[bowman] fundamental PROCESSES IN HISTORICAL SCIENCE 495 



tion; and though Bernheim would Hke to deny it, it is a fact which 

 can be proved in itself and from his own manual that the present 

 method's grand test for trustworthiness in records is their contempor- 

 aneousness. Both the treatment and the test are incorrect and purely 

 probable processes. As long ago as 1891 Ottokar Lorenz, an approved 

 scholar and author, in a work^ which Bernheim (p. 183) calls a "direct 

 declaration of war" on the prevailing method, drew attention to the 

 fact that the contemporaneousness of a record, on which point "critical 

 gentlemen lay so much stress" proves nothing at all about its trust- 

 worthiness. It is, moreover, a fact well known and established by spe- 

 cific tests that out of any considerable group of observers with equal 

 opportunities, all present together and therefore all contemporaneous 

 to a dot, a few will report the features of an occurrence with sub- 

 stantial correctness, and the remainder will not. But still the fetich 

 holds. In a portly volume on historical method, the qualities which, 

 present in the few, necessarily made them trustworthy, and, wanting 

 in the many, left them necessarily untrustworthy, may be unnoticed 

 and unanalyzed or receive at best a bare mention in a few lines, while 

 page upon page are devoted to a careful analysis of contemporariness 

 and similar features in which the incorrect and correct reporters alike 

 shared, and which, as Lorenz said, prove nothing at all about trust- 

 worthiness. 



When Lorenz placed his finger on this tender (because diseased) 

 spot in the present method, Bernheim, unwilling to admit and yet 

 unable to deny outright the correctness of the other's contention, 

 made the following heated answer (p. 327): 



"I doubt much whether, as Lorenz maintains, there are among 

 historical investigators any with intellects so limited as to fancy that 

 a narrative is correct because shown to be contemporary — every half- 

 ways sensible historian regards this as but one of many things to be 

 considered .2 . . . It is strange that I should be required thus to 

 censure an approved scholar, but it is not my fault if he takes a delight 



1 "Die Geschichtswissenschaft in.Hauptrichtungen und Aufgaben" (in two parts, 

 1886 and 1891). Between 1859 and 1895 Lorenz wrote nine works in fourteen vol- 

 umes, collaborated with another writer in a tenth, and edited an eleventh, or in all 

 sixteen volumes of a purely historical nature or closely connected with the study. 

 He was director of the Austrian archives from 1857 to 1865, and professor of history at 

 Vienna from 1860 to 1885, when he accepted a call to Jena. 



2 After this reply one would expect that Bernheim in his own subsequent treat- 

 ment of trustworthiness would relegate the test by contemporaneousness to a subor- 

 dinate place and that the "many other things to be considered" would there come 

 to the fore. But instead he says in that treatment (1) that the "determination of the 

 time when a record originated is important because its value as evidence depends upon 

 the nearness or distance in time (von dem nâheren oder entfernteren Zeitverhalt- 

 nisse . . . abhângt) between the record and the events" (pp. 391-392), i.e., 

 upon whether or not the record is contemporary; (2) that "the determination of the 



