Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/36

 approach his life's work; he mast realize that the competent labourer who refuses his co-operation in the great task of reaping die harvest of the past—the harvest that is so great while the labourers are still so few—is sinning against the light. We stand at present in a crisis when the raw material has accumulated in such masses that there is a most pressing want of hands to sort and arrange it To stand by idle, because you feel that some of your work may prove of no more than temporary worth, because your amour propre revolts against the notion that you may be building a scaffolding rather than a permanent structure, is deplorable. By setting forth a hypothesis that may turn out to be only half true, by formulating a thesis that requires indefinite modification, we may serve the cause of history far better than by refusing to put anything on paper that is not absolutely certain, complete, and undeniable. It is only the shallowest fool among critics who contemns the pioneer in any line of research for not having achieved absolute accuracy. Columbus when discovering America wrongly believed that he had reached the Indies: is his service to geography to be ignored or derided because his discovery was made while pursuing a hypothesis that was partly false? The world greatly needs Columbuses; it has no such pressing need for the critic, incapable of forming a bold hypothesis himself, two exists only to point out ex post facto small errors in the work of those who have gone before him. Yet I would be far from denying that the critic has his uses too; it is certainly far better to have set right even a dozen minute mistakes in other men's books than to have remained altogether dumb. If one cannot be the pioneer, one can at least do unostentatious work as the navvy who makes smooth the path which the pioneer has discovered.