Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/179

Rh been gathered and shall be crushed together to make one surpassing syrup—the philosophy of history? No; as yet no historical units have been discovered. The word "fact" is, like the word "event," merely a convenient but exceedingly indefinite term. A fact is any fragment of historic truth just as an event is an arbitrary division of the past. To speak of "objective facts" of history then is impermissible. How much a fact or an event shall include is an entirely subjective matter. A war is a fact or event, so is any battle in it, so is the death of any soldier in the battle.

Qualitatively a fact or an event is quite as difficult to limit. Bernheim and Winsor displayed a tendency to restrict the "facts" of history to epic material and Adams seems at first sight to give the same thought its most recent expression in saying, "The field of the historian is and must long remain the discovery and recording of what actually happened." But it is idle to try to study "past action" by itself. We must know the milieu, the material, social and intellectual environment in which an event happened, in order properly to understand the event. But why single out "events" for our attention? Why not study the past without qualification? And again, what are "events"? Every external act had its inner concomitant, cause or result. Science and art have their "connected action," as well as states and dynasties. The very conditions which form the milieu for some act are themselves really in constant flux and so "happening" from day to day. In the last analysis, therefore, "what actually happened," like "facts," is no other limitation upon the scope of history than the negative one of excluding fictions and philosophizing. Truth and unvarnished truth are all they mean. Everything in the past is still left as the province of history.

There is, however, another possible explanation of the expression "the facts of history." One might narrow the definition of history by accepting roughly the limited scope of past historians and trying to discover only "facts" of the sort which they give. Of course, exactly to define what sorts of past phenomena they recorded would be difficult but it is also not easy apparently for modern investigators to strike out along new lines. The tradition though vague is powerful. Herodotus and his successors too often not merely—witness Winsor—suggest to moderns their method, but also their matter. Yet if history were narrowed down from its possible scope as investigation of the past in the interest of and with especial reference to man to a study of only the writings of those men in the past who were called historians, it evidently would become mere scholasticism, a barren commentary upon traditional authorities. It is only less unsatisfactory to confine history to material additional to but similar to that with which they dealt. Their standards can be bettered, not merely as they have been by the modern attitude to sources and the modern historical sense, but also in point of the content of history and the mode of presenting it. The historian to-day must not impose on the public the limited round of topics which