action of a given man, or group of men, at a given moment. In a scheme
of classification which should only recognise the general facts of
political life there would be no place for the victory of Pharsalia or
the taking of the Bastille--accidental and transient facts, but without
which the history of Roman and French institutions would be
unintelligible.
History is thus obliged to combine with the study of general facts the
study of certain particular facts. It has a mixed character, fluctuating
between a science of generalities and a narrative of adventures. The
difficulty of classing this hybrid under one of the categories of human
thought has often been expressed by the childish question: Is history a
science or an art?
III. The general table given above may be used for the determination of
all the species of habits (usages or institutions) of which the history
may be written. But before applying this general scheme to the study of
any particular group of habits, language, religion, private usages, or
political institutions, there is always a preliminary question to be
answered: Whose were the habits we are about to study? They were common
to a great number of individuals; and a collection of individuals with
the same habits is what we call a _group_. The first condition, then,
for the study of a habit is the determination of the group which has
practised it. At this point we must beware of the first impulse; it
leads to a negligence which may ruin the whole of our historical
construction.
The natural tendency is to conceive the human group on the model of the
zoological species--as a body of men who all resemble each other. We
take a group united by a very obvious common characteristic, a nation
united by a common official government (Romans, English, French), a
people speaking the same language (Greeks, ancient Germans), and we
proceed as if all the members of this group resembled each other at
every point and had the same usages.
As a matter of fact, no real group, not even a centralised society, is a
homogeneous whole. For a great part of human activity--language, art,
science, religion, economic interests--the group is constantly
fluctuating. What are we to understand by the group of those who speak
Greek, the Christian group, the group of modern science? And even those
groups to which some precision is given by an official organisation,
States and Churches, are but superficial unities composed of
heterogeneous elements. The English nation comprises Welsh, Scotch, and
Irish; the Catholic Church is composed of adherents scattered over the
whole world, and differing in everything but religion. There is no
group whose members have the same habits in every respect. The same man
is at the same time a member of several groups, and in each group he has
companions who differ from those he has in the others. A French Canadian
belongs to the British Empire, the Catholic Church, the group of
French-speaking people. Thus the different groups overlap each other in
a way that makes it impossible to divide humanity into sharply distinct
societies existing side by side.
In historical documents we find the contemporary names of groups, many
of them resting on mere superficial resemblances. It must be made a rule
not to adopt popular notions of this kind without criticising them. We
must accurately determine the nature and extent of the group, asking: Of
what men was it composed? What bond united them? What habits had they in
common? In what species of activity did they differ? Not till after such
criticism shall we be able to tell what are the habits in respect of
which the group in question may be used as a basis of study. In order to
study intellectual habits (language, religion, art, science) we shall
not take a political unit, the nation, but the group consisting of those
who shared the habit in question. In order to study economic facts we
shall choose a group united by a common economic interest; we shall
reserve the political group for the study of social and political facts,
and we shall discard _race_[193] altogether.
Even in those points in which a group is homogeneous it is not entirely
so; it is divided into sub-groups, the members of which differ in
secondary habits; a language is divided into dialects, a religion into
sects, a nation into provinces. Conversely, one group resembles other
groups in a way that justifies its being regarded as contiguous with
them; in a general classification we may recognise "families" of
languages, arts, and peoples. We have, then, to ask: How was a given
group sub-divided? Of what larger group did it form a part?
It then becomes possible to study methodically a given habit, or even
the totality of the habits belonging to a given time and place, by
following the table given above. The operation presents no difficulties
of method in the case of those species of facts which appear as
individual and voluntary habits--language, art, sciences, conceptions,
private usages; here it is enough to ascertain in what each habit
consisted. It is merely necessary to distinguish carefully between those
who originated or maintained habits (artists, the learned, philosophers,
introducers of fashions) and the mass who accepted them.
But when we come to social or political habits (what we call
institutions), we meet with new conditions which produce an inevitable
illusion. The members of the same social or political group do not
merely habitually perform _similar_ actions; they influence each other
by _reciprocal_ actions, they command, coerce, pay each other. Habits
here take the form of _relations_ between the different members; when
they are of old standing, formulated in official rules, imposed by a
visible authority, maintained by a special set of persons, they occupy
so important a place in life, that, to the persons under their
influence, they appear as external realities. The men, too, who
specialise in an occupation or a function which becomes the dominating
habit of their lives, appear as grouped in distinct categories (classes,
corporations, churches, governments); and these categories are taken for
real existences, or at least for organs of various functions in a real
existence, namely, society. We follow the analogy of an animal's body so
far as to describe the "structure" and the "functions" of a society,
even its "anatomy" and "physiology." These are pure metaphors. By the
structure of a society we mean the rules and the customs by which
occupations and enjoyments are distributed among its members; by its
functions we mean the habitual actions by which each man enters into
relations with the others. It may be convenient to use these terms, but
it should be remembered that the underlying reality is composed entirely
of habits and customs.
