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was not a guide to be followed. History thus written is 
nothing but clever guess-work, and amounts to no more than 
plausible conjecture, in which the chances are almost infinite 
that the narrative is, if not wholly, at least materially wrong. 
As the speculation of an ingenious mind it may be interesting, 
but as a record of facts it is worthless.” 
In his essay on the uncertainty of the history of the 
first four centuries of Rome, in the Memoirs of the Academy 
of Inscriptions , tome vi. p. 71, M. de Pouilly says : — “ History 
is the narrative of a fact which we derive from those whom 
we know to have been witnesses of it. It results from 
this definition that for a history to be authentic its author, or at 
all events the person on whose narrative it is based, must have 
lived at the time when the events happened.” And the same 
writer adds, “ Tradition is a popular rumour of which the source 
is not known. It is a chain of which we hold one end, but the 
other is lost in the abysmal depths of the past.” 
To show the danger of trusting to tradition, I may take 
as an illustration the amusing game called “ Russian Scandal,” 
where a party being seated together in a row, a person 
at one end whispers some story into the ear of his neigh- 
bour, who repeats it in the same manner to the one next 
to him, and so on until it comes to the last, who tells aloud 
what he has heard. It will be generally found that the 
story thus transmitted varies essentially from the story as 
originally told, and the experience of every one as to the gossip 
of society teaches the same lesson. Laplace, in his Essai 
Philosophique sur les Probabitites, has made this the subject 
of a mathematical calculation. He says, “ Suppose a fact to 
be transmitted through twenty persons; the first communi- 
cating it to the second, the second to the third, &c., and 
let the probability of each testimony be expressed by nine- 
tenths (that is, suppose that of ten reports made by each 
witness nine only are true), then at every time the story 
passes from one witness to another the evidence is reduced 
to nine-tenths of what it was before. Thus, after it has passed 
through the whole twenty, the evidence will be found to be 
less than one-eighth.” 
But belief by no means depends upon actual testimony. 
We believe in the results of mathematical inquiry by reasoning. 
We believe in the existence of a Creator by arguments drawn 
from design and other considerations. We may or may not 
believe that the planets are inhabited from arguments drawn 
from analogy. We believe many other facts from their inherent 
probability, and so on. But in many such cases it would be 
more proper to speak of our persuasion than our belief, by 
VOL. VIII. t 
