Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/185

Rh with scientific exactness, he will make perfectly clear the material available and utilized for the solution of the problem, and will inform us of the plan b}-which that material will be exploited. Then will follow naturally the subjection of that material to these methods and the consequent results, positive or negative, partial or complete. Presentation will follow investigation step by step.

Moreover, since investigation will be so completely a matter of accurate measurement and of accurate conclusion therefrom, the method of presentation will probably somewhat resemble that employed by mathematics and the sciences. We shall come, not merely to the historical terminology which Robinson desires, but also to standards of historical measurement, modes of historical reckoning, historical symbols, curves, charts and other graphic means of presenting briefly and accurately what prose could compass only in many pages or fail to express with requisite precision and discrimination. Thus, while historians will present proof as well as results, this greater detail than is at present given will be so put that it can be looked over in less time. Historians will no longer be handicapped as were the medieval algebraists who wrote out their equations in words. Other sciences of human life, psychology, economics, sociology, have already turned to such methods; history alone remains backward and awkward. Yet the scantiness of the material at its disposal, in comparison with the abundant opportunity for experiment and observation possessed by the others, requires from it even more accurate inspection, calculus and presentation.

Even in historical manuals, text-books, general treatments of countries and ages, and other works of too pretentious scope and abbreviated form to be based directly on the source material and use of scientific processes, there will be no reason why scientific propositions may not in increasing measure constitute the contents, the field be definite, the form in accord with the true spirit of history. Possibly fewer persons would study the reformed presentation than read histories at present, but they would learn more truth of value, gain a deeper insight into the true nature of history, and have a greater respect for it. One could not then dismiss it as "a branch of literature." Its utterances would rest neither on vague consensus of opinion, nor on the reputation, nor on the footnotes of this and that individual; but upon a common method, open to the scrutiny of all and worked out in its fullness by generations of scholars, though applied in each particular investigation by an individual mind.