16 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



Here, then, is the fundamental weakness of the cooperative his- 

 tories of which I have spoken by example. They have no wholeness, 

 singleness, or integrity of conception. If the several authors who 

 wrote their sections or chapters had written their several parts only 

 for the eye of one man chosen guide and chief among them, and he, 

 pondering them all, making his own verifications, and drawing from 

 them not only but also from many another source and chiefly from 

 his own lifelong studies, had constructed the whole, the narrative 

 had been everywhere richer, more complete, more vital, a living 

 whole. But such a scheme as that is beyond human nature, in its 

 present jealous constitution, to execute, and is a mere pleasing fancy, 

 - if any one be pleased with it. Such things are sometimes done in 

 university seminars, where masters have been known to use, at their 

 manifest peril, 'the work of their pupils in making up their published 

 writings; but they ought not to have been done there, and they are 

 not likely to be done anywhere else. At least this may be said, that, 

 if master workmen were thus to use and interpret other men's mate- 

 rials, one great and indispensable gain would be made: history 

 would be coherently conceived and consistently explained. The 

 reader would not himself have to compound and reconcile the diverg- 

 ent views of his authors. 



I daresay it seems a very radical judgment to say that synthesis 

 in our studies must come by means of literary art and the conceiving 

 imagination ; but I do not see how otherwise it is to come. By liter- 

 ary art, because interpretation cannot come by crude terms and 

 unstudied phrases in writing any more than pictorial interpretation 

 can come by a crude, unpracticed, ignorant use of the brush in paint- 

 ing. By the conceiving imagination, because the historian is not a 

 clerk but a seer: he must see the thing first before he can judge of it. 

 Not the inventing imagination, but the conceiving imagination, 

 not all historians have been careful to draw the distinction in their 

 practice. It is imagination that is needed, is it not, to conceive past 

 generations of men truly in their habit and manner as they lived? 

 If not, it is some power of the same kind which you prefer to call by 

 another name : the name is not what we shall stop to discuss. I will 

 use the word under correction. Nothing but imagination can put the 

 mind back into past experiences not its own, or make it the con- 

 temporary of institutions long since passed away or modified beyond 

 recognition. And yet the historian must be in thought and com- 

 prehension the contemporary of the men and affairs he writes of. 

 He must also, it is true, be something more: if he would have the 

 full power to interpret, he must have the offing that will give him 

 perspective, the knowledge of subsequent events ,which will furnish 

 him with multiplied standards of judgment: he should write among 

 records amplified, verified, complete, withdrawn from the mist of 



