[bowman] fundamental PROCESSES IN HISTORICAL SCIENCE 501 



i. Of the two representative and more prominent exponents of 

 the method, Professor Seignobos is not only fundamentally sceptical, 

 but increasingly so in his successive works. 



ii. Professor Bernheim, the other exponent, was confident, as 

 long ago as 1889, that the present method could supply assured know- 

 ledge and repel every attack of scepticism from every quarter; but 

 per contra: (1) In 1898 and 1901, or 9 and 12 years later respectively, 

 there appeared the fundamentally and increasingly sceptical works 

 of Professor Seignobos; (2) in 1907 and 1909, or approximately 20 

 years later. Professor Fling, in an experimental and comprehensive 

 application of the prevailing method, could offer as its net and best 

 result only a comprehensive uncertainty; and finally (3) in 1913, or 24 

 years later, so far from the present method having cleared the field 

 of scepticism. Professor Dunning, who says that truth and its discovery 

 are the subject-matter and end of history, says also that historical 

 research ( = the application of the present method) leads to "despair 

 o\ truth," and that the whole historical gild (who are applying that 

 method) are enveloped in the mantle of scepticism. 



As to the 2nd or chief specific requirement of historical science in 

 particular, which is that it should provide trustworthy, synthetic, 

 organized and literary narratives, and which depends for its fulfil- 

 ment on the fulfilment of the 1st or general requirement: According 

 to the 3rd of the above statements by Professor Dunning, the number 

 of organized and literary narratives by historians is sinking before the 

 number of monographic collections of material ; many have abandoned 

 the hopeless task of synthesizing; instead they are gathering for the 

 present a mass of material in the hope that it may be used some day 

 by some man who may prove competent to make a synthesis. In 

 other words, after a century's trial of the present method, historical 

 science is sinking, with respect to its own chief specific requirement, 

 more and more into the place where it is only marking time. 



The men whose position and own utterances on this question 

 are thus stated and summarized are not only friends and supporters 

 of the present method. They are scholars of the first rank; academic 

 instructors with mature experience; the foremost authors upon the 

 method; the most competent judges who will view it, not with cold 

 justice, but with sympathetic appreciation. These men have thus 

 gone upon record that the method does not meet the minimum re- 

 quirements which they themselves have set for history as a science: 

 therefore, to the question here under test, "Is history a science?" 

 the answer, under the prevailing method, according to the adherents 

 of that method, is that it is not. 



