4 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



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upon analysis, so far apart as they at first appear to be. I think that 

 we shall all agree, upon reflection and after a little explanation of 

 the terms we use, that what we seek in history is the manifestation 

 and development of the human spirit, whether we seek it in precedents 

 or in processes. 



All of the many ways of writing history may be reduced to two. 

 There are those who write history, as there are those who read it, 

 only for the sake of the story. Their study is of plot, their narrative 

 goes by ordered sequence and seeks the dramatic order of events; 

 men appear, in their view, always in organized society, under leaders 

 and subject to common forces making this way or that; details are 

 for the intensification of the impression made by the main move- 

 ment in mass; there is the unity and the epic progress of The Decline 

 and Fall, or the crowded but always ordered composition of one of 

 Macaulay's canvases; cause and effect move obvious and majestic 

 upon the page, and the story is of the large force of nations. This is 

 history embodied in "events," centering in the large transactions 

 of epochs or of peoples. It is history in one kind, upon which there 

 are many variants. History in the other kind devotes itself to analy- 

 sis, to interpretation, to the illumination of the transactions of which 

 it treats by lights let in from every side. It has its own standard of 

 measurement in reckoning transactions great or small, bases its 

 assessments, not upon the numbers involved or the noise and reputa- 

 tion of the day itself in which they occurred, so much as upon their 

 intrinsic significance, seen now in after days, as an index of what the 

 obscure men of the mass thought and endured, indications of the 

 forces making and to be made, the intimate biography of daily 

 thought. Here interest centres, not so much in what happened as in 

 what underlay the happening; not so much in the tides as in the 

 silent forces that lifted them. Economic history is of this quality, 

 and the history of religious belief, and the history of literature, where 

 it traces the map of opinion, whether in an age of certainty or in an 

 age of doubt and change. 



The interest of history in both kinds is essentially the same. Each 

 in its kind is a record of the human spirit. In one sort we seek that 

 spirit manifested in action, where effort is organized upon the great 

 scale and leadership displayed. It stirs our pulses to be made aware 

 of the mighty forces, whether of exaltation or of passion, that play 

 through what men have done. In the other sort of history we seek 

 the spirit of man manifested in conception, in the quiet tides of 

 thought and emotion making up the minor bays and inlets of our 

 various life of complex circumstance, in the private accumulation of 

 events which lie far away from the sound of drum or trumpet and 

 constitute no part of the pomp of great affairs. The interest of human 

 history is that it is human. It is a tale that moves and quickens us. 



