Introduction to the Study of History Part 7

This first series of questions will yield the _provisional_ result of enabling us to note the statements which have a _chance_ of being mendacious.

V. The second series of questions will be of use in determining whether there is any reason to distrust the accuracy of a statement. Was the author in one of those situations which cause a man to make mistakes? As in dealing with good faith, we must look for these conditions both as affecting the doc.u.ment as a whole, and as affecting each of the particular statements in it.

The practice of the established sciences teaches us the conditions of an exact knowledge of facts. There is only one scientific procedure for gaining knowledge of a fact, namely, _observation_; every statement, therefore, must rest, directly or indirectly, upon an observation, and this observation must have been made correctly.

The set of questions by the aid of which we investigate the probabilities of error may be drawn up in the light of experience, which brings before us the most common cases of error.

(1) The author was in a situation to observe the fact, and supposed he really had observed it; he was, however, prevented from doing so by some interior force of which he was unconscious, an hallucination, an illusion, or a mere prejudice. It would be useless, as well as impossible, to determine which of these agencies was at work; it is enough to ascertain whether the author had a tendency to observe badly.

It is scarcely possible in the case of a particular statement to recognise that it was the result of an hallucination or an illusion. At the most we may learn, either from information derived from other sources or by comparison, that an author had a _general_ propensity to this kind of error.

There is a better chance of recognising whether a statement was due to prejudice. In the life or the works of an author we may find the traces of his dominant prejudices. With reference to each of his particular statements, we ought to ask whether it is not the result of a preconceived idea of the author on a cla.s.s of men or a kind of facts.

This inquiry partly coincides with the search for motives of falsehood: interest, vanity, sympathy, and antipathy give rise to prejudices which alter the truth in the same manner as wilful falsehood. We therefore employ the questions already formulated for the purpose of testing good faith. But there is one to be added. In putting forward a statement has the author been led to distort it unconsciously by the circ.u.mstance that he was answering a question? This is the case of all statements obtained by interrogating witnesses. Even apart from the cases where the person interrogated seeks to please the proposer of the question by giving an answer which he thinks will be agreeable to him, every question suggests its own answer, or at least its form, and this form is dictated beforehand by some one unacquainted with the facts. It is therefore necessary to apply a special criticism to every statement obtained by interrogation; we must ask what was the question put, and what were the preconceptions to which it may have given rise in the mind of the person interrogated.

(2) The author was badly situated for observing. The practice of the sciences teaches us what are the conditions for correct observation. The observer ought to be placed where he can see correctly, and should have no practical interest, no desire to obtain a particular result, no preconceived idea about the result. He ought to record the observation immediately, in a precise system of notation; he ought to give a precise indication of his method. These conditions, which are insisted on in the sciences of observation, are never completely fulfilled by the authors of doc.u.ments.

It would be useless, therefore, to ask whether there have been chances of inaccuracy; _there always have been_, and it is just this that distinguishes a _doc.u.ment_ from an _observation_. It only remains to look for the obvious causes of error in the conditions of observation: to inquire whether the observer was in a place where he could not see or hear well, as would be the case, for example, with a subordinate who should presume to narrate the secret deliberations of a council of dignitaries; whether his attention was greatly distracted by the necessity for action, as it would be on the field of battle, for example; whether he was inattentive because the facts had little interest for him; whether he lacked the special experience or general intelligence necessary for understanding the facts; whether he a.n.a.lysed his impressions badly, or confused different events. Above all, we must ask when he _wrote down_ what he saw or heard. This is the most important point: the only exact observation is the one which is recorded immediately it is made; such is the constant procedure in the established sciences; an impression committed to writing later on is only a recollection, liable to be confused in the memory with other recollections. _Memoirs_ written several years after the facts, often at the very end of the author's career, have introduced innumerable errors into history. It must be made a rule to treat _memoirs_ with special distrust as second-hand doc.u.ments, in spite of their appearance of being contemporary testimony.

(3) The author states facts which he could have observed, but to which he did not take the trouble to attend. From idleness or negligence he reported details which he has merely inferred, or even imagined at random, and which turn out to be false. This is a common source of error, though it does not readily occur to one, and is to be suspected wherever the author was obliged to procure information in which he took little interest, in order to fill up a blank form. Of this kind are answers to questions put by an authority (it is enough to observe how most official inquiries are conducted in our own day), and detailed accounts of ceremonies or public functions. There is too strong a temptation to write the account from the programme, or in agreement with the usual order of the proceedings. How many accounts of meetings of all kinds have been published by reporters who were not present at them!

