Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/166

 152 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

which can be intensified and corrected by repeated observations and clarified by experiment.

"It should now have become clear that history can never become a science in the sense that physics, chemistry, physiology, or even anthropology, is a science. The complexity of the phenomena is appalling and we have no way of artificially analyz- ing and of experimenting with our facts. We know absolutely nothing of any occurrences in the history of mankind during thousands of years and it is only since the invention of printing that our sources have become in any sense abundant. Historical students have moreover become keenly aware of the 'psycho- logical operations' which separate them from the objective facts of the past. They know that all narrative sources, upon which former historians so naively relied, are open to the gravest sus- picion and that even the documents and inscriptions which they prize more highly are nevertheless liable to grave misinterpreta- tion."

I think, then, we must frankly despair of ever reconstructing the past history of man in a complete and particularistic fashion. Whether certain incidents transpired as is set down in the records or handed down in tradition we can never know. The folk-mind is highly imaginative and anecdotal. It has always possessed the appetite for the sensational, the morbid, and the marvelous which is at present so successfully catered to by the yellow section of the daily press. It has created many picturesque situations, but it is not an organ for scientific observation.

I suppose it is even true that the myth, superstition, and magical practice of the savage have a more certain value for the study of the history of man than the written record. The printed page is deceitful, but the myth cannot deceive. What it narrates is not true, but the student is not deceived. And the mere existence of the myth is one of the great facts in this history of mind which must be recognized if we are to under- stand the present state of social consciousness. This is a point on which Professor Tylor has insisted. And as the historian abandons or relaxes his effort to establish a particular order of incidents in the past and turns his attention rather to the estab-