Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/496

492 is that in which history is interested, the individual fact with all the differences, marking it as something unique in the past. Sociology studies the same phenomena, but draws from present and past in her search for conditions of like kind, disregarding individual variations, and therefore hopes—so far without much success—to find types and even discover laws. What sociology with its different point of view and method may hope to acomplishaccomplish [sic] is not a part of the historical problem.

The demand has been made of the science, however, that it disclose the laws of social dynamics. The futility of such an attempt will be more fully seen after the discussion of the method of reasoning in history; but at the present moment it is sufficient to note that to discover a law by observation—the only method capable of being employed by the historian—there is need of finding a type or typical development, the law of which will be the law of all similar phenomena. It is not to be denied that there have been in the past certain recurrences of similar forms which some philosophers have eagerly asserted to be typical regularities of social development from which laws may be learned. On account of the complexity of the phenomena, in which these similar elements are closely interwoven with variants, and because the observations at best are unreliable and can never be corrected by repeated trial, a complete knowledge of the conditions or of the occurrence is not possessed by the historian and there is, therefore, no secure basis for an induction. Besides the collection of a number of similar facts from various periods is not the usual method of the historian in whose eyes events are individual in character, never combining the same conditions, never following the same course. These very differences are those which he seeks. Even here he must acknowledge himself baffled in his search for the sufficient cause of these variations which mark them unique. He finds their beginnings and traces their development, but, as far as his knowledge goes, it is conceivable that quite another succession of events might have been enacted, and then he would have zealously shown how it too fitted into the evolution past and present and interdigitated so accurately with the other phenomena. From the observation of an isolated event, dissimilar to all others, no law can be formulated.

From another point of view attempts have been made to discover the laws controlling historical development. The world's history is continuous; each nation, each period forms but a part of the grand whole; on this broader field can we find laws of historical evolution. We historians stand in a very different relation to our phenomena than does the natural scientist; in the twisting and squirmings of the microcosm we read our own destiny. Never can we get outside of the course of the evolution of which we are ourselves a part, and view it as something entirely foreign to our wills. An objective criterion of the truth, although not wholly lacking, is still by no means so perfect as that offered the natural scientists. But a still greater difficulty confronts