Part 9 (1/2)
BOOK III
_SYNTHETIC OPERATIONS_
CHAPTER I
GENERAL CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION
The criticism of doc.u.ments only yields isolated facts. In order to organise them into a body of science it is necessary to perform a series of synthetic operations. The study of these processes of historical construction forms the second half of Methodology.
The mode of construction cannot be regulated by the ideal plan of the science we desire to construct; it depends on the materials we have at our disposal. It would be chimerical to formulate a scheme which the materials would not allow us to carry out; it would be like proposing to construct an Eiffel tower with building-stones. The fundamental defect of philosophies of history is that they forget this practical necessity.
I. Let us begin by considering the materials of history. What is their form and their nature? How do they differ from the materials of other sciences?
Historical facts are derived from the critical a.n.a.lysis of the doc.u.ments. They issue from this process in the form to which a.n.a.lysis has reduced them, chopped small into individual statements; for a single sentence contains several statements: we have often accepted some and rejected others; each of these statements represents a fact.
Historical facts have the common characteristic of having been taken from doc.u.ments; but they differ greatly among themselves.
(1) They represent phenomena of very different nature. From the same doc.u.ment we derive facts bearing on handwriting, language, style, doctrines, customs, events. The Mesha inscription furnishes facts bearing on Moabite handwriting and language, the belief in the G.o.d Chemosh, the practices belonging to his cult, the war between the Moabites and Israel. Thus the facts reach us pell-mell, without distinction of nature. This mixture of heterogeneous facts is one of the characteristics which differentiate history from the other sciences. The sciences of direct observation choose the facts to be studied, and systematically limit themselves to the observation of facts of a single species. The doc.u.mentary sciences receive the facts, already observed, at the hands of authors of doc.u.ments, who supply them in disorder. For the purpose of remedying this disorder it is necessary to sort the facts and group them by species. But, for the purpose of sorting them, it is necessary to know precisely what it is that const.i.tutes a _species_ of historical facts; in order to group them we need a principle of cla.s.sification applicable to them. But on these two questions of capital importance historians have not as yet succeeded in formulating precise rules.
(2) Historical facts present themselves in very different degrees of generality, from the highly general facts which apply to a whole people and which lasted for centuries (inst.i.tutions, customs, beliefs), down to the most transient actions of a single man (a word, a movement). Here again history differs from the sciences of direct observation, which regularly start from particular facts and labour methodically to condense them into general facts. In order to form groups the facts must be reduced to a common degree of generality, which makes it necessary to inquire to what degree of generality we can and ought to reduce the different species of facts. And this is what historians do not agree about among themselves.
(3) Historical facts are localised; each belongs to a given time and a given country. If we suppress the time and place to which they belong, they lose their historical character; they now contribute only to the knowledge of universal humanity, as is the case with facts of folk-lore whose origin is unknown. This necessity of localisation is also foreign to the general sciences; it is confined to the descriptive sciences, which deal with the geographical distribution and with the evolution of phenomena. It obliges the historian to study separately the facts belonging to different countries and different epochs.
(4) The facts which have been extracted from doc.u.ments by critical a.n.a.lysis present themselves accompanied by a critical estimate of their probability.[178] In every case where we have not reached complete certainty, whenever the fact is merely probable--still more when it is open to suspicion--criticism supplies the fact to the historian accompanied by a label which he has no right to remove, and which prevents the fact from being definitively admitted into the science.
Even those facts which, after comparison with others, end by being established, are subject to temporary exclusion, like the clinical cases which acc.u.mulate in the medical reviews before they are considered sufficiently proved to be received as scientific facts.
Historical construction has thus to be performed with an incoherent ma.s.s of minute facts, with detail-knowledge reduced as it were to a powder.
It must utilise a heterogeneous medley of materials, relating to different subjects and places, differing in their degree of generality and certainty. No method of cla.s.sifying them is provided by the practice of historians; history, which began by being a form of literature, has remained the least methodical of the sciences.
II. In every science the next step after observing the facts is to formulate a series of questions according to some methodical system;[179] every science is composed of the answers to such a series of questions. In all the sciences of direct observation, even if the questions to be answered have not been put down in advance, the facts which are observed suggest questions, and require them to be formulated precisely. But historians have no discipline of this kind; many of them are accustomed to imitate artists, and do not even think of asking themselves what they are looking for. They take from their doc.u.ments those parts which strike them, often for purely personal reasons, and reproduce them, changing the language and adding any miscellaneous reflections which come into their minds.
