Page:Karel Čapek - The Absolute at Large (1927).djvu/118

 admits that he is incapable of writing a history. Where the historian uses the press or pounder of his historical learning, documentary lore, abstracts, synthesis, statistics, and other professional devices, to squeeze thousands and hundreds of thousands of little vital personal incidents into a dense and arbitrary conglomerate known as "a historical fact," "a social phenomenon," "a mass movement," "evolution," "the mind of the race," or "historical truth" in general, the chronicler sees only the individual cases and even finds them pleasing in themselves.

Now suppose that he had to describe and explain, say, pragmatically, progressively, theoretically, and synthetically, the "religious wave" which swept over the whole world before the year 1950. Once he sees this grandiose task before him, he begins collecting the "religious phenomena" of his own time; and there, in the course of these researches, he comes, for example, upon Jan Binder, ex-variety artiste, wandering from place to place in his striped jersey with his atomic merry-go-round. Historical synthesis, of course, requires the chronicler to omit the striped jersey, the merry-go-round, even Jan Binder himself, and retain as the "historical nucleus" or scientific result, only the discovery that "these religious phenomena from the very outset affected the most diverse classes of society."