The study of institutions, however, obliges us to ask special questions
about persons and their functions. In respect of social and economic
institutions we have to ask what was the principle of the division of
labour and of the division into classes, what were the professions and
classes, how were they recruited, what were the relations between the
members of the different professions and classes. In respect of
political institutions, which are sanctioned by obligatory rules and a
visible authority, two new series of questions arise. (1) Who were the
persons invested with authority? When authority is divided we have to
study the division of functions, to analyse the _personnel_ of
government into its different groups (supreme and subordinate, central
and local), and to distinguish each of the special bodies. In respect of
each class of men concerned in the government we shall ask: How were
they recruited? What was their official authority? What were their real
powers? (2) What were the official rules? What was their form (custom,
orders, law, precedent)? What was their content (rules of law)? What was
the mode of application (procedure)? And, above all, how did the rules
differ from the practice (abuse of power, exploitation, conflicts
between executive agents, non-observance of rules)?
After the determination of all the facts which constitute a society, it
remains to find the place which this society occupies among the total
number of the societies contemporary with it. Here we enter upon the
study of international institutions, intellectual, economic, and
political (diplomacy and the usages of war); the same questions apply as
in the study of political institutions. A study should also be made of
the habits common to several societies, and of those relations which do
not assume an official form. This is one of the least advanced parts of
historical construction.
IV. The outcome of all this labour is a tabulated view of human life at
a given moment; it gives us the knowledge of a _state_ of society (in
German, _Zustand_). But history is not limited to the study of
simultaneous facts, taken in a state of rest, to what we may call the
_statics_ of society. It also studies the states of society at different
moments, and discovers the differences between these states. The habits
of men and the material conditions under which they live change from
epoch to epoch; even when they appear to be constant they do not remain
unaltered in every respect. There is therefore occasion to investigate
these changes; thus arises the study of successive facts.
Of these changes the most interesting for the work of historical
construction are those which tend in a common direction,[194] so that in
virtue of a series of gradual differentiations a usage or a state of
society is transformed into a different usage or state, or, to speak
without metaphor, cases where the men of a given period practise a habit
very different from that of their predecessors without any abrupt change
having taken place. This is _evolution_.
Evolution occurs in all human habits. In order to investigate it,
therefore, it is enough to turn once more to the series of questions
which we used in constructing a tabulated view of society. In respect of
each of the facts, conditions, usages, persons invested with authority,
official rules, the question is to be asked: What was the evolution of
this fact?
This study will involve several operations: (1) the determination of the
fact whose evolution is to be studied; (2) the fixing of the duration of
the time during which the evolution took place (the period should be so
chosen that while the transformation is obvious, there yet remains a
connecting link between the initial and the final condition); (3) the
establishing of the different stages of the evolution; (4) the
investigation of the means by which it was brought about.
V. A series, even a complete series, of all the states of all societies
and of all their evolutions would not be enough to exhaust the
subject-matter of history. There remains a number of unique facts which
we cannot pass over, because they explain the origin of certain states
of society, and form the starting-points of evolutions. How could we
study the institutions or the evolution of France if we ignored the
conquest of Gaul by Caesar and the invasion of the Barbarians?
This necessity of studying unique facts has caused it to be said that
history cannot be a science, for every science has for its object that
which is general. History is here in the same situation as cosmography,
geology, the science of animal species: it is not the abstract knowledge
of the general relations between facts, it is a study which aims at
_explaining_ reality. Now, reality exists but once. There has been but a
single evolution of the world, of animal life, of humanity. In each of
these evolutions the successive facts have not been the product of
abstract laws, but of the concurrence, at each moment, of several
circumstances of different nature. This concurrence, sometimes called
chance, has produced a series of accidents which have determined the
particular course taken by evolution.[195] Evolution can only be
understood by the study of these accidents; history is here on the same
footing as geology or palaeontology.
