582 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



history, we are told, is the source. In historical, as in all other, science, 

 the only "authority" is correct scientific principles. Where a narrator 

 or other scientist makes thorough examination of all available sources, 

 reaches his conclusions by a process of resistance to all hypotheses 

 (attractive or not), reduces his final results to the minimum dictated 

 as necessary by the available evidence, and states these impartially, 

 and without exaggeration, and solely according to the reader's interest 

 — such a person, we have seen, does not utter mere opinions on his 

 personal authority or infallibility. He has submitted himself without 

 reserve to the dictates of science itself, which alone is the authority, 

 and he speaks in his narrative out of full knowledge of the available 

 sources simply as a faithful reporter. But what is the position of a 

 subsequent, especially the modern, interpreter of such a narrative 

 who will not accept its statements in so far as they exemplify the above 

 requisites of science ? Who, instead, presumes to test the narrator's 

 trustworthiness by random guesses at the narrator's sources, which 

 the interpreter cannot know because they no longer exist, but which, 

 while they still existed, the narrator could see and examine and knew 

 exhaustively ? When such an interpreter discounts and rejects the 

 conclusions which the man who knew found to be necessary, and puts 

 in their place his own probable conclusions — the mere opinions of a 

 man who knows not — does not this interpreter exalt his own imagina- 

 tion above the other's toil, his own ignorance above the other's know- 

 ledge, his own personal authority above the authority of science itself ? 

 And does he, or does he not, under an outward form of modesty, don 

 in the realest sense the mantle of infallibility ? 



3. The above statement advances its own reasons for the "un- 

 certainty and unreliability of much of our information upon Greek 

 history": "it is due to the character of the evidence with which we 

 have to work." But, as it happens, our information for this period 

 rests on a group of historians, including Thucydides, who for excellence 

 and ability were as a whole unsurpassed, if they were ever equalled, 

 in any other age. What are the merits of Thucydides ? "He is the 

 greatest historian that ever lived." — Macauley (February 27, 1835). 

 He "has neither equal nor rival." — Smith's Classical Dictionary (1850). 

 "The greatest mind that ever applied itself to history." — Encyclo- 

 pœdia Britannica, 9th edition (1881). "Absolutely alone among the 

 historians, not only of Hellas, but of the world, in impartiality and 

 love of truth." — B. Jowett, regius professor of Greek in the university 

 of Oxford (1881). "The prince of original writers." — E. A. Freeman, 

 regius professor of modern history in the university of Oxford (1886). 

 "He raised history to the full height of untrammelled criticism." — 

 Brockhaus' Konversationslexikon (1895). "If the English, German 