If history is not to be lost in the confusion of its materials, it must be made a rule to proceed here, as in the other sciences, by way of question and answer.[180] But how are the questions to be chosen in a science so different from the others? This is the fundamental problem of method. The only way to solve it is to begin by determining the essential characteristic of historical facts by which they are differentiated from the facts of the other sciences.
The sciences of direct observation deal with _realities_, taken in their entirety. The science which borders most closely on history in respect of its subject-matter, descriptive zoology, proceeds by the examination of a real and complete animal. This animal is first observed, as a whole, by actual vision; it is then dissected into its parts; this dissection is _a.n.a.lysis_ in the original sense of the word ([Greek: ha.n.a.lhyein], to break up into parts). It is then possible to put the parts together again in such a way as to exhibit the structure of the whole; this is _real_ synthesis. It is possible to watch the _real_ movements which are the functions of the organs in such a way as to observe the mutual actions and reactions of the different parts of the organism. It is possible to compare _real_ wholes and see what are the parts in which they resemble each other, so as to be able to cla.s.sify them according to real points of resemblance. The science is a body of objective knowledge founded on _real_ a.n.a.lysis, synthesis, and comparison; actual sight of the things studied guides the scientific researcher and dictates the questions he is to ask himself.
In history there is nothing like this. One is apt to say that history is the ”vision” of past events, and that it proceeds by ”a.n.a.lysis”: these are two metaphors, dangerous if we suffer ourselves to be misled by them.[181] In history we see nothing real except paper with writing on it--and sometimes monuments or the products of art or industry. The historian has nothing before him which he can a.n.a.lyse physically, nothing which he can destroy and reconstruct. ”Historical a.n.a.lysis” is no more real than is the vision of historical facts; it is an abstract process, a purely intellectual operation. The a.n.a.lysis of a doc.u.ment consists in a _mental_ search for the items of information it contains, with the object of criticising them one by one. The a.n.a.lysis of a fact consists in the process of distinguis.h.i.+ng _mentally_ between its different details (the various episodes of an event, the characteristics of an inst.i.tution), with the object of paying special attention to each detail in turn; that is what is called examining the different ”aspects”
of a fact,--another metaphor. The human mind is vague by nature, and spontaneously revives only vague collective impressions; to impart clearness to these it is necessary to ask what individual impressions go to form a given collective impression, in order that precision may be attained by a successive consideration of them. This is an indispensable operation but we must not exaggerate its scope. It is not an objective method which yields a knowledge of real objects; it is only a subjective method which aims at detecting those abstract elements which compose our impressions.[182] From the very nature of its materials history is necessarily a subjective science. It would be illegitimate to extend to this intellectual a.n.a.lysis of subjective impressions the rules which govern the real a.n.a.lysis of real objects.
History, then, must guard against the temptation to imitate the method of the biological sciences. Historical facts are so different from the facts of the other sciences that their study requires a different method.
III. Doc.u.ments, the sole source of historical knowledge, give information on three categories of facts:
(1) _Living beings and material objects._ Doc.u.ments make us acquainted with the existence of human beings, physical conditions, products of art and industry. In all these cases physical facts have been brought before the author by physical perception. But we have before us nothing but intellectual phenomena, facts seen ”through the author's imagination,” or, to speak accurately, mental images representative of the author's impressions--images which we form on the _a.n.a.logy_ of the images which were in his mind. The Temple at Jerusalem was a material object which men saw, but we cannot see it now; all we can now do is to form a mental image of it, a.n.a.logous to that which existed in the minds of those who saw and described it.
(2) _Actions of men._ Doc.u.ments relate the actions (and words) of men of former times. Here, too, are physical facts which were known to the authors by sight and hearing, but which are now for us no more than the author's recollections, subjective images which are reproduced in our minds. When Caesar was stabbed the dagger-thrusts were seen, the words of the murderers were heard; we have nothing but mental images. Actions and words all have this characteristic, that each was the action or the word of an individual; the imagination can only represent to itself _individual_ acts, copied from those which are brought before us by direct physical observation. As these are the actions of men living in a society, most of them are performed simultaneously by several individuals, or are directed to some common end. These are collective acts; but, in the imagination as in direct observation, they always reduce to a sum of individual actions. The ”social fact,” as recognised by certain sociologists, is a philosophical construction, not an historical fact.