Similar efforts of imagination are suspected--sometimes, it is thought, clearly recognised--in the writings of mediaeval chroniclers.[154] The rule, then, will be to distrust all narratives conforming too closely to a set formula.

(4) The fact stated is of such a nature that it could not have been learnt by observation alone. It may be a hidden fact--a private secret, for example. It may be a fact relating to a collectivity, and applying to an extensive area or a long period of time; for example, the common act of a whole army, a custom common to a whole people or a whole age, a statistical total obtained by the addition of numerous items. It may be a comprehensive judgment on the character of a man, a group, a custom, an event. Here we have to do with propositions derived from observations by synthesis or inference: the author can only have arrived at them indirectly; he began with data furnished by observation, and elaborated them by the logical processes of abstraction, generalisation, reasoning, calculation. Two questions arise. Does it appear that the author had sufficient data to work upon? Was he accurate, or the reverse, in his use of the data he had?

On the probable inaccuracies of an author, general indications may be obtained from an examination of his writings. This examination will show us how he worked: whether he was capable of abstraction, reasoning, generalisation, and what were the mistakes he was in the habit of making. In order to determine the value of the data, we must criticise each statement separately; we must imagine the conditions under which the author observed, and ask ourselves whether he was able to procure the necessary data for his statement. This is an indispensable precaution in dealing with large totals in statistics and descriptions of popular usages; for it is possible that the author may have obtained the total he gives by a process of conjectural valuation (this is the ordinary practice in stating the number of combatants or killed in a battle), or by combining subsidiary totals, all of which were not accurate; it is possible that he may have extended to a whole people, a whole country, a whole period, that which was true only of a small group known to him.[155]

VI. These two first series of questions bearing on the good faith and the accuracy of the statements in the doc.u.ment are based on the supposition that the author has observed the fact himself. This is a feature common to all reports of observations in the established sciences. But in history there is so great a dearth of direct _observations_, of even moderate value, that we are obliged to turn to account doc.u.ments which every other science would reject.[156] Take any narrative at random, even if it be the work of a contemporary, it will be found that the facts observed by the author are never more than a part of the whole number. In nearly every doc.u.ment the majority of the statements do not come from the author at first hand, but are reproductions of the statements of others. Even where a general relates a battle in which he commanded, he does not communicate his own observations, but those of his officers; his narrative is in a large measure a "second-hand doc.u.ment."[157]

In order to criticise a second-hand statement it is no longer enough to examine the conditions under which the author of the doc.u.ment worked: this author is, in such a case, a mere agent of transmission; the true author is the person who supplied him the information. The critic, therefore, must change his ground, and ask whether the informant observed and reported correctly; and if he too had the information from some one else (the commonest case), the chase must be pursued from one intermediary to another, till the person is found who first launched the statement on its career, and with regard to him the question must be asked: Was he an accurate observer?

Logically such a search is not inconceivable; ancient collections of Arab traditions give lists of their successive guarantors. But, in practice, lack of doc.u.ments nearly always prevents us from getting as far as the observer of a fact; the observation remains anonymous. A general question then presents itself: How are we to criticise an anonymous statement? It is not only "anonymous doc.u.ments" with which we are concerned, where the composition as a whole is the work of an unknown author; even when the author is known, this question arises with respect to each statement of his drawn from an unknown source.

Criticism works by reproducing the conditions under which an author wrote, and has hardly anything to take hold of where a statement is anonymous. The only method left is to examine the general conditions of the doc.u.ment. We may inquire whether there is any feature common to all the statements of a doc.u.ment indicating that they all proceed from persons having the same prejudices or pa.s.sions: in this case the tradition followed by the author is bia.s.sed; the tradition followed by Herodotus has both an Athenian bias and a Delphic bias. In respect of each fact derived from such a tradition we must ask whether it has not been distorted by the interest, the vanity, or the prejudices of the group concerned. We may even ignore the author, and ask whether there was anything likely to make for or against correct observation, common to all the men of the time and country in which the observation must have been made: for example, what means of information, and what prejudices, had the Greeks of Herodotus' time with respect to the Scythians.

The most useful of all these general inquiries has reference to that mode of transmitting anonymous statements which is called _tradition_.

No second-hand statement has any value except in so far as it reproduces its source; every addition is an alteration, and ought to be eliminated.