Thus scientific history may go back to the accidents, or events, which
traditional history collected for literary reasons, because they struck
the imagination, and employ them for the study of evolution. We may thus
look for the facts which have influenced the evolution of each one of
the habits of humanity. Each event will be arranged under its date in
the evolution which it is supposed to have influenced. It will then
suffice to bring together the events of every kind, and to arrange them
in chronological and geographical order, to have a representation of
historical evolution as a whole.
Then, over and above the _special_ histories in which the facts are
arranged under purely abstract categories (art, religion, private life,
political institutions), we shall have constructed a concrete _general_
history, which will connect together the various special histories by
exhibiting the main stream of evolution which has dominated all the
special evolutions. None of the species of facts which we study apart
(religion, art, law, constitutions) forms a closed world within which
evolution takes place in obedience to a kind of internal impulse, as
specialists are prone to imagine. The evolution of a usage or of an
institution (language, religion, church, state) is only a metaphor; a
usage is an abstraction, abstractions do not evolve; it is only
_existences_ that evolve, in the strict sense of the word.[196] When a
change takes place in a usage, this means that the men who practise it
have changed. Now, men are not built in water-tight compartments
(religious, juridical, economic) within which phenomena can occur in
isolation; an event which modifies the condition of a man changes his
habits in a great variety of respects. The invasion of the Barbarians
influenced alike language, private life, and political institutions. We
cannot, therefore, understand evolution by confining ourselves to a
special branch of history; the specialist, even for the purpose of
writing the complete history of his own branch, must look beyond the
confines of his own subject into the field of general events. It is the
merit of Taine to have asserted, with reference to English literature,
that literary evolution depends, not on literary events, but on facts of
a general character.
The general history of individual facts was developed before the special
histories. It contains the residue of facts which have not found a place
in the special histories, and has been reduced in extent by the
formation and detachment of special branches. As general facts are
principally of a political nature, and as it is more difficult to
organise these into a special branch, general history has in practice
been confounded with political history (_Staatengeschichte_).[197] Thus
political historians have been led to make themselves the champions of
general history, and to retain in their constructions all the general
facts (migrations of peoples, religious reforms, inventions, and
discoveries) necessary for the understanding of political evolution.
In order to construct general history it is necessary to look for all
the facts which, because they have produced changes, can explain either
the state of a society or one of its evolutions. We must search for them
among all classes of facts, displacements of population, artistic,
scientific, religious, technical innovations, changes in the _personnel_
of government, revolutions, wars, discoveries of countries.
That which is important is that the fact should have had a decisive
influence. We must therefore resist the natural temptation to divide
facts into great and small. It goes against the grain to admit that
great effects may have had small causes, that Cleopatra's nose may have
made a difference to the Roman Empire. This repugnance is of a
metaphysical order; it springs from a preconceived opinion on the
government of the world. In all the sciences which deal with an
evolution we find individual facts which serve as starting-points for
series of vast transformations. A drove of horses brought by the
Spanish has stocked the whole of South America. In a flood a branch of
a tree may dam a current and transform the aspect of a valley.
In human evolution we meet with great transformations which have no
intelligible cause beyond an individual accident.[198] In the sixteenth
century England changed its religion three times on the death of a
sovereign (Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary). Importance not to be measured
by the initial fact, but by the facts which resulted from it. We must
not, therefore, deny _a priori_ the action of individuals and discard
individual facts. We must examine whether a given individual was in a
position to make his influence strongly felt. There are two cases in
which we may assume that he was: (1) when his action served as an
example to a mass of men and created a tradition, a case frequent in
art, science, religion, and technical matters; (2) when he had power to
issue commands and direct the actions of a mass of men, as is the case
with the heads of a state, an army, or a church. The episodes in a man's
life may thus become important facts.
Accordingly, in the scheme of historical classification a place should
be assigned for persons and events.
VI. In every study of successive facts it is necessary to provide a
number of halting-places, to distinguish beginnings and ends, in order
that chronological divisions may be made in the enormous mass of facts.
These divisions are _periods_; the use of them is as old as history. We
need them, not only in general history, but in the special branches of
history as well, whenever we study an extent of time long enough for an
evolution to be sensible. It is by means of events that we fix their
limits.
In the special branches of history, after having decided what changes of
habits are to be considered as reaching deepest, we adopt them as
marking _dates_ in the evolution; we then inquire what event produced
them. The event which led to the formation or the change of a habit
becomes the beginning or the end of a period. Sometimes these boundary
events are of the same species as the facts whose evolution we are
studying--literary facts in the history of literature, political facts
in political history. But more often they belong to a different species,
and the special historian is obliged to borrow them from general
history.
