136 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



ency, of which there have been many examples, and which some- 

 times seems as if it were inevitable in the economic historian, to 

 stop the process of investigation too soon, in order to theorize, or 

 to attempt to explain the facts before they are understood. Would it 

 be unfair to say that in proportion as economic training predominates 

 over historical, in such proportion is this tendency present? How- 

 ever this may be, it is true that against the tendency to theorize too 

 soon there is only one effectual safeguard, and that is the thorough 

 discipline of the critical judgment, which it should be the business 

 of historical training to impart to the point where the mind may be 

 trusted instinctively to know when the fact is well established and 

 when it is still more or less doubtful. In any case the historian should 

 not yield to the temptation to judge this tendency more severely in 

 the economic historian than in imperfectly trained members of his 

 own company, and he should be ready as in their case to separate 

 the real result from the premature explanation. While I desire to 

 express strongly, as I have done, my belief that we have such a gain 

 from these investigations, I am also desirous of repeating emphatically 

 my earlier statement that in my opinion none of the more important 

 results which the historian has already reached concerning the facts 

 of the first half of the Middle Ages is likely to be overturned or seri- 

 ously modified by the study of economic history. 



With the sociologist we have a less close relationship, and from him 

 we have to expect much more that is not so directly historical. We 

 have indeed, I think, a strong tendency to look on his invasion of 

 our preserves with suspicion. The economist's tendency to explain 

 seems carried in the sociologist to an extreme which it is impossible 

 to resist, and the numerous premature attempts which he has 

 already made to formulate the fundamental laws of history, or to 

 propound its final philosophy, give us good ground for suspicion. 

 We remember that such attempts to explain history philosophically 

 were very numerous in the infancy of our own branch of learning - 

 as speculation is perhaps in the infancy of all learning; we see very 

 quickly that the sociological historian is not always trained in the 

 methods of historical criticism, that he is apt to get his knowledge 

 of facts at second-hand, and often imperfectly, with frequent mis- 

 understandings, and with a strong tendency to take them from one- 

 sided and partial students who exaggerate the historical factors in 

 which the sociologist is himself most interested, and that he 

 often regards as established facts the conclusions of some single 

 scholar whom no one follows; and we are tempted to suspect that 

 metaphysical phraseology sometimes conceals a lack of clear and 

 definite thinking. 



If I have stated these points of criticism strongly, it is in no un- 

 friendly spirit. It is rather because I believe so firmly in the great 