Similarly, all the intermediary sources are valueless except as copies of the original statement founded directly on observation. The critic needs to know whether this transmission from hand to hand has preserved or distorted the original statement; above all, whether the tradition embodied in the doc.u.ment was _written_ or _oral_. Writing fixes a statement, and ensures its being transmitted faithfully; when a statement is communicated orally, the impression in the mind of the hearer is apt to be modified by confusion with other impressions; in pa.s.sing from one intermediary to another the statement is modified at every step,[158] and as these modifications arise from different causes, there is no possibility of measuring or correcting them.

Oral tradition is by its nature a process of continual alteration; hence in the established sciences only written transmission is accepted.

Historians have no avowable motive for proceeding differently, at any rate when it is a case of establishing a particular fact. We must therefore search doc.u.ments for statements derived from oral tradition in order that we may suspect them. We rarely have direct information as to statements being thus derived; authors who borrow from oral tradition are not anxious to proclaim the fact.[159] There is thus only an indirect method, and that is to ascertain that written transmission was impossible; we may then be sure that the fact reached the author only by oral tradition. We have therefore to ask the question: In this period and in this group of men was it customary to commit to writing facts of this kind? If the answer is negative, the fact considered rests on oral tradition alone.

The most striking form of oral tradition is _legend_. It arises among groups of men with whom the spoken word is the only means of transmission, in barbarous societies, or in cla.s.ses of little culture, such as peasants or soldiers. In this case it is the whole group of facts which is transmitted orally and a.s.sumes the legendary form. There is a legendary period in the early history of every people: in Greece, at Rome, among the Germanic and Slavonic races, the most ancient memories of the people form a stratum of legend. In periods of civilisation popular legends continue to exist in reference to events which strike the imagination of the people.[160] Legend is exclusively oral tradition.

When a people has emerged from the legendary period and begun to commit its history to writing, oral tradition does not come to an end, but only applies to a narrower sphere; it is now restricted to facts which are not registered, whether because they are by their nature secret, or because no one takes the trouble to record them, such as private actions, words, the details of events. Thus arise _anecdotes_, which have been named "the legends of civilised society." Like legends they have their origin in confused recollections, allusions, mistaken interpretations, imaginings of all kinds which fasten upon particular persons and events.

Legends and anecdotes are at bottom mere popular beliefs, arbitrarily attached to historical personages; they belong to folk-lore, not to history.[161] We must therefore guard against the temptation to treat legend as an alloy of accurate facts and errors out of which it is possible by a.n.a.lysis to extract grains of historical truth. A legend is a conglomerate in which there may be some grains of truth, and which may even be capable of being a.n.a.lysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law of refraction."

The crudest a.n.a.lytical procedure consists in rejecting those details in the legendary narrative which appear impossible, miraculous, contradictory, or absurd, and retaining the rational residue as historical. This is how the Protestant rationalists of the eighteenth century treated biblical narratives. One might as well amputate the marvellous part of a fairy tale, suppress Puss in Boots, and keep the Marquis of Carabas as an historical character. A more refined but no less dangerous method is to compare different legends in order to deduce their common historical basis. Grote[162] has shown, with reference to Greek tradition, that it is impossible to extract any trustworthy information from legend by any process whatever.[163] We must make up our minds to treat legend as a product of imagination; we may look in it for a people's conceptions, not for the external facts in that people's history. The rule will be to reject every statement of legendary origin; nor does this apply only to narratives in legendary form: a narrative which has an historical appearance, but is founded on the data of legend, the opening chapters of Thucydides for example, ought equally to be discarded.

In the case of written transmission it remains to inquire whether the author reproduced his source without altering it. This inquiry forms part of the critical investigation of the sources,[164] so far as it can be pursued by a comparison of texts. But when the source has disappeared we are reduced to internal criticism. We ask, first of all, whether the author can have had exact information, otherwise his statement is valueless. We next put to ourselves the general question: Was the author in the habit of altering his sources, and in what manner? And in regard to each separate second-hand statement we ask whether it has the appearance of being an exact reproduction or an arrangement. We judge by the form: when we meet with a pa.s.sage whose style is out of harmony with the main body of the composition, we have before us a fragment of an earlier doc.u.ment; the more servile the reproduction the more valuable is the pa.s.sage, for it can contain no exact information beyond what was already in the source.

VII. In spite of all these investigations, criticism never succeeds in determining the parentage of all the statements to the extent of finding out who it was that observed, or even recorded, each fact. In most cases the inquiry ends in leaving the statement anonymous.