In general history the periods should be divided according to the
evolution of several species of phenomena; we look for events which mark
an epoch simultaneously in several branches (the Invasion of the
Barbarians, the Reformation, the French Revolution). We may thus
construct periods which are common to several branches of evolution,
whose beginning and whose end are each marked by a single event. It is
thus that the traditional division of universal history into periods has
been effected. The sub-periods are obtained by the same process, by
taking for limits events which have produced consequences of secondary
importance.
The periods which are thus constructed according to the events are of
unequal duration. We must not be troubled by this want of symmetry; a
period ought not to be a fixed number of years, but the time occupied by
a distinct phase of evolution. Now, evolution is not a regular movement;
sometimes a long series of years passes without notable change, then
come moments of rapid transformation. On this difference Saint-Simon has
founded a distinction between _organic_ periods (of slow change) and
_critical_ periods (of rapid change).
CHAPTER III
CONSTRUCTIVE REASONING
I. The historical facts supplied by documents are never enough to fill
all the blanks in such schemes of classification and arrangement as we
have been considering. There are many questions to which no direct
answer is given by the documents; many features are lacking without
which the complete picture of the various states of society, of
evolutions and events, cannot be given. We are irresistibly impelled to
endeavour to fill up these gaps.
In the sciences of direct observation, when a fact is missing from a
series, it is sought for by a new observation. In history, where we have
not this resource, we seek to extend our knowledge by the help of
reasoning. Starting from facts known to us from the documents, we
endeavour to reach new facts by inference. If the reasoning be correct,
this method of acquiring knowledge is legitimate.
But experience shows that of all the methods of acquiring historical
knowledge, reasoning is the most difficult to employ correctly, and the
one which has introduced the most serious errors. It should not be used
without the safeguard of a number of precautions calculated to keep the
danger continually before the mind.
(1) Reasoning should never be combined with the analysis of a document.
The reader who allows himself to introduce into a text what the author
has not expressly put there ends by making him say what he never
intended to say.[199]
(2) Facts obtained by the direct examination of documents should never
be confused with the results obtained by reasoning. When we state a fact
known to us by reasoning only, we must not allow it to be supposed that
we have found it in the documents; we must disclose the method by which
we have obtained it.
(3) Unconscious reasoning must never be allowed; there are too many
chances of error. It will be enough to make a point of putting every
argument into logical form; in the case of bad reasoning the major
premiss is generally monstrous to an appalling degree.
(4) If the reasoning leaves the least doubt, no attempt must be made to
draw a conclusion; the point treated must be left in the conjectural
stage, clearly distinguished from the definitively established results.
(5) It is not permissible to return to a conjecture and endeavour to
transform it into a certainty. Here the first impression is most likely
to be right. By reflection upon a conjecture we familiarise ourselves
with it, and end by thinking it better established; while the truth is,
we are merely more accustomed to it. This is a frequent mishap with
those who devote themselves to long meditation on a small number of
texts.
There are two ways of employing reasoning, one negative, the other
positive; we shall examine them separately.
II. The negative mode of reasoning, called also the "argument from
silence," is based on the absence of indications with regard to a
fact.[200] From the circumstance of the fact not being mentioned in any
document it is inferred that there was no such fact; the argument is
applied to all kinds of subjects, usages of every description,
evolutions, events. It rests on a feeling which in ordinary life is
expressed by saying: "If it were true, we should have heard of it;" it
implies a general proposition which may be formulated thus: "If an
alleged event really had occurred, there would be some document in
existence in which it would be referred to."
In order that such reasoning should be justified it would be necessary
that every fact should have been observed and recorded in writing, and
that all the records should have been preserved. Now, the greater part
of the documents which have been written have been lost, and the greater
part of the events which happen are not recorded in writing. In the
majority of cases the argument would be invalid. It must therefore be
restricted to the cases where the conditions implied in it have been
fulfilled.
(1) It is necessary not only that there should be now no documents in
existence which mention the fact in question, but that there should
never have been any. If the documents are lost we can conclude nothing.
The argument from silence ought, therefore, to be employed the more
rarely the greater the number of documents that have been lost; it is of
much less use in ancient history than in dealing with the nineteenth
century. Some, desiring to free themselves from this restriction, are
tempted to assume that the lost documents contained nothing interesting;
if they were lost, say they, the reason was that they were not worth
preserving. But the truth is, every manuscript is at the mercy of the
least accident; its preservation or destruction is a matter of pure
chance.
