498 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



1909), with the extracts from his book on the battle of Salamis. By a 

 characteristic application of the essential features of the prevailing 

 method to these extracts, he reduced his conclusions concerning this 

 momentous contest of antiquity "possibly only to the fact that the 

 battle took place;" and having suggested that the class be required 

 to write a narrative embodying the results obtained and to compare 

 it with the accounts of the battle in two or three of the best school 

 histories, he sums up the entire discussion and article thus: — 



"They will be somewhat surprised to learn that these accounts 

 contain no suggestion of the uncertainty that surrounds the history 

 of the battle, but describe it with all the confidence that might be 

 displayed by a historian of events established by a cloud of witnesses. 

 It may be objected that this sort of source work will raise very serious 

 doubts in the pupils' minds as to whether we know anything with 

 certainty about the history of the early centuries. But what if it 

 does ? What harm has been done, if the impression is a correct one ? 

 Is not much of our knowledge concerning the history of the Greeks 

 and Romans of the most fragile character ? Why attempt to conceal 

 it ? Should not the pupils be taught by this kind of critical study that 

 much of what is repeated with confidence as history has hardly a shred 

 of valuable evidence to rest on ?" 



The position of Professor Fling as an advocate wishing to meet 

 possible objections to the introduction of the prevailing method into 

 secondary schools requires that he should present the best results it 

 can offer; and if his knowledge and experience of the method had justi- 

 fied the course, he would have been pleased to advance as its char- 

 acteristic product something more satisfactory than this comprehen- 

 sive scepticism and uncertainty. 



(6) General attitude of representative hooks of method and success 

 in general in overcoming scepticism. With a view to independent 

 impartial selection, the two works (and the only two) named as repre- 

 sentative books of method in the article on "history" in Nelson's 

 Encyclopcedia — the French work of Langlois and Seignobos, Intro- 

 duction aux Etudes Historiques (1898), and the German work of 

 Bernheim — will be considered here. Seignobos who wrote the section 

 of the French work on internal criticism dealing with trustworthiness 

 and certainty in history reached the following general conclusion 

 (p. 174):- 



"For antiquity and the middle ages historical knowledge is re- 

 stricted by scarcity of records to general features {faits généraux). 

 In contemporary history it can extend more and more to single events 

 {faits particulier sY' 



