SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION OF HISTORY 175 



been gathered and shall be crushed together to make one surpassing 

 syrup — the philosophy of history? No; as yet no historical units have 

 been discovered. The word " fact " is, like the word " event," merely 

 a convenient but exceedingly indefinite term. A fact is any fragment 

 of historic truth just as an event is an arbitrary division of the past. 

 To speak of "objective facts" of history then is impermissible. How 

 much a fact or an event shall include is an entirely subjective matter. 

 A war is a fact or event, so is any battle in it, so is the death of any 

 soldier in the battle. 



Qualitatively a fact or an event is quite as difficult to limit. Bern- 

 heim and Winsor displayed a tendency to restrict the " facts " of his- 

 tory to epic material and Adams seems at first sight to give the same 

 thought its most recent expression in saying, " The field of the historian 

 is and must long remain the discovery and recording of what actually 

 happened." But it is idle to try to study " past action " by itself. We 

 must know the milieu, the material, social and intellectual environment 

 in which an event happened, in order properly to understand the event. 

 But why single out " events " for our attention ? Why not study the 

 past without qualification ? And again, what are " events " ? Every 

 external act had its inner concomitant, cause or result. Science and art 

 have their " connected action," as well as states and dynasties. The very 

 conditions which form the milieu for some act are themselves really in 

 constant flux and so "happening" from day to day. In the last 

 analysis, therefore, " what actually happened," like " facts," is no other 

 limitation upon the scope of history than the negative one of excluding 

 fictions and philosophizing. Truth and unvarnished truth are all they 

 mean. Everything in the past is still left as the province of history. 



There is, however, another possible explanation of the expression 

 " the facts of history." One might narrow the definition of history by 

 accepting roughly the limited scope of past historians and trying to 

 discover only " facts " of the sort which they give. Of course, exactly 

 to define what sorts of past phenomena they recorded would be difficult 

 but it is also not easy apparently for modern investigators to strike 

 out along new lines. The tradition though vague is powerful. Herodo- 

 tus and his successors too often not merely — witness Winsor — suggest 

 to moderns their method, but also their matter. Yet if history were 

 narrowed down from its possible scope as investigation of the past in 

 the interest of and with especial reference to man to a study of only the 

 writings of those men in the past who were called historians, it evidently 

 would become mere scholasticism, a barren commentary upon traditional 

 authorities. It is only less unsatisfactory to confine history to ma- 

 terial additional to but similar to that with which they dealt. Their 

 standards can be bettered, not merely as they have been by the modern 

 attitude to sources and the modern historical sense, but also in point 

 of the content of history and the mode of presenting it. The historian 

 to-day must not impose on the public the limited round of topics which 



