ASCERTAINMENT OF SIMPLE FACTS IN THEIR ORDER.--PERSONAL OBSERVATION.
--HEARSAY EVIDENCE--METHOD OF TESTING TRADITIONAL EVIDENCE.
All beliefs as to simple matter of fact must rest ultimately on
observation. But, of course, we believe many things to have happened
that we have never seen. As Chaucer says:--
But God forbede but men shoulde 'lieve
Wel more thing than men han seen with eye.
Man shall not weenen everything a lie
But if himself it seeth or else doth.
For the great bulk of matters of fact that we believe we are
necessarily dependent on the observations of others. And if we are
to apply scientific method to the ascertainment of this, we must know
what errors we are liable to in our recollections of what we have
ourselves witnessed, and what errors are apt to arise in the tradition
of what purports to be the evidence of eye-witnesses.
I.--PERSONAL OBSERVATION.
It is hard to convince anybody that he cannot trust implicitly to his
memory of what he has himself seen. We are ready enough to believe
that others may be deceived: but not our own senses. Seeing is
believing. It is well, however, that we should realise that all
observation is fallible, even our own.
Three great besetting fallacies or tendencies to error may be
specified:--
1. Liability to have the attention fastened on special incidents, and
so diverted from other parts of the occurrence.
2. Liability to confuse and transpose the sequence of events.
3. Liability to substitute inference for fact.
It is upon the first of these weaknesses in man as an observing
machine that jugglers chiefly depend on working their marvels. Sleight
of hand counts for much, but diverting the spectator's eyes for a good
deal more. That is why they have music played and patter incessantly
as they operate. Their patter is not purposeless: it is calculated to
turn our eyes away from the movements of their nimble hands.
It must be borne in mind that in any field of vision there are many
objects, and that in any rapid succession of incidents much more
passes before the eyes than the memory can retain in its exact
order. It is of course in moments of excitement and hurry, when our
observation is distracted, that we are most subject to fallacious
illusions of memory. Unconsciously we make a coherent picture of what
we have seen, and very often it happens that the sequence of events
is not what actually passed, but what we were prejudiced in favour of
seeing. Hence the unlikelihood of finding exact agreement among the
witnesses of any exciting occurrence, a quarrel, a railway accident, a
collision at sea, the incidents of a battle.
"It commonly happens," says Mr. Kinglake,[1] "that incidents occurring
in a battle are told by the most truthful bystanders with differences
more or less wide." In the attack on the Great Redoubt in the Battle
of the Alma, a young officer, Anstruther, rushed forward and planted
the colours of the Royal Welsh--but where? Some distinctly remembered
seeing him dig the butt-end of the flagstaff into the parapet: others
as distinctly remembered seeing him fall several paces before he
reached it. Similarly with the incidents of the death of the Prince
Imperial near the Italezi Hills in the Zulu War. He was out as a
volunteer with a reconnoitring party. They had off-saddled at a kraal
and were resting, when a band of Zulus crept up through the long
grass, and suddenly opened fire and made a rush forward. Our scouts
at once took horse, as a reconnoitring party was bound to do, and
scampered off, but the Prince was overtaken and killed. At the
Court-Martial which ensued, the five troopers gave the most
conflicting accounts of particulars which an unskilled investigator
would think could not possibly have been mistaken by eye-witnesses of
the same event. One said that the Prince had given the order to mount
before the Zulus fired: another that he gave the order directly after:
a third was positive that he never gave the order at all, but that it
was given after the surprise by the officer in command. One said that
he saw the Prince vault into the saddle as he gave the order: another
that his horse bolted as he laid hold of the saddle, and that he ran
alongside trying to get up.