We are thus confronted with a fact, observed we know not by whom nor how, recorded we know not when nor how. No other science accepts facts which come in such a condition, without possibility of verification, subject to incalculable chances of error. But history can turn them to account, because it does not, like the other sciences, need a supply of facts which are difficult to ascertain.

The notion of a _fact_, when we come to examine it precisely, reduces to an affirmative judgment having reference to external reality. The operations by which we arrive at such a judgment are more or less difficult, and the risk of error is greater or smaller according to the nature of the realities investigated and the degree of precision with which we wish to formulate them. Chemistry and biology need to discern facts of a delicate order, rapid movements, transient states, and to measure them in exact figures. History can work with facts of a much coa.r.s.er kind, spread over a large extent of s.p.a.ce or time, such as the existence of a custom, of a man, of a group, even of a people; and these facts may be roughly expressed in vague words conveying no idea of accurate measurement. With such easily observed facts as these to deal with, history can afford to be much less exacting with regard to the conditions of observation. The imperfection of the means of information is compensated by a natural faculty of being satisfied with information which can easily be obtained.

Doc.u.ments supply little else besides ill-verified facts, subject to many risks of falsehood or error. But there are some facts in respect of which it is very difficult to lie or be mistaken. The last series of questions which the critic should ask is intended to distinguish, in the ma.s.s of alleged facts, those which by their nature are little subject to the risk of alteration, and which are therefore very probably correct.

We know what, in general, are the cla.s.ses of facts which enjoy this privilege; we are thus enabled to draw up a list of questions for general use, and in applying them to any particular case we ask whether the fact in question comes under any of the heads specified in advance.

(1) The fact is of a nature to render falsehood improbable. A man lies in order to produce an impression, and has no motive to lie in a case where he believes that the false impression would be of no use, or that the falsehood would be ineffectual. In order to determine whether the author was in such a situation there are several questions to be asked.

(_a_) Is the fact stated manifestly prejudicial to the effect which the author wished to produce? Does it run counter to the interest, the vanity, the sentiments, the literary tastes of the author and his group; or to the opinions which he made a point of not offending? In such a case there is a probability of good faith. But in the application of this criterion there is danger; it has often been wrongly used, and in two ways. One of these is to take for a confession what was meant for a boast, as the declaration of Charles IX. that he was responsible for the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew. Or again, we trust without examination an Athenian who speaks ill of the Athenians, or a Protestant who accuses other Protestants. But it is quite possible the author's notions of his interest or honour were very different from ours;[165] or he may have wished to calumniate fellow-citizens who did not belong to his own party, or co-religionists who did not belong to his own sect. This criterion must therefore be restricted to cases where we know exactly what _effect_ he wished to produce, and in what _group_ he was mainly interested.

(_b_) Was the fact stated so obviously known to the public that the author, even if tempted to falsehood, would have been restrained by the certainty of being detected? This is the case with facts which are easy to verify, which are not remote in point of time or s.p.a.ce, which apply to a wide area or a long period, especially if the public had any interest in verifying them. But the fear of detection is only an intermittent check, opposed by interest whenever the author has any motive for deceiving. It acts unequally on different minds--strongly on men of culture and self-control who understand their public, feebly in barbarous ages and on pa.s.sionate men.[166] This criterion, therefore, is to be restricted to cases where we know what idea the author had of his readers, and whether he was dispa.s.sionate enough to keep them in mind.

(_c_) Was the fact stated _indifferent_ to the author, so that he had no temptation to misrepresent it? This is the case with facts of a general kind, usages, inst.i.tutions, objects, persons, which the author mentions incidentally. A narrative, even a false one, cannot be composed exclusively of falsehoods; the author must localise his facts, and needs to surround them with a framework of truth. The facts which form this framework had no interest for him; at that time every one knew them. But for us they are instructive, and we can depend on them, for the author had no intention of deceiving us.

(2) The fact was of a kind to render error improbable. Numerous as the chances of error are, still there are facts so "big" it is hard to be mistaken about them. We have, then, to ask whether the alleged fact was easy to ascertain: (_a_) Did it cover a long period of time, so that it must have been frequently observed? Take, for example, the case of a monument, a man, a custom, an event which was in progress for a considerable time. (_b_) Did it cover a wide area, so that many people observed it?--as, for example, a battle, a war, a custom common to a whole people. (_c_) Is it expressed in such general terms that superficial observation was enough to discover it?--as the mere existence of a man, a city, a people, a custom. Facts of this large and general kind make up the bulk of historical knowledge.

