i 7 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION OF HISTORY 



By LYNN THORNDIKE, Ph.D. 



INSTRUCTOR IN WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY 



THE question, "Is history a science or can it become a science?" 

 has long both fascinated and irritated historical students. A few 

 think that they have already discovered a science of history, but in 

 reality have made only a premature and primarily speculative attempt 

 at a philosophy of history. Some would limit their ideal to indiscrimi- 

 nate verification of the greatest possible number of "facts" and to 

 indiscriminate exposure of the greatest possible number of historical 

 Actions — sometimes adding the hard requirement of setting forth their 

 unsystematic results in attractive literary form. Some are pessimistic 

 because the historian can not perform experiments in the past and 

 because even his observation is seriously limited by the scantiness of the 

 material at his disposal. This is true, but of course does not exempt the 

 historian from dealing with the data he does have in a scientific spirit. 

 It only renders it the more imperative. Others more hopefully point 

 to the progress made in modern times in the publication and criticism 

 of sources as a sign of history's conversion to scientific method. But of 

 scientific method in the process by which the sources are transformed 

 into history and presented to the public one hears little. On the con- 

 trary, one finds prominent writers on historical method not merely ad- 

 mitting but almost rejoicing in, the impossibility of fixed principles of 

 research, of scientific exposition of results. 



Bernheim, in his " Lehrbuch der historischen Methocle/' after desig- 

 nating history as " Wissenschaft " and describing its purpose as not 

 esthetic but informing, in proceeding to speak of the process of con- 

 verting the sources into history draws all his similes from the fine arts. 

 History is like a pianoforte rendition of an orchestral performance ; it 

 should, like a painting, make use of perspective; in it, as in a drama, the 

 characters should lie silent part of the time; gaps to fill in as between 

 the scenes of a play should be left to the reader's imagination. In 

 short, the turning out of the finished product is a fine art according to 

 Bernheim, despite his denial. He says that it ought not to be poetiw, 

 but implies that it must be prose. His model historian's aim is to 

 present the past vividly, not necessarily to prove anything. He should 

 give specific bits from the sources occasionally, but more in order to 

 make a story realistic than to make an exposition scientific. This story 

 should follow either chronology or geography or " the logic of events." 