The evidence before any Court of Inquiry into an exciting occurrence
is almost certain to reveal similar discrepancies. But what we find it
hard to realise is that we ourselves can possibly be mistaken in what
we have a distinct and positive recollection of having seen. It once
happened to myself in a London street to see a drunken woman
thrown under a cab by her husband. Two cabs were running along, a
four-wheeler and a hansom: the woman staggered almost under the first,
and was thrown under the second. As it happened the case never got
beyond the police station to which the parties were conveyed after
fierce opposition from some neighbours, who sympathised entirely with
the man. The woman herself, when her wounds were dressed, acknowledged
the justice of her punishment, and refused to charge her husband. I
was all the more willing to acquiesce in this because I found
that while I had the most distinct impression of having seen the
four-wheeler run over the woman's body, and should have been obliged
to swear accordingly, there could be no doubt that it was really
the hansom that had done so. This was not only the evidence of the
neighbours, which I suspected at the time of being a trick, but of the
cabdriver, who had stopped at the moment to abide the results of the
accident. I afterwards had the curiosity to ask an eminent police
magistrate, Sir John Bridge, whether this illusion of memory on my
part--which I can only account for by supposing that my eyes had
been fixed on the sufferer and that I had unconsciously referred her
injuries to the heavier vehicle--would have entirely discredited my
testimony in his Court. His answer was that it would not; that he was
constantly meeting with such errors, and that if he found a number of
witnesses of the same occurrence exactly agreed in every particular,
he would suspect that they had talked the matter over and agreed upon
what they were to say. This was the opinion of an experienced judge,
a skilled critic of the defects of personal observation. An Old Bailey
counsel for the defence, who is equally acquainted with the weakness
of human memory, takes advantage of the fact that it is not generally
understood by a Jury, and makes the fallacious assumption that glaring
discrepancies are irreconcilable with the good faith of the witnesses
who differ.[2]
II.--TRADITION.--HEARSAY EVIDENCE.
Next in value to personal observation, we must place the report, oral
or written, of an eye-witness. This is the best evidence we can get
if we have not witnessed an occurrence ourselves. Yet Courts of Law,
which in consideration of the defects of personal observation require
more than one witness to establish the truth, exclude hearsay evidence
altogether in certain cases, and not without reason.
In hearing a report we are in the position of observers of a series
of significant sounds, and we are subject to all the fallacies of
observation already mentioned. In an aggravated degree, for words are
harder to observe than visible things. Our attention is apt to be more
listless than in presence of the actual events. Our minds dwell upon
parts of the narrative to the neglect of other parts, and in the
coherent story or description that we retain in our memories,
sequences are apt to be altered and missing links supplied in
accordance with what we were predisposed to hear. Thus hearsay
evidence is subject to all the imperfections of the original observer,
in addition to the still more insidious imperfections of the second
observer.
How quickly in the course of a few such transmissions hearsay loses
all evidentiary value is simply illustrated by the game known as
Russian Scandal. One of a company, A, writes down a short tale or
sketch, and reads it to B. B repeats it to C, C to D, and so on. When
it has thus gone the round of the company, the last hearer writes
down his version, and it is compared with the original. With every
willingness to play fair, the changes are generally considerable and
significant.
Sometimes it is possible to compare an oral tradition with a
contemporary written record. In one of Mr. Hayward's Essays--"The
Pearls and Mock Pearls of History"--there are some examples of this
disenchanting process. There is, for instance, a pretty story of an
exchange of courtesies between the leaders of the French and English
Guards at the battle of Fontenoy. The tradition runs that Lord Charles
Hay stepped in front of his men and invited the French Guards to fire,
to which M. d'Auteroche with no less chivalry responded: "Monsieur, we
never fire first; you fire". What really passed we learn from a
letter from Lord Charles Hay to his mother, which happens to have
been preserved. "I advanced before our regiment, and drank to the
Frenchmen, and told them we were the English Guards, and hoped they
would stand till we came, and not swim the Scheldt as they did the
Maine at Dettingen." Tradition has changed this lively piece of
buffoonery into an act of stately and romantic courtesy. The change
was probably made quite unconsciously by some tenth or hundredth
transmitter, who remembered only part of the story, and dressed the
remainder to suit his own fancy.