(2) The fact must have been of such a kind that it could not fail to be
observed and recorded. Because a fact has not been recorded it does not
follow that it has not been observed. Any one who is concerned in an
organisation for the collection of a particular species of facts knows
how much commoner those facts are than people think, and how many cases
pass unnoticed or without leaving any written trace. It is so with
earthquakes, cases of hydrophobia, whales stranded on the shore.
Besides, many facts, even those which are well known to those who are
contemporary with them, are not recorded, because the official
authorities prevent their publication; this is what happens to the
secret acts of governments and the complaints of the lower classes. This
silence, which proves nothing, greatly impresses unreflecting
historians; it is the origin of the widespread sophism of the "good old
times." No document relates any abuse of power by officials or any
complaints made by peasants; therefore, everything was regular and
nobody was suffering. Before we argue from silence we should ask: Might
not this fact have failed to be recorded in any of the documents we
possess? That which is conclusive is not the absence of any document on
a given fact, but silence as to the fact in a document in which it would
naturally be mentioned.
The negative argument is thus limited to a few clearly defined cases.
(1) The author of the document in which the fact is not mentioned had
the intention of systematically recording all the facts of the same
class, and must have been acquainted with all of them. (Tacitus sought
to enumerate the peoples of Germany; the _Notitia dignitatum_ mentioned
all the provinces of the Empire; the absence from these lists of a
people or a province proves that it did not then exist.) (2) The fact,
if it was such, must have affected the author's imagination so forcibly
as necessarily to enter into his conceptions. (If there had been regular
assemblies of the Frankish people, Gregory of Tours could not have
conceived and described the life of the Frankish kings without
mentioning them.)
III. The positive mode of reasoning begins with a fact established by
the documents, and infers some other fact which the documents do not
mention. It is an application of the fundamental principle of history,
the _analogy_ between present and past humanity. In the present we
observe that the facts of humanity are connected together. Given one
fact, another fact accompanies it, either because the first is the cause
of the second, or because the second is the cause of the first, or
because both are effects of a common cause. We assume that in the past
similar facts were connected in a similar manner, and this assumption is
corroborated by the direct study of the past in the documents. From a
given fact, therefore, which we find in the past, we may infer the
existence of the other facts which were connected with it.
This reasoning applies to facts of all kinds, usages, transformations,
individual incidents. We may begin with any known fact and endeavour to
infer unknown facts from it. Now the facts of humanity, having a common
centre, man, are all connected together, not merely facts of the same
class, but facts belonging to the most widely different classes. There
are connections, not merely between the different facts relating to art,
to religion, to manners, to politics, but between the facts of religion
on the one hand and the facts of art, of politics, and of manners on the
other; thus from a fact of one species we may infer facts of all the
other species.
To examine those connections between facts on which reasonings may be
founded would mean tabulating all the known relations between the facts
of humanity, that is, giving a full account of all the empirical laws of
social life. Such a labour would provide matter for a whole book.[201]
Here we shall content ourselves with indicating the general rules
governing this kind of reasoning, and the precautions to be taken
against the most common errors.
The argument rests on two propositions: one is general, and is derived
from experience of human affairs; the other is particular, and is
derived from the documents. In practice, we begin with the particular
proposition, the historical fact: Salamis bears a Phoenician name. We
then look for a general proposition: the language of the name of a city
is the language of the people which founded it. And we conclude:
Salamis, bearing a Phoenician name, was founded by the Phoenicians.
In order that the conclusion may be certain, two conditions are
necessary.
(1) The general proposition must be accurately true; the two facts which
it declares to be connected must be connected in such a way that the one
is never found without the other. If this condition were completely
satisfied we should have a _law_, in the scientific sense of the word;
but in dealing with the facts of humanity--apart from those physical
conditions whose laws are established by the regular sciences--we can
only work with empirical laws obtained by rough determinations of
general facts which are not analysed in such a manner as to educe their
true causes. These empirical laws are approximately true only when they
relate to a numerous body of facts, for we can never quite know how far
each is necessary to produce the result. The proposition relating to the
language of the name of a city does not go enough into detail to be
always true. Petersburg is a German name, Syracuse in America bears a
Greek name. Other conditions must be fulfilled before we can be sure
that the name is connected with the nationality of the founders. We
should, therefore, only employ such propositions as go into detail.
