The operations which must necessarily be performed in order to pass from the inspection of documents 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 documents, their restoration and preliminary classification, should co-ordinate their efforts, in order that the preparatory work of critical scholarship 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 documents 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 vitæ), 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 distinguishing 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 constitution 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 assumed 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 analogies (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.