The question has been raised, For how long can oral tradition be
trusted? Newton was of opinion that it might be trusted for eighty
years after the event. Others have named forty years. But if this
means that we may believe a story that we find in circulation forty
years after the alleged events, it is wildly extravagant. It does
injustice to the Mythop[oe]ic Faculty of man. The period of time that
suffices for the creation of a full-blown myth, must be measured
by hours rather than by years. I will give an instance from my own
observation, if that has not been entirely discredited by my previous
confessions. The bazaars of the East are generally supposed to be
the peculiar home of myth, hotbeds in which myths grow with the most
amazing speed, but the locality of my myth is Aberdeen. In the summer
of 1887 our town set up in one of its steeples a very fine carillon
of Belgian bells. There was much public excitement over the event: the
descriptions of enthusiastic promoters had prepared us to hear silvery
music floating all over the town and filling the whole air. On the day
fixed for the inauguration, four hours after the time announced for
the first ceremonial peal, not having heard the bells, I was in a shop
and asked if anything had happened to put off the ceremony. "Yes,"
I was told; "there had been an accident; they had not been properly
hung, and when the wife of the Lord Provost had taken hold of a string
to give the first pull, the whole machinery had come down." As a
matter of fact all that had happened was that the sound of the bells
was faint, barely audible a hundred yards from the belfry, and not at
all like what had been expected. There were hundreds of people in the
streets, and the myth had originated somehow among those who had
not heard what they went out to hear. The shop where it was repeated
circumstantially to me was in the main street, not more than a quarter
of a mile from where the carillon had been played in the hearing of
a large but disappointed crowd. I could not help reflecting that if I
had been a mediaeval chronicler, I should have gone home and recorded
the story, which continued to circulate for some days in spite of
the newspapers: and two hundred years hence no historian would have
ventured to challenge the truth of the contemporary evidence.
III.--METHOD OF TESTING TRADITIONAL EVIDENCE.
It is obvious that the tests applied to descriptive testimony in
Courts of Law cannot be applied to the assertions of History. It is
a supreme canon of historical evidence that only the statements of
contemporaries can be admitted: but most even of their statements must
rest on hearsay, and even when the historian professes to have been an
eye-witness, the range of his observation is necessarily limited, and
he cannot be put into the witness-box and cross-examined. Is there
then no way of ascertaining historical fact? Must we reject history as
altogether unworthy of credit?
The rational conclusion only is that very few facts can be established
by descriptive testimony such as would satisfy a Court of Law. Those
who look for such ascertainment are on a wrong track, and are doomed
to disappointment. It is told of Sir Walter Raleigh that when he was
writing his History of the World, he heard from his prison in the
Tower a quarrel outside, tried to find out the rights and the wrongs
and the course of it, and failing to satisfy himself after careful
inquiry, asked in despair how he could pretend to write the history
of the world when he could not find out the truth about what occurred
under his own windows. But this was really to set up an impossible
standard of historical evidence.
The method of testing historical evidence follows rather the lines
of the Newtonian method of Explanation, which we shall afterwards
describe. We must treat any historical record as being itself in the
first place a fact to be explained. The statement at least is extant:
our first question is, What is the most rational way of accounting
for it? Can it be accounted for most probably by supposing the event
stated to have really occurred with all the circumstances alleged? Or
is it a more probable hypothesis that it was the result of an illusion
of memory on the part of the original observer, if it professes to
be the record of an eye-witness, or on the part of some intermediate
transmitter, if it is the record of a tradition? To qualify ourselves
to answer the latter kind of question with reasonable probability
we must acquaint ourselves with the various tendencies to error in
personal observation and in tradition, and examine how far any of
them are likely to have operated in the given case. We must study the
operation of these tendencies within our experience, and apply the
knowledge thus gained. We must learn from actual observation of facts
what the Mythop[oe]ic Faculty is capable of in the way of creation
and transmutation, and what feats are beyond its powers, and then
determine with as near a probability as we can how far it has been
active in the particular case before us.
[Footnote 1: _The Invasion of the Crimea_, iii. 124]
[Footnote 2: The truth is, that we see much less than is
commonly supposed. Not every impression is attended to that
is made on the retina, and unless we do attend we cannot,
properly speaking, be said to see. Walking across to college
one day, I was startled by seeing on the face of a clock in
my way that it was ten minutes to twelve, whereas I generally
passed that spot about twenty minutes to twelve. I hurried
on, fearing to be late, and on my arrival found myself in very
good time. On my way back, passing the clock again, I looked
up to see how much it was fast. It marked ten minutes to
eight. It had stopped at that time. When I passed before I
had really seen only the minute hand. The whole dial must have
been on my retina, but I had looked at or attended to only
what I was in doubt about, taking the hour for granted. I am
bound to add that my business friends hint that it is only
absorbed students that are capable of such mistakes, and that
alert men of business are more circumspect. That can only be
because they are more alive to the danger of error.]