(2) In order to employ a general proposition which goes into detail, we
must have a detailed knowledge of the particular fact; for it is not
till after this fact has been established that we look for an empirical
general law on which to found an argument. We shall begin, then, by
studying the particular conditions of the case (the situation of
Salamis, the habits of the Greeks and Phoenicians); we shall not work
on a single detail, but on an assemblage of details.
Thus, in historical reasoning it is necessary to have (1) an accurate
general proposition; (2) a detailed knowledge of a past fact. It is bad
workmanship to assume a false general proposition--to suppose, for
example, as Augustin Thierry did, that every aristocracy had its origin
in a conquest. It is bad workmanship, again, to found an argument on an
isolated detail (the name of a city). The nature of these errors
indicates the precautions to be taken.
(1) The spontaneous tendency is to take as a basis of reasoning those
"common-sense truths" which form nearly the whole of our knowledge of
social life. Now, the greater part of these are to some extent false,
for the science of social life is still imperfect. And the chief danger
in them lies in the circumstance that we use them unconsciously. The
safest precaution will be always to formulate the supposed law on which
we propose to base an argument. In every instance where such and such a
fact occurs, it is certain that such and such another fact occurs also.
If this proposition is obviously false, we shall at once see it to be
so; if it is too general, we shall inquire what new conditions may be
introduced to make it accurate.
(2) A second spontaneous impulse leads us to draw consequences from
isolated facts, even of the slightest kind (or rather, the idea of each
fact awakens in us, by association, the idea of other facts). This is
the natural procedure in the history of literature. Each circumstance in
the life of an author supplies material for reasoning; we construct by
conjecture all the influences which could have acted upon him, and we
assume that they did act upon him. All the branches of history which
study a single species of facts, isolated from every other species
(language, arts, private law, religion), are exposed to the same danger,
because they deal with fragments of human life, not with comprehensive
collections of phenomena. But few conclusions are firmly established
except those which rest on a comprehensive body of data. We do not make
a diagnosis from a single symptom, but from a number of concurrent
symptoms. The precaution to be taken will be to avoid working with an
isolated detail or an abstract fact. We must have before our minds
actual men, as affected by the principal conditions under which they
lived.
We must be prepared to realise but rarely the conditions of a certain
inference; we are too little acquainted with the laws of social life,
and too seldom know the precise details of an historical fact. Thus most
of our reasonings will only afford presumptions, not certainties. But it
is with reasonings as with documents.[202] When several presumptions
all point in the same direction they confirm each other, and end by
producing a legitimate certitude. History fills up some of its gaps by
an accumulation of reasonings. Doubts remain as to the Phoenician
origin of various Greek cities, but there is no doubt about the presence
of the Phoenicians in Greece.
CHAPTER IV
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENERAL FORMULAE
I. Suppose we had methodically arranged all the historical facts
established by the analysis of documents, or by reasoning; we should
possess a systematised inventory of the whole of history, and the work
of construction would be complete. Ought history to stop at this point?
The question is warmly debated, and we cannot avoid giving an answer,
for it is a question with a practical bearing.
Critical scholars, who are accustomed to collect all the facts relating
to their speciality, without any personal preference, are inclined to
regard a complete, accurate, and objective collection of facts as the
prime requisite. All historical facts have an equal right to a place in
history; to retain some as being of greater importance, and reject the
rest as comparatively unimportant, would be to introduce the subjective
element of choice, variable according to individual fancy; history
cannot sacrifice a single fact.
Against this very reasonable view there is nothing to be urged except a
material difficulty; this, however, is enough, for it is the practical
motive of all the sciences: we mean the impossibility of acquiring or
communicating complete knowledge. A body of history in which no fact
was sacrificed would have to contain all the actions, all the thoughts,
all the adventures of all men at all times. It would form a total which
no one could possibly make himself master of, not for want of materials,
but for want of time. This, indeed, applies, as things are, to certain
voluminous collections of documents: the collected reports of
parliamentary debates contain the whole history of the various
assemblies, but to learn their history from these sources would require
more than a lifetime.
Every science must take into consideration the practical conditions of
life, at least so far as it claims to be a real science, a science which
it is possible to know. Any ideal which ends by making knowledge
impossible impedes the establishment of the science.
Science is a saving of time and labour, effected by a process which
provides a rapid means of learning and understanding facts; it consists
in the slow collection of a quantity of details and their condensation
into portable and incontrovertible formulae. History, which is more
encumbered with details than any other science, has the choice between
two alternatives: to be complete and unknowable, or to be knowable and
incomplete. All the other sciences have chosen the second alternative;
they abridge and they condense, preferring to take the risk of
mutilating and arbitrarily combining the facts to the certainty of being
unable either to understand or communicate them. Scholars have preferred
to confine themselves to the periods of ancient history, where chance,
which has destroyed nearly all the sources of information, has freed
them from the responsibility of choosing between facts by depriving them
of nearly all the means of knowing them.
History, in order to constitute itself a science, must elaborate the raw
material of facts. It must condense them into manageable form by means
of descriptive formulae, qualitative and quantitative. It must search for
those connections between facts which form the ultimate conclusions of
every science.
II. The facts of humanity, with their complex and varied character,
cannot be reduced like chemical facts to a few simple formulae. Like the
other sciences which deal with life, history needs descriptive formulae
in order to express the nature of the different phenomena.
In order to be manageable, a formula must be short; in order to give an
exact idea of the facts, it must be precise. Now, in the knowledge of
human affairs, precision can only be obtained by attention to
characteristic details, for these alone enable us to understand how one
fact differed from others, and what there was in it peculiar to itself.
There is thus a conflict between the need of brevity, which leads us to
look for concrete formulae, and the necessity of being precise, which
requires us to adopt detailed formulae. Formulae which are too short make
science vague and illusory, formulae which are too long encumber it and
make it useless. This dilemma can only be evaded by a perpetual
compromise, the principle of which is to compress the facts by omitting
all that is not necessary for the purpose of representing them to the
mind, and to stop at the point where omission would suppress some
characteristic feature.
This operation, which is difficult in itself, is still further
complicated by the state in which the facts which are to be condensed
into formulae present themselves. According to the nature of the
documents from which they are derived, they come to us in all the
different degrees of precision: from the detailed narrative which
relates the smallest episodes (the battle of Waterloo) down to the
barest mention in a couple of words (the victory of the Austrasians at
Testry). On different facts of the same kind we possess an amount of
details which is infinitely variable according as the documents give us
a complete description or a mere mention. How are we to organise into a
common whole, items of knowledge which differ so widely in point of
precision? When facts are known to us from a vague word of general
import, we cannot reduce them to a less degree of generality and a
greater degree of precision; we do not know the details. If we add them
conjecturally we shall produce an historical novel. This is what
Augustin Thierry did in the case of his _Recits merovingiens_. When
facts are known in detail, it is always easy to reduce them to a greater
degree of generality by suppressing characteristic details; this is what
is done by the authors of abridgements. But the result of this procedure
would be to reduce history to a mass of vague generalities, uniform for
the whole of time except for the proper names and the dates. It would be
a dangerous method of introducing symmetry, to bring all facts to a
common degree of generality by levelling them all to the condition of
those which are the most imperfectly known. In those cases, therefore,
where the documents give details, our descriptive formulae should always
retain the characteristic features of the facts.
In order to construct these formulae we must return to the set of
questions which we employed in grouping the facts, we must answer each
question, and compare the answers. We shall then combine them into as
condensed and as precise a formula as possible, taking care to keep a
fixed sense for every word. This may appear to be a matter of style, but
what we have in view here is not merely a principle of exposition,
necessary for the sake of being intelligible to the reader, it is a
precaution which the author ought to take on his own account. The facts
of society are of an elusive nature, and for the purpose of seizing and
expressing them, fixed and precise language is an indispensable
instrument; no historian is complete without good language.
It will be well to make the greatest possible use of concrete and
descriptive terms: their meaning is always clear. It will be prudent to
designate collective groups only by collective, not by abstract names
(royalty, State, democracy, Reformation, Revolution), and to avoid
personifying abstractions. We think we are simply using metaphors, and
then we are carried away by the force of the words. Certainly abstract
terms have something very seductive about them, they give a scientific
appearance to a proposition. But it is only an appearance, behind which
scholasticism is apt to be concealed; the word, having no concrete
meaning, becomes a purely verbal notion (like the soporific virtue of
which Moliere speaks). As long as our notions on social phenomena have
not been reduced to truly scientific formulae, the most scientific course
will be to express them in terms of every-day experience.
In order to construct a formula, we should know beforehand what elements
ought to enter into it. We must here make a distinction between general
facts (habits and evolutions) and unique facts (events).
III. General facts consist in actions which are often repeated, and are
common to a number of men. We have to determine their _character_,
_extent_, and _duration_.
