Part 14 (2/2)

In history knowledge is not obtained, as in the other sciences, by direct methods, it is indirect. History is not, as has been said, a science of observation, but a science of reasoning.

In order to use facts which have been observed under unknown conditions, it is necessary to apply criticism to them, and criticism consists in a series of reasonings by a.n.a.logy. The facts as furnished by criticism are isolated and scattered; in order to organise them into a structure it is necessary to imagine and group them in accordance with their resemblances to facts of the present day, an operation which also depends on the use of a.n.a.logies. This necessity compels history to use an exceptional method. In order to frame its arguments from a.n.a.logy, it must always combine the knowledge of the particular conditions under which the facts of the past occurred with an understanding of the general conditions under which the facts of humanity occur. Its method is to draw up special _tables_ of the facts of an epoch in the past, and to apply to them sets of _questions_ founded on the study of the present.

The operations which must necessarily be performed in order to pa.s.s from the inspection of doc.u.ments to the knowledge of the facts and evolutions of the past are very numerous. Hence the necessity of the division and organisation of labour in history. It is requisite, on the one hand, that those specialists who occupy themselves with the search for doc.u.ments, their restoration and preliminary cla.s.sification, should co-ordinate their efforts, in order that the preparatory work of critical scholars.h.i.+p may be finished as soon as possible, under the best conditions as to accuracy and economy of labour. On the other hand, authors of partial syntheses (monographs) designed to serve as materials for more comprehensive syntheses ought to agree among themselves to work on a common method, in order that the results of each may be used by the others without preliminary investigations. Lastly, workers of experience should be found to renounce personal research and devote their whole time to the study of these partial syntheses, in order to combine them scientifically in comprehensive works of historical construction. And if the result of these labours were to bring out clear and certain conclusions as to the nature and the causes of social evolution, a truly scientific ”philosophy of history” would have been created, which historians might acknowledge as legitimately crowning historical science.

Conceivably a day may come when, thanks to the organisation of labour, all existing doc.u.ments will have been discovered, emended, arranged, and all the facts established of which the traces have not been destroyed.

When that day comes, history will be established, but it will not be fixed: it will continue to be gradually modified in proportion as the direct study of existing societies becomes more scientific and permits a better understanding of social phenomena and their evolution; for the new ideas which will doubtless be acquired on the nature, the causes, and the relative importance of social facts will continue to transform the ideas which will be formed of the societies and events of the past.[231]

II. It is an obsolete illusion to suppose that history supplies information of practical utility in the conduct of life (_Historia magistra vitae_), lessons directly profitable to individuals and peoples; the conditions under which human actions are performed are rarely sufficiently similar at two different moments for the ”lessons of history” to be directly applicable. But it is an error to say, by way of reaction, that ”the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of history is to be good for nothing.”[232] It has an indirect utility.

History enables us to understand the present in so far as it explains the origin of the existing state of things. Here we must admit that history does not offer an equal interest through the whole extent of time which it covers; there are remote generations whose traces are no longer visible in the world as it now is; for the purpose of explaining the political const.i.tution of contemporary England, for example, the study of the Anglo-Saxon witangemot is without value, that of the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is all-important. The evolution of the civilised societies has within the last hundred years been accelerated to such a degree that, for the understanding of their present form, the history of these hundred years is more important than that of the ten preceding centuries. As an explanation of the present, history would almost reduce to the study of the contemporary period.

History is also indispensable for the completion of the political and social sciences, which are still in process of formation; for the direct observation of social phenomena (in a state of rest) is not a sufficient foundation for these sciences--there must be added a study of the development of these phenomena in time, that is, their history.[233]

This is why all the sciences which deal with man (linguistic, law, science of religions, political economy, and so on) have in this century a.s.sumed the form of historical sciences.