(3) The fact was of such a nature that it would not have been stated unless it was true. A man does not declare that he has seen something contrary to his expectations and habits of mind unless observation has compelled him to admit it. A fact which seems very improbable to the man who relates it has a good chance of being true. We have, then, to ask whether the fact stated was in contradiction with the author's opinions, whether it is a phenomenon of a kind unknown to him, an action or a custom which seems unintelligible to him; whether it is a saying whose import transcends his intelligence, such as the sayings of Christ reported in the Gospels, or the answers made by Joan of Arc to questions put to her in the course of her trial. But we must guard against judging of the author's ideas by our own standards: when men who are accustomed to believe in the marvellous speak of monsters, of miracles, of wizards, there is nothing in these to contradict their expectations, and the criterion does not apply.

VIII. We have at last reached the end of this description of the critical operations; its length is due to the necessity of describing successively operations which are performed simultaneously. We will now consider how these methods are applied in practice.

If the text be one whose interpretation is debatable, the examination is divided into two stages: the first comprises the reading of the text with a view to the determination of the meaning, without attempting to draw any information from it; the second comprises the critical study of the facts contained in the doc.u.ment. In the case of doc.u.ments whose meaning is clear, we may begin the critical examination on the first reading, reserving for separate study any individual pa.s.sages of doubtful meaning.

We begin by collecting the _general_ information we possess about the doc.u.ment and the author, with the special purpose of discovering the conditions which may have influenced the production of the doc.u.ment--the epoch, the place, the purpose, the circ.u.mstances of its composition; the author's social status, country, party, sect, family, interests, pa.s.sions, prejudices, linguistic habits, methods of work, means of information, culture, abilities, and mental defects; the nature of the facts and the mode of their transmission. Information on all these points is supplied by the preparatory critical investigation of authorship and sources. We now combine the different heads, mentally applying the set of general critical questions; this should be done at the outset, and the results impressed on the memory, for they will need to be present to the mind during the remainder of the operations.

Thus prepared, we attack the doc.u.ment. As we read we mentally a.n.a.lyse it, destroying all the author's combinations, discarding all his literary devices, in order to arrive at the facts, which we formulate in simple and precise language. We thus free ourselves from the deference imposed by artistic form, and from all submission to the author's ideas--an emanc.i.p.ation without which criticism is impossible.

The doc.u.ment thus a.n.a.lysed resolves into a long series of the author's conceptions and statements as to facts.

With regard to each statement, we ask ourselves whether there is a probability of their being false or erroneous, or whether, on the other hand, there are exceptional chances in favour of good faith and accuracy, working through the list of critical questions prepared for particular cases. This list of questions must be always present to the mind. At first it may seem c.u.mbersome, perhaps pedantic; but as it will be applied more than a hundred times in each page of the doc.u.ment, it will in the end be used unconsciously. As we read a text, all the reasons for distrust or confidence will occur to the mind simultaneously, combined into a single impression.

a.n.a.lysis and critical questioning will then have become a matter of instinct, and we shall have acquired for ever that methodically a.n.a.lytical, distrustful, not too respectful turn of mind which is often mystically called "the critical sense," but which is nothing else than an unconscious _habit_ of criticism.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DETERMINATION OF PARTICULAR FACTS

Critical a.n.a.lysis yields in the result a number of conceptions and statements, accompanied by comments on the probability of the facts stated being accurate. It remains to examine how we can deduce from these materials those particular historical facts which are to form the basis of scientific knowledge. Conceptions and statements are two different kinds of results, and must be treated by different methods.

I. Every conception which is expressed in writing or by any ill.u.s.trative representation is in itself a definite, unimpeachable fact That which is expressed must have first been present in the mind of some one--if not in that of the author, who may have reproduced a formula he did not understand, then in the mind of the man who originated the formula. The existence of a conception may be learnt from a single instance and proved from a single doc.u.ment. a.n.a.lysis and interpretation are thus sufficient for the purpose of drawing up the complete list of those facts which form the basis of the history of the arts, the sciences, or of doctrines.[167] It is the task of external criticism to localise these facts by determining the epoch, the country, the author of each conception. The duration, geographical distribution, origin, and filiation of conceptions belong to historical synthesis. Internal criticism has nothing to do here; the fact is taken directly from the doc.u.ment.