I ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG 9 



perhaps to give a history of the past, in which 

 Cannes would be altogether ignored ! Decidedly 

 it were better to burn this man at once. 



If instinct, or an unwonted use of reason, led 

 Moabdar's magi to this conclusion two or three 

 thousand years ago, all that can be said is that 

 subsequent history has fully justified them. For 

 the rigorous application of Zadig's logic to the 

 results of accurate and long-continued observation 

 has founded all those sciences which have been 

 termed historical or palaetiological, because they 

 are retrospectively prophetic and strive towards 

 the reconstruction in human imagination of events 

 which have vanished and ceased to be. 



History, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, 

 is based upon the interpretation of documentary 

 evidence; and documents would have no 

 evidential value unless historians were justified 

 in their assumption that they have come into 

 existence by the operation of causes similar to 

 those of which documents are, in our present 

 experience, the effects. If a written history can 

 be produced otherwise than by human agency, or if 

 the man who wrote a given document was actu- 

 ated by other than ordinary human motives, such 

 documents are of no more evidential value than 

 so many arabesques. 



Archaeology, which takes up the thread of 

 history beyond the point at which documentary 

 evidence fails us, could have no existence, except 