But the chief merit of history is that of being an instrument of intellectual culture; it is so in several ways. Firstly, the practice of the historical method of investigation, of which the principles have been sketched in the present volume, is very hygienic for the mind, which it cures of credulity. Secondly, history, by exhibiting to us a great number of differing societies, prepares us to understand and tolerate a variety of usages; by showing us that societies have often been transformed, it familiarises us with variation in social forms, and cures us of a morbid dread of change. Lastly, the contemplation of past evolutions, which enables us to understand how the transformations of humanity are brought about by changes of habits and the renewal of generations, saves us from the temptation of applying biological a.n.a.logies (selection, struggle for existence, inherited habits, and so on) to the explanation of social evolution, which is not produced by the operation of the same causes as animal evolution.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

THE SECONDARY TEACHING OF HISTORY IN FRANCE

I. The teaching of history is a recent addition to secondary education.

Formerly history was taught to the sons of kings and great persons, in order to give them a preparation in the art of governing, according to the ancient tradition, but it was a sacred science reserved for the future rulers of states, a science for princes, not for subjects. The secondary schools which have been organised since the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical or secular, Catholic or Protestant, did not admit history into their plan of study, or only admitted it as an appendage to the study of the ancient languages. This was the tradition of the Jesuits in France; it was adopted by the University of Napoleon.

History was only introduced into secondary education in the nineteenth century, under the pressure of public opinion; and although it has been allotted more s.p.a.ce in France than in England, or even in Germany, it has continued to be a subsidiary subject, not taught in a special cla.s.s (as philosophy is), nor always by a special professor, and counting for very little in examinations.

Historical instruction has for a long time felt the effects of the manner in which it was introduced. The subject was imposed by the authorities on teachers trained exclusively in the study of literature, and could find no suitable place in a system of cla.s.sical education based on the study of forms, and indifferent to the knowledge of social phenomena. History was taught because it was prescribed by the programme; but this programme, the sole motive and guide of the instruction, was always an accident, and varied with the preferences, or even the personal studies of those who framed it. History formed part of the social conventions; there are, it was said, names and facts ”of which it is not permissible to be ignorant”; but the things of which ignorance was not permitted varied greatly, from the names of the Merovingian kings and the battles of the Seven Years' War to the Salic Law and the work of Saint Vincent de Paul.

The improvised staffs which, in order to carry out the programme, had to furnish impromptu instruction in history, had no clear idea either of the reasons for such instruction, or of its place in general education, or of the technical methods necessary for giving it. With this lack of tradition, of pedagogic preparation, and even of mechanical aids, the professor of history found himself carried back to the ages before printing, when the teacher had to supply the pupil with all the facts which formed the subject-matter of instruction, and he adopted the mediaeval procedure. Armed with a note-book in which he had written down the list of facts to be taught, he read it out to the pupils, sometimes making a pretence of extemporising; this was the ”lesson,” the corner-stone of historical instruction. The whole series of lessons, determined by the programme, formed the ”course.” The pupil was expected to write as he listened (this was called ”taking notes”) and to compose a written account of what he had heard (this was the _redaction_). But as the pupils were not taught how to take notes, nearly all of them were content to write very rapidly, from the professor's dictation, a rough draft, which they copied out at home in the form of a _redaction_, without any endeavour to grasp the meaning either of what they heard or what they transcribed. To this mechanical labour the most zealous added extracts copied from books, generally with just as little reflection.

In order to get the facts judged essential into the pupils' heads, the professor used to make a very short version of the lesson, the ”summary”

or ”abstract,” which he dictated openly, and caused to be learnt by heart. Thus of the two written exercises which occupied nearly the whole time of the cla.s.s, one (the summary) was an overt dictation, the other (the _redaction_) an unavowed dictation.

The only means adopted to check the pupils' work was to make them repeat the summary word for word, and to question them on the _redaction_, that is to make them repeat approximately the words of the professor. Of the two oral exercises one was an overt, the other an unavowed repet.i.tion.

It is true the pupil was given a book, the _Precis d'histoire_,[234] but this book had the same form as the professor's course, and instead of serving as a basis for the oral instruction, merely duplicated it, and, as a rule, duplicated it badly, for it was not intelligible to the pupil. The authors of these text-books,[235] adopting the traditional methods of ”abridgments,” endeavoured to acc.u.mulate the greatest possible number of facts by omitting all their characteristic details and summarising them in the most general, and therefore vague, expressions. In the elementary books nothing was left but a residue of proper names and dates connected by formulae of a uniform type; history appeared as a series of wars, treaties, reforms, revolutions, which only differed in the names of peoples, sovereigns, fields of battle, and in the figures giving the years.[236]

Such, down to the end of the Second Empire, was historical instruction in all French inst.i.tutions, both secular and ecclesiastical--with a few exceptions, whose merit is measured by their rarity, for in those days a professor of history needed a more than common share of energy and initiative to rise above the routine of _redaction_ and summary.

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