The whole of criticism thus reduces to the drawing up and answering of two sets of questions: one for the purpose of bringing before our minds those general conditions affecting the composition of the document, from which we may deduce general motives for distrust or confidence; the other for the purpose of realising the special conditions of each statement, from which special motives may be drawn for distrust or confidence. These two sets of questions ought to be drawn up beforehand in such a form as may enable us to examine methodically both the document in general and each statement in particular; and as they are the same for all documents, it is useful to formulate them once for all.
IV. The critical process comprises two series of questions, which correspond to the two series of operations by which the document was produced. All that interpretative criticism tells us is what the author meant; it remains to determine (1) what he really believed, for he may not have been sincere; (2) what he really knew, for he may have been mistaken. We may therefore distinguish a critical examination of the author's good faith, by which we seek to determine whether the author of the document lied or not, and a critical examination of his accuracy, by which we seek to determine whether he was or was not mistaken.
In practice we rarely need to know what an author believed, unless we are making a special study of his character. We have no direct interest in the author; he is merely the medium through which we reach the external facts he reports. The aim of criticism is to determine whether the author has reported the facts correctly. If he has given inexact information, it is indifferent whether he did so intentionally or not; to draw a distinction would complicate matters unnecessarily. There is thus little occasion to make a separate examination of an author's good faith, and we may shorten our labours by including in a single set of questions all the causes which lead to misstatement. But for the sake of clearness it will be well to discuss the questions to be asked in two separate series.
The questions in the first series will help us to inquire whether we have any reason to distrust the sincerity of a statement. We ask whether the author was in any of those situations which normally incline a man to be insincere. We must ask what these situations are, both as affecting the general composition of a document, and as affecting each particular statement. Experience supplies the answer. Every violation of truth, small or great, is due to a wish on the part of the author to produce a particular impression upon the reader. Our set of questions thus reduces to a list of the motives which may, in the general case, lead an author to violate truth. The following are the most important cases:—
(1) The author seeks to gain a practical advantage for himself; he wishes to deceive the reader of the document, in order to persuade him to an action, or to dissuade him from it; he knowingly gives false information: we then say the author has an interest in deceiving. This is the case with most official documents. Even in documents which have not been composed for a practical purpose, every interested statement has a chance of being mendacious. In order to determine which statements are to be suspected, we are to ask what can have been the general aim of the author in writing the document as a whole; and again, what can have been his particular purpose in making each of the separate statements which compose the document. But there are two natural tendencies to be resisted. The first is, to ask what interest the author could have had in lying, meaning what interest should we have had in his place; we must ask instead what interest can he have thought he had in lying, and we must look for the answer in his tastes and ideals. The other tendency is to take sole account of the individual interest of the author; we ought, however, to remember that the author may have given false information in order to serve a collective interest. This is one of the difficulties of criticism. An author is a member at one and the same time of several different groups, a family, a province, a country, a religious denomination, a political party, a class in society, whose interests often conflict; we have to discover the group in which he took most interest, and for which he worked.
(2) The author was placed in a situation which compelled him to violate truth. This happens whenever he has to draw up a document in conformity with rule or custom, while the actual circumstances are in some point or other in conflict with rule or custom; he is then obliged to state that the conditions were normal, and thus make a false declaration in respect of all the irregularities. In nearly every report of proceedings there is some slight deviation from truth as to the day, the hour, the place, the number or the names of those present. Most of us have observed, if not taken part in, some of these petty fictions. But we are too apt to forget them when we come to criticise documents relating to the past. The authentic character of the documents contributes to the illusion; we instinctively make authentic a synonym of sincere. The rigid rules which govern the composition of every authentic document seem to guarantee sincerity; they are, on the contrary, an incentive to falsify, not the main facts, but the accessory circumstances. From the fact of a person having signed a report we may infer that he agreed to it, but not that he was actually present at the time when the report mentions him as having been present.
