New Minds and New Facts
All the greater, therefore, becomes the need for care and sobriety in the forming and setting forth every summarising statement and general conclusion or judgment. Probably the soundest guiding principle and best safeguard against error is to be found in shunning all preconceived hypotheses which seek to explain history by one set of causes, or to read it in the light of one idea. The habit of magnifying a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided, destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the life-blood of history. They make it intelligible. They give it unity. They convey to us the instruction which it always contains, together with so much of practical guidance in the management of communities as history is capable of rendering. But they need to be applied with reserve, and not only with an impartial mind, but after a painstaking examination of all the facts—whether or no they seem to make for the particular theory stated—and of all the theories which any competent predecessor has propounded.
For the historian, though he must keep himself from falling under the dominion of any one doctrine by which it is sought to connect and explain phenomena, must welcome all the light which any such doctrine can throw upon facts. Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts, or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered, not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before.
A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether social, economic, or political.
The Side Streams of History
Yet even here there is a danger to be guarded against. No epoch, no movement, is so simple as it looks at first sight, or as one would gather from even the most honest contemporary writer. There is always an eddy at the side of the stream; and the stream itself is the resultant of a number of rivulets with different sources, whose waters, if the metaphor may be extended, are of different tints. Let any man study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate. Or let any one—for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult, method of getting at the roots of this complexity—study thoroughly and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. Let him observe how many movements go on simultaneously, sometimes accelerating, sometimes retarding, one another, and mark how, the more fully he understands this complex interlacing, so much the less confident do his predictions of the future become. He will then realise how hard it is to find simple explanations and to deliver exact statements regarding critical epochs in the past.
Mercier
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: POTTERY
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon