SCIENCE AND HISTORY 581 



SCIENCE AND HISTOEY 



By Dk. C. W. super 

 athens, ohio 



THE question has been a good deal discussed whether history is a 

 science or an art. Those who deny to it a place among the 

 sciences proceed on the assumption that science deals only with facts, 

 with uncontrovertible truths, and as history is for the most part founded 

 on the preponderance of probabilities, it should not be ranked as a 

 science. It is not possible to frame a definition of science sufficiently 

 comprehensive to embrace all subjects that may be investigated by man. 

 Only a single branch of science deals with incontrovertible truths, that 

 is mathematics, while the subject matter of all others is constituted of 

 data and not of facts. Science is founded upon method rather than 

 upon results. All the sciences that deal with forces which may be 

 more or less modified by acts dependent upon the human will, such as 

 economics, politics, ethics, and others of the same class, can never attain 

 positive results. Besides, some of the sciences are constituted of forces 

 that are latent and more or less inscrutable so that there is no possibility 

 of predicting when they will become active. Comte placed geology 

 among the histories. It is the discovery of the changes that have taken 

 place in the composition and recomposition of the globe. "While there 

 is substantial agreement among experts as to the order in which these 

 changes took place, there are many minor points upon which there is 

 more or less divergence of opinion. When we endeavor to set forth the 

 order in which events took place we produce history, even though the 

 artistic element be entirely lacking. History, as the term is usually 

 understood, is the interpretation, from written records, of the psychic 

 forces as manifested in acts land institutions. By written we are, how- 

 ever, to understand all the devices which men have employed for the 

 purpose of preserving the memory of their deeds to future generations. 

 William James defined history " as the observation of a series of changes 

 of conditions that never exactly repeat themselves and that ever tend 

 toward further and unfathomable changes." 



According to this definition everything in the universe that is capa- 

 ble of being intellectually apprehended and is not static may be dealt 

 with historically. The discovery and investigation of the memorials 

 that man has unintentionally left of himself are usually classed as pre- 

 history, and include paleontologv, anthropology and some other sciences. 



The term history is used interchangeably in one of two senses, 

 although thev differ widely. Can there be a history where there is no 