In order to formulate their character, we combine all the features which
constitute a fact (habit, institution) and distinguish it from all
others. We unite under the same formula all the individual cases which
greatly resemble each other, by neglecting the individual differences.
This concentration is performed without effort in the case of habits
which have to do with forms (language, handwriting), and in the case of
all intellectual habits; those who practised these habits have already
given them expression in formulae, which we have only to collect. The
same holds of these institutions which are sanctioned by expressly
formulated rules (regulations, laws, private statutes). Accordingly the
special branches of history were the first to yield methodical formulae.
On the other hand, these special branches do not go beyond superficial
and conventional facts, they do not reach the real actions and thoughts
of men: in language they deal with written words, not the real
pronunciation; in religion with official dogmas and rites, not with the
real beliefs of the mass of the people; in morals with avowed precepts,
not with the effective ideals; in institutions with official rules, not
with the real practice. On all these subjects the knowledge of
conventional forms must some day be supplemented by a parallel study of
the real habits.
It is much more difficult to embrace in a single formula a habit which
is composed of real actions, as is the case with economic phenomena,
private life, politics; for we have to find in the different actions
those common characteristics which constitute the habit; or, if this
work has already been done in the documents, and condensed into a
formula (the most common case), we must criticise this formula in order
to make sure that it really represents a homogeneous habit.
The same difficulty occurs in constructing the formula for a group; we
have to describe the characteristic common to all the members of the
group and to find a collective name which shall exactly designate it. In
documents there is no lack of names of groups; but, as they have their
origin in usage, many of them correspond but ill to the real groups; we
have to criticise these names to fix their precise meaning, sometimes to
correct their application.
This first operation should yield formulae expressive of the conventional
and real characteristics of all the habits of the different groups.
In order to fix the precise _extent_ of a habit we shall seek the most
distant points where it appears (this will give the area of
distribution), and the region where it is most common (the centre).
Sometimes the operation takes the form of a map (for example the map of
the _tumuli_ and the _dolmens_ of France). It will also be necessary to
indicate the groups of men who practised each habit, and the sub-groups
in which it was most pronounced.
The formula should also indicate the _duration_ of the habit. We shall
look for the extreme cases, the first and the last appearance of the
form, the doctrine, the usage, the institution, the group. But it will
not be enough to note the two isolated cases, the earliest and the most
recent; we must ascertain the period in which it was really active.
The formula of an evolution ought to indicate the successive variations
in the habit, giving in each case precise limits of extent and duration.
Then, by comparing all the variations, it will be possible to determine
the general course of the evolution. The general formula will indicate
when and where the evolution began and ended, and the nature of the
change which it effected. All evolutions present common features which
enable them to be divided into stages. Every habit (usage or
institution) begins by being the spontaneous act of several individuals;
when others imitate them it becomes a usage. Similarly social functions
are in the first instance performed by persons who undertake them
spontaneously, when these persons are recognised by others they acquire
an official status. This is the first stage; individual initiative
followed by general imitation and recognition. The usage becomes
traditional and is transformed into an obligatory custom or rule; the
persons acquire a permanent status and are invested with powers of
material or moral constraint. This is the stage of tradition and
authority; very often it is the last stage, and continues till the
society is destroyed. The usage is relaxed, the rules are violated, the
persons in authority cease to be obeyed; this is the stage of revolt and
decomposition. Finally, in certain civilised societies, the rule is
criticised, the persons in authority are censured, by the action of a
part of the subjects a rational change is effected in the composition of
the governing body, which is subjected to supervision; this is the stage
of reform and of checks.
IV. In the case of unique facts we cannot expect to bring several
together under a common formula, for the nature of these facts is to
occur but once. However, it is imperatively necessary to abridge, we
cannot preserve all the acts of all the members of an assembly or of all
the officers of a state. Many individuals and many facts must be
sacrificed.
How are we to choose? Personal tastes and patriotism give rise to
preferences for congenial characters and for local events; but the only
principle of selection which can be employed by all historians in common
is that which is based on the part played in the evolution of human
affairs. We ought to retain those persons and those events which have
visibly influenced the course of an evolution. We may recognise them by
our inability to describe the evolution without mentioning them. The men
are those who have modified the state of a society either by the
creation or the introduction of a habit (artists, men of science,
inventors, founders, apostles), or as directors of a movement, heads of
states, of parties, of armies. The events are those which have brought
about changes in the habits or the state of societies.