Indirect methods of attaining it.
This ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; not merely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in the way. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because its very nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phases bodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memory itself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totality may at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; and experience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into the moving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past. History is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recovering what has lapsed. The historian’s object may be to bring the past again before the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that object he is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramatic fancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforce written by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historical investigation, historical theory, and historical romance.
Historical research a part of physics.
Historical investigation is the natural science of the past. The circumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhat disguise the physical character and the physical principles of this science; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at a given moment, even if the event were somebody’s thought; he has to read his sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In other words, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves, after the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony has to be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs to be reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or archæology it needs to be reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man’s memory or the report in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about its probable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in the present when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is often very difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end is merely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as a perplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the state of the earth’s crust was once very different from what it is now.
Verification here indirect.
A natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantage of not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates upon cannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesis that had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by current events; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of facts which themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to the loose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a most dangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which in turn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts are more deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error in the inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering that error; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet, can never be found out.
Most facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and their reality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which they are inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete and constant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and tradition give the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations which these first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to be concatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the first hypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming a background and congruous extension to those originally assumed. This expansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed the principles of inference employed in it involve some present existence, such as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails to verify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of hypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.
Futile ideal to survey all facts.
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum ad infinitum would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete historical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for intelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are many things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to know—namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind’s fortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of immediate experience in other minds or in one’s own past; and just as it is better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone sensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous pulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant in character.
An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived would be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above the world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would flatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence, with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not come to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey of events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in matter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palæontology, and archæology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning would dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of boredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may enter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but which ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.