Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/178

174 True, these makers of hypotheses may be in too great haste to reach their goal and base their results on dubious and insufficient data rather than undertake a thorough examination of the source material. They may resemble the Ionian philosophers with their single world grounds rather than the slow, painstaking observers and experimenters of modern science. But, like the Greek sages, those who would conquer history at a blow have not led their forlorn hope quite in vain. However faulty their execution, they have at least corrected the assumption of Bernheim and Winsor that history is merely something to narrate and have held it to be something to study, to classify, to evaluate.

Nor does present orthodox historical practise lag behind with historical theory as sketched above. Original research of to-day would generally scorn intuitive methods, and the presentation of the results of such research is seldom primarily literaiy. But unfortunately, since the methods of research employed are seldom fully exposed, even if we take their validity for granted so far as the particular results are concerned, we are still left without the needed data for a theory of scientific presentation. No common and accepted methods have been formulated. Moreover, while such preliminary work as the editing of the sources is painstaking and while original research is done more or less scientifically, there is a marked tendency to limit the sphere of scientific investigation to the bare "facts," to "what actually happened"—to use Adams's phrase—and to look at least for the present upon further analysis and synthesis, upon the composition of history for the public, upon the manufacture of the final product, as an art either not needing or not permitting regulation, and as sufficiently scientific if it employs the results of the two earlier processes, no matter how it may use them. Thus is built on rock a house of sand. But that is not all. The flimsy superstructure is two-storied, for there are no bare "facts" of history.

The first step towards a correct theory of scientific investigation and presentation is then to show that there are no separate and particular objective facts of history; that consequently investigation having them as its object must be fruitless; and that methods of writing history based—as were all those which have been outlined—upon the assumption that they exist are wrong. When this is done, we shall be in a position to see much better what is the task of historical investigation and hence what is its fitting method. Only when we understand that "ascertaining and classifying objective facts" is not history's true business, may we with hope of success put the question, "Can methods which are really scientific be employed?"

What then are meant by the "facts" of history? Is there in the field of history any such definite and fundamental unit as the cell in biology? Are facts indivisible, elemental entities, found hanging ripe as it were on the branches of the sources and needing only to be plucked and picked over according to their essentiality and then to be canned in works of particular research until the day when all fruit shall have