Part 8 (1/2)
We may advance a step farther. In themselves conceptions are nothing but facts in psychology; but imagination does not create its objects, it takes the elements of them from reality. Descriptions of imaginary facts are constructed out of the real facts which the author has observed in his experience. These elements of knowledge, the raw material of the imaginary description, may be sought for and isolated. In dealing with periods and with cla.s.ses of facts for which doc.u.ments are rare--antiquity, for example, and the usages of private life--the attempt has been made to lay under contribution works of literature, epic poems, novels, plays.[168] The method is legitimate, but only within the limits of certain restrictions which one is very apt to forget.
(1) It does not apply to social facts of a psychological order, the moral or artistic standards of a society; the moral and aesthetic conceptions in a doc.u.ment give at most the individual standards of the author; we have no right to conclude from these to the morals or the aesthetic tastes of the age. We must at least wait till we have compared several different authors of the same period.
(2) Descriptions even of physical facts and objects may be products of the author's imagination. It is only the _elements_ of them which we know to be certainly real; all that we can a.s.sert is the separate existence of the irreducible elements, form, material, colour, number.
When the poet speaks of golden gates or silver bucklers, we cannot infer that golden gates and silver bucklers ever existed in reality; nothing is certain beyond the separate existence of gates, bucklers, gold, and silver. The a.n.a.lysis must therefore be carried to the point of distinguis.h.i.+ng those elements which the author must necessarily have taken from experience: objects, their purpose, ordinary actions.
(3) The conception of an object or an action proves that it existed, but not that it was common; the object or action may have been unique, or restricted to a very small circle; poets and novelists are fond of taking their models from an exceptional world.
(4) The facts yielded by this method are not localised in s.p.a.ce or time; the author may have taken them from a time or country not his own.
All these restrictions may be summarised as follows: before drawing any inference from a work of literature as to the state of the society in which the author lived, we should ask ourselves what would be the worth of a similar inference as to contemporary manners drawn from a modern novel.
With the facts yielded by conceptions we may join those indifferent facts of an obvious and elementary character which the author has stated almost without thinking. Logically we have no right to call them certain, for we do sometimes meet with men who make mistakes about obvious and elementary facts, and others who lie even on indifferent matters. But such cases are so rare that there is not much danger in admitting as certain facts of this kind which are supported by a single doc.u.ment, and this is how we deal, in practice, with periods of which little is known. The inst.i.tutions of the Gauls and Germans are described from the unique texts of Caesar and Tacitus. Facts so easy to discover are forced upon the authors of descriptions much as realities are forced upon poets.
II. On the other hand, a statement in a doc.u.ment as to an objective fact is never enough to establish that fact. The chances of falsehood or error are so many, the conditions which gave rise to the statement are so little known, that we cannot be sure that none of these chances has taken effect. The critical examination provides no definitive solution; it is indispensable if we are to avoid error, but it is insufficient to conduct us to truth.
Criticism can _prove_ no fact; it only yields probabilities. Its end and result is to decompose doc.u.ments into statements, each labelled with an estimate of its value--worthless statement, statement open to suspicion (strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, statement of unknown value.
Of all these different kinds of results one only is definitive--_the statement of an author who can have had no information on the fact he states is null and void_; it is to be rejected as we reject an apocryphal doc.u.ment.[169] But criticism here merely destroys illusory sources of information; it supplies nothing certain to take their place.
The only sure results of criticism are _negative_. All the positive results are subject to doubt; they reduce to propositions of the form: ”There are chances for or against the truth of such and such a statement.” Chances only. A statement open to suspicion may turn out to be true; a statement whose truth is probable may, after all, be false.
Instances occur continually, and we are never sufficiently well acquainted with the conditions under which the observation was made to _know_ whether it was made ill or well.
In order to obtain a definitive result we require a final operation.
After pa.s.sing through the ordeal of criticism, statements present themselves as probable or improbable. But even the most probable of them, taken by themselves, remain mere probabilities: to pa.s.s from them to categorical propositions in scientific form is a step we have no right to take; a proposition in a science is an a.s.sertion not open to debate, and that is what the statements we have before us are not. It is a principle common to all sciences of observation not to base a scientific conclusion on a single observation; the fact must have been corroborated by several independent observations before it is affirmed categorically. History, with its imperfect modes of acquiring information, has less right than any other science to claim exemption from this principle. An historical statement is, in the most favourable case, but an indifferently made observation, and needs other observations to corroborate it.
It is by combining observations that every science is built up: a scientific fact is a centre on which several different observations converge.[170] Each observation is subject to chances of error which cannot be entirely eliminated; but if several observations agree, this can hardly be in virtue of a common error: the more probable explanation of the agreement is that the observers have all seen the same reality and have all described it correctly. Errors are personal and tend to diverge; it is the correct observations that agree.
Applied to history, this principle leads to a last series of operations, intermediate between purely a.n.a.lytical criticism and the synthetic operations--the comparison of statements.
We begin by cla.s.sifying the results yielded by critical a.n.a.lysis in such a way as to bring together those statements which relate to the same fact. The operation is facilitated mechanically by the method of slips.
Either each statement has been entered on a separate slip, or else a single slip has been a.s.signed for each fact, and the different statements relating to it entered upon the slip as met with in the course of reading. By bringing the statements together we learn the extent of our information on the fact; the definitive conclusion depends on the relation between the statements. We have, then, to study separately the different cases which may occur.
III. Most frequently, except in contemporary history, the doc.u.ments only supply a single statement on a given fact. In such a case all the other sciences follow an invariable rule: an isolated observation is not admitted into science; it is quoted (with the observer's name), but no conclusions are drawn from it. Historians have no avowable motive for proceeding otherwise. When a fact is supported by no more than the statement of a single man, however honest he may be, historians ought not to a.s.sert it, but to do as men of science do--give the reference (Thucydides states, Caesar says that ...); this is all they have a right to affirm. In reality they all retain the habit of stating facts, as was done in the middle ages, on the _authority_ of Thucydides or of Caesar; many are simple enough to do so in express terms. Thus, allowing themselves to be guided by natural credulity, unchecked by science, historians end by admitting, on the insufficient presumption afforded by a unique doc.u.ment, any statement which does not happen to be contradicted by another doc.u.ment. Hence the absurd consequence that history is more positive, and seems better established in regard to those little known periods which are represented by a single writer than in regard to facts known from thousands of doc.u.ments which contradict each other. The wars of the Medes known to Herodotus alone, the adventures of Fredegonda related by none but Gregory of Tours, are less subject to discussion than the events of the French Revolution, which have been described by hundreds of contemporaries. This is a discreditable state of things which cannot be ended except by a revolution in the minds of historians.
IV. When we have several statements relating to the same fact, they may contradict each other or they may agree. In order to be certain that they really do contradict each other, we have to make sure that they do actually relate to the same fact. Two apparently contradictory statements may be merely parallel; they may not relate exactly to the same moment, the same place, the same persons, the same episodes of an event, and they may be both correct.[171] We must not, however, infer that they confirm each other; each comes under the category of unique statements.
If the contradiction is real, at least one of the statements is false.
In such cases it is a natural tendency to seek to reconcile them by a compromise--to split the difference. This peace-making spirit is the reverse of scientific. A says two and two make four; B says they make five. We are not to conclude that two and two make four and a half; we must examine and see which is right. This examination is the work of criticism. Of two contradictory statements, it nearly always happens that one is open to suspicion; this should be rejected if the competing statement has been judged very probably true. If both are open to suspicion, we abstain from drawing any conclusion. We do the same if several statements open to suspicion agree together as against a single statement which is not suspected.[172]
V. When several statements agree, it is still necessary to resist the natural tendency to believe that the fact has been demonstrated. The first impulse is to count each doc.u.ment as one source of information. We are well aware in matters of every-day life that men are apt to copy each other, that a single narrative often serves the turn of several narrators, that several newspapers sometimes happen to publish the same correspondence, that several reporters sometimes agree to let one of their number do the work for all. We have, in such a case, several doc.u.ments, several statements--have we the same number of observations?
Obviously not. When one statement reproduces another, it does not const.i.tute a new observation, and even if an observation were to be reproduced by a hundred different authors, these hundred copies would amount to no more than one observation. To count them as a hundred would be the same thing as to count a hundred printed copies of the same book as a hundred different doc.u.ments. But the respect paid to ”historical doc.u.ments” is sometimes stronger than obvious truth. The same statement occurring in several different doc.u.ments by different authors has an illusory appearance of multiplicity; an identical fact related in ten different doc.u.ments at once gives the impression of being established by ten agreeing observations. This impression is to be distrusted. An agreement is only conclusive when the agreeing statements represent _observations_ which are independent of each other. Before we draw any conclusion from an agreement we must examine whether it is an agreement between _independent_ observations. Two operations are thus required.
(1) We begin by inquiring whether the statements are independent, or are reproductions of one and the same observation. This inquiry is partly the work of that part of external criticism which deals with the investigation of sources;[173] but that investigation only touches the relations between written doc.u.ments, and stops short when it has determined which pa.s.sages of an author are borrowed from other authors.
Borrowed pa.s.sages are to be rejected without discussion. But the same work remains to be done in reference to statements which were not committed to writing. We have to compare the statements which relate to the same fact, in order to find out whether they proceeded originally from different observers, or at least from different observations.