GENERAL INTRODUCTION xix 



connexion with the different periods of history, the publications 

 that are urgent and the researches, explorations, and excavations 

 which, by furnishing new facts, might possibly clear up obscure 

 points. These concluding chapters will thus offer many 

 advantages. Not only will they furnish specialists with 

 useful hints, but they will, at the same time, offer numerous 

 subjects for treatment and give many individuals with indefinite 

 but praiseworthy desires, ample opportunity for effectively 

 employing themselves. It is to be hoped that this general survey 

 of the historical field may lead to a better organization of effort, 

 to a more advantageous division of labour, and direct some of the 

 surplus workers with which certain subjects are encumbered 

 toward the neglected regions of science. 



Our inventory will even be of profit to the merely curious 

 public : it will provide a sane notion of the present and future 

 conditions of historical studies. No one, of course, is to imagine 

 that in this synthesis history has been completed. History is in 

 the making : it exists as a knowledge of the past obtained 

 through learned research, as an explanation of the past through 

 the study of causes. Our knowledge of the past, quite incomplete 

 to-day, will, in fact, always remain so in spite of constant progress ; 

 what has existed, what has lived, what has been created and then 

 destroyed by time, of all this only an infinitesimal part can possibly 

 be evoked. But the scientific problems raised by the past will 

 gradually become more definite and in the course of investigations 

 still to be determined may eventually be solved. That is how the 

 public, no less than the historians, ought to conceive scientific 

 history or synthesis — as the determination and gradual solution 

 of limited problems relating to a subject that is itself without 

 limitations and in part unknowable. 



Ill 



Our enterprise may thus be of great value to further decisive 

 progress in the study of human evolution. Its object is the proper 

 arrangement of labour and the elaboration of a true scientific 

 method with the purpose of initiating the public into the more 

 serious and engrossing aspects of history as a whole. In the 

 natural sciences, laboratory research, however technical and 

 ungrateful it may be, always results in theories or in a practical 

 outcome to which the public cannot remain indifferent : and, for 



