SECTION II, 1916 [225] TRANS. R.S.C. 
Thucydides and History. 
By Maurice Hutton, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.C. 
(Read May Meeting, 1916.) 
That the personality of an historian is a large factor in his history 
is the merest truism: if only because in history, as in metaphysics, 
there is no such thing as the fact in itself: ding an sich: but all so called 
facts are strained through the moulds furnished by the special nature 
of the writer. 
But this subjective element will vary immensely in direct ratio 
to two forces, not identical though converging: to the depth and force 
of the writer’s personality but also to the theory which he holds of 
his function as historian. 
Theories of history, like theories of life itself, will modify largely 
the play of temperament and personality. No man was tempera- 
mentally gayer or lighter hearted than Matthew Arnold: his theory 
of life nevertheless went a long way to diminish the gaiety and high 
spirits of his writings. 
There are broadly two theories of history. There is the large 
and chiefly modern school of historians, who almost seek to turn his- 
tory into a record similar to the records of the investigations of the 
naturalist or mathematician. History is to record facts ascertained by 
severe and laborious research into the original authorities. It is 
to be documented by reference to these authorities. It is to turn 
largely on the constitutional development and constitutional changes 
in a nation’s life: on its economic changes: on the influence of geography 
and climate. In short, it is to be an unfolding of law, law human as 
unfolded in constitutions and institutions, and law natural as il- 
lustrated in economic, geographic and climatic forces. It is to fight 
shy of the merely personal factors in life: the characters of individual 
men and women: partly because these are of less importance in a 
broad view of life, but even more because these are past finding out. 
The influence of moral and religious ideas in the same way must be 
left without treatment for the same reasons that these things are of 
little importance apart from economic, geographic and climatic 
forces, and that in any case they are too subjective for discussion. 
They seem to raise the thorny question of free will in man. History 
had better adopt, as a working hypothesis at least, the doctrine of 
necessity, and assume that, so far as the historian is concerned, 