(3) The author viewed with sympathy or antipathy a group of men (nation, party, denomination, province, city, family), or an assemblage of doctrines or institutions (religion, school of philosophy, political theory), and was led to distort facts in such a manner as to represent his friends in a favourable and his opponents in an unfavourable light. These are instances of a general bias which affects all the statements of an author, and they are so obvious that the ancients perceived them and gave them names (studium and odium); from ancient times it has been a literary commonplace for historians to protest that they have steered clear of both.
(4) The author was induced by private or collective vanity to violate truth for the purpose of exalting himself or his group. He made such statements as he thought likely to give the reader the impression that he and his possessed qualities deserving of esteem. We have therefore to inquire whether a given statement may not be influenced by vanity. But we must take care not to represent the author's vanity to ourselves as being exactly like our own vanity or that of our contemporaries. Different people are vain for different reasons; we must inquire what was our author's particular vanity; he may have lied in order to attribute to himself or his friends actions which we should consider dishonourable. Charles IX. falsely boasted of having organised the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. There is, however, a kind of vanity which is universal, and that is, the desire to appear to be a person of exalted rank playing an important part in affairs. We must, therefore, always distrust a statement which attributes to the author or his group a high place in the world.[149]
(5) The author desired to please the public, or at least to avoid shocking it. He has expressed sentiments and ideas in harmony with the morality or the fashion of his public; he has distorted facts in order to adapt them to the passions and prejudices of his time, even those which he did not share. The purest types of this kind of falsehood are found in ceremonial forms, official formulæ, declarations prescribed by etiquette, set speeches, polite phrases. The statements which come under this head are so open to suspicion that we are unable to derive from them any information about the facts stated. We are all aware of this so far as relates to the contemporary formulæ of which we see instances every day, but we often forget it in the criticism of documents, especially those belonging to an age from which few documents have come down to us. No one would think of looking for the real sentiments of a man in the assurances of respect with which he ends his letters. But people believed for a long time in the humility of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries of the middle ages, because, on the day of their election, they began by refusing an office of which they declared themselves unworthy, till at last comparison showed that this refusal was a mere conventional form. And there are still scholars who, like the Benedictines of the eighteenth century, look in the chancery-formulæ of a prince for information as to his piety or his liberality.[150]
In order to recognise these conventional declarations there are two lines of general study to be pursued: the one is directed to the author, and seeks to discover what was the public he addressed, for in one and the same country there are usually several different publics, each of which has its own code of morals or propriety; the other is directed towards the public, and seeks to determine its morals or its manners.
(6) The author endeavoured to please the public by literary artifices. He distorted facts in order to embellish them according to his own æsthetic notions. We have therefore to look for the ideal of the author or of his time, in order to be on our guard against passages distorted to suit that ideal. But without special study we may calculate on the common kinds of literary distortion. Rhetorical distortion consists in attributing to persons noble attitudes, acts, sentiments, and, above all, words: this is a natural tendency in young boys who are beginning to practise the art of composition, and in writers still in a semi-barbarous stage; it is the common defect of the mediæval chroniclers.[151] Epic distortion embellishes the narrative by adding picturesque details, speeches delivered by the persons concerned, numbers, sometimes names of persons; it is dangerous, because the precision of the details produces an illusive appearance of truth.[152] Dramatic distortion consists in grouping the facts in such a way as to enhance the dramatic effect by concentrating facts, which in reality were separate, upon a single moment, a single person, or a single group. Writing of this kind is what we call "truer than the truth." It is the most dangerous form of distortion, the form employed by artistic historians, by Herodotus, Tacitus, the Italians of the Renaissance. Lyrical distortion exaggerates the intensity of the sentiments and the emotions of the author and his friends: we should remember this when we attempt to reconstruct "the psychology" of a person.
Literary distortion does not much affect archives (though instances of it are found in most charters of the eleventh century); but it profoundly modifies all literary texts, including the narratives of historians. Now, the natural tendency is to trust writers more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume noble attitudes or manifest great intensity of feeling.
This first series of questions will yield the provisional result of enabling us to note the statements which have a chance of being mendacious.
V. The second series of questions will be of use in determining whether there is any reason to distrust the accuracy of a