12 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



This apparently fantastical idea really applies with more force 

 to the interpretation of documents and makes many historical char- 

 acters problematical. 



Contemporaries seldom know the exact truth or the whole truth 

 of what is happening about them, and it is only after long and patient 

 study that the historian of a later age may succeed in arriving at an 

 approximately full and accurate comprehension of the sequence of 

 events in their relations of cause and effect. Contemporaries can 

 scarcely hope to do more than collect materials for those who may 

 attempt in after years to write a true and faithful history of the past, 

 with that judicial calmness and impartiality, which cannot be expected 

 from those who have taken an active part in those events. 



Account must be taken of the mutual connection of events, 

 occurring approximately at the same time. As Carlyle has pointed 

 out no person, however gifted and alert, can do more than observe, 

 still less record, the series of his own impressions and sensations. 

 "His observation, therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, 

 must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous; 

 the things done were not a series but a group. It is not in acted, as it 

 is in written history; acted events are in no wise so simply related to 

 each other as a parent and offspring are; every single event is not the 

 offspring of one but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and 

 will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new; it is an 

 ever-living, ever-working chaos of being, wherein shape after shape 

 bodies itself forth from innumerable events. . . . All narrative is, 

 by its nature, of only one dimension; only travels toward one or 

 toward successive points; narrative is linear, action is solid." 



That variety of narrative, which is usually termed the philosophy 

 of history, consisting of an attempt to trace the relation of events 

 with each other, is just as much genuine history as the descriptions 

 of battles, political struggles, economic changes, and all other salient 

 occurrences, which it attempts to state. Facts of that kind are more 

 difficult to ascertain, their connection is more uncertain, the writer 

 is more likely to be deceived or to deceive himself; but they will ever 

 continue to be a vital part of history. 



The main task of the historian, then, is not so much a matter 

 of vivid narrative and picturesque colouring as of a proper and honest 

 grouping of events; of tracing the true sequence by which successive 

 occurrences are seen to lead to an inevitable result, or causes, appar- 

 ently remote and unrelated, converge to a common end. 



There are many fundamental requisites. They may be generally 

 summed up as thoroughness and accuracy of knowledge; an intimate 



