Notes.
Lecture I.
Note 1. p. [3]. Subdivisions Of Historical Inquiry.
A few words may explain the distinctions intended in the text.
History has been properly distinguished by Macaulay into two branches, the artistic or descriptive, and the scientific or analytic. (Essays, vol. i. 2, on Hallam.) If viewed in the former aspect, history aims as far as possible to reproduce what has been, to recover a picture of the past. Hence it is obedient to the two conditions which rule all art,—precise outline in details, and preservation of perspective in the combination. In the latter, theory in some slight degree steps in, but theory dictated by the instinct of taste rather than by reflection. It is in this branch, in which the historian is the critic, that the border line lies between art and science. For it is hard to measure the precise amount which is due in the appreciation of facts respectively to artistic intuition and to reflective analysis.[1054]
Supposing the facts to be thus given, it is the province of the science of history to ascertain their causes. Two living writers, Mr. Mill (System of Logic), and Dr. Whewell (Philosophy of Inductive Sciences), have given an account of the logic of science. That of the latter is more suitable to the conception which we are here forming of history; for history is exactly one of the class of sciences which he calls “Palætiological.” (vol. i. b. x.) It requires first, that we recover the record of the successive stages of facts, the narrative of the past, before searching for the causes. The causes are then to be sought by transferring backward for the explanation of the past those which are at present operating. The search will probably exhibit three successive stages in the process [pg 380] of examination. First, causes will be found which are the mere antecedents of the events, the mere links which connect the phenomena. Next, a cyclical law of the recurrence of the facts is perceived, such e.g. as Vico's well-known law concerning the development of political society. Such a law as this, supposing it to hold good without exception within the limits of experience, is what Mr. Mill calls an “empirical law.” (Logic, vol. ii. b. iii. ch. xvi.) Next, this law must be analysed into its causes. Mr. Mill gives three forms which this third stage of analysis may assume in science. (Id. vol. i. b. iii. ch. xii.) Probably in history it will generally assume the one of the three in which the complex result is analysed into its simpler component elements. (Id. § 2.)