SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION OF HISTORY 171 



Jt should emphasize some "facts" as essential, treat others as sub- 

 ordinate, omit others entirely. The only standard in this process of 

 selection and discrimination, the sole guide in finding what the logic of 

 events may be, seems to be the source material itself which Bernheim 

 expects will suggest modes of treating the "facts" derived from it. 

 These vague and inadequate recommendations as to method in historical 

 writing at least show Bernheim's ideal of history to be not a detailed 

 and systematic investigation of the past by analysis and classification 

 but a well-proportioned narrative bringing events, characters and con- 

 ditions vividly before the reader. Indeed he goes so far as to say, 

 "Die litterarische Form der Darstellung welche man wiihlt. in ent- 

 sprechender Weise die Auswahl des Mitzuteilenden bestimmt." 1 



Justin Winsor, writing in 1890 in The Aliunde Monthly on '"The 

 Perils of Historical Xarrative," 2 affirms distinctly that history's proper 

 method is epic and that connected action should be its exclusive theme. 

 He wants no " maundering method " ; he desires with Milton an absence 

 of " frequent interspersions of sentiment or a prolix dissertation on 

 transactions which interrupt the series of events"; he demands "train- 

 ing and large familiarity," but instead of scientific presentation is 

 content with a " story that travels steadily to the end." " To tell the 

 story with Herodotus,*' he says, " is what we have come to, after all 

 experimenting." In the writer of history AVinsor thinks desirable the 

 same faculties that make for the merchant his fortune, by which is 

 probably meant a sort of snap judgment. Indeed we presently hear of 

 the historian's divination. Moreover, the historian's personality and en- 

 vironment are sure to affect his work. " The interlacing of the ages 

 makes the new telling of old stories a part of the intellectual develop- 

 ment cf the race and this retelling is necessarily subject to the writer's 

 personality and to the influence upon him of his clay and generation." 

 But Winsor does not draw the conclusion that in an age of science his- 

 tory too should attain to scientific form. 



M. Gabriel Monod, in two recent articles in La Revue Bleue on 

 "La Methode en Histoire " writes in much the same vein. 3 For him 

 again the historian seems to be the spinner of one connected story and 

 rather more of an artist than scientist. He "reconstructs in his brain 

 the image of the past." 4 Again we hear of the essential facts, of 

 others merely accessory to these, of still others to be omitted entirely 

 from the history, though all should be present in the historian's thought 

 to influence his selection or to aid his constructive imagination in bridg- 

 ing the gaps in the sources by logical inference. Monod, however, be- 

 lieves that the historian can not only pick out the nuggets of " essential 



1 Bernheim, " Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode," Leipzig, 1903, p. 724. 



2 Volume 66. pp. 289 et seq. The quotations- which follow in the text occur 

 on pp. 292-294. 



3 Fifth Series, Vol. IX.. April 11 and IS. 1908. 



4 Ibid., p. 487. 



