Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/87

 be what it is, the love of history is certainly second in origin to no other sort of love of knowledge. As a search for truth it tries to investigate matters in which the truth may be more difficult to find than it is in mere matters of observation or deduction, but surely its difficulty is not an argument for its disparagement; as a hoarding up of knowledge, it collects facts and records, the results of which are less exact than those of strict science, but are not less precious even in the eyes of the man who would regard them as mere engines of power. It is not true that written history is a mere tradition of falsehoods, assumptions and illogical deductions, of what the writers believed, rather than of what they knew, and of what they wished to have believed rather than what was true; even if it were, it would be no reason why we should not do our best to unmask the falsehood and detect the fallacies. But we have all heard enough of that sort of thing before; there is, in the most exact science that has subject-matter at all, a mixture of the phenomenal and the real: even the falsehoods and misrepresentations of the record serve as a guide to the discovery of the truth of fact, and certainly serve to train the mind to distinguish historical truth.

Agreeing, then, that both for the great extent of its field of view, the grandeur of its subject-matter, the difficulty of its problems, and the value of its results, the study of history is worth pursuing; and that, for its own sake, not merely for its effects as an educational agent, or its usefulness in the business of life,—we may allow that, even for its own sake, it may be studied with some variety of aspect or approach. We may work simply for the love of discovery, that is the exercise of the investigative instinct and the pleasure of overcoming difficulties; or we may work with the beneficent idea of increasing the sum of human knowledge, or of unravelling the string which forms the clue to the history of human progress, or of making such generalisations as may constitute the laws of a new historic science. All these, and perhaps some other purposes may be arranged under our first head, because, although some of them may seem subsidiary to larger and wider general designs, they all have in common the belief