Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/177

Rh what does that mean; how far should such indication go? "Furnish proof":—how is it to be got in order to be furnished? What constitutes proof? "As far as possible":—surely a weak-kneed and halfhearted phrase, but probably meant to leave way for the undemonstrable results of intuition and divination. As for the third rule:—how shall he make the sharp distinction, and further, ought he not rather to supply that which will make his readers certain or uncertain than merely to state his own convictions and doubts. Professor James Harvey Robinson writes on this point, "The historian has no accurate means of representing his own dubiety, strongly as he may be conscious of it. Much less can he impart his doubts and uncertainties to his reader" since history "possesses no special terminology adapted to its specific uses and historical writers content themselves with vague and uncertain expressions which are in their nature literary rather than scientific." Robinson, it should be said, both in the article just cited and in a lecture on "History" published in 1908 by the Columbia University Press, makes several incidental suggestions stimulating to one interested in scientific presentation, although his main aim is to expose the defects of the literary method of presenting history and he does not go on to attempt a theory of scientific presentation.

The most recent noteworthy instance of discouragement of endeavor to present history scientifically was the last annual address by a president of the American Historical Association. Professor George Burton Adams did not, like Bernheim and Winsor, disregard the possibility of scientific history; he clearly put the question, "In ascertaining and classifying the objective facts with which history deals can methods which are really scientific be employed . . . "? But he went on to say coolly, "History must remain one of the branches of literature"—a servitude incompatible with scientific status. Then a little later, when wisely discouraging present attempts to philosophize history, he tended towards the opposite extreme and declared that, "The field of the historian is and must long remain the discovery and recording of what actually happened," —thereby abandoning Monod's hope of attaining to general truths and taking up a position not much more consoling to scientist than to philosopher.

On the other hand, there are tendencies toward scientific presentation outside the pages of writers on historical method. Even those who would incontinently discover some one hypothesis—for instance, the economic interpretation of history—to charm the "facts" of history from a chaos into a system, have at least invoked the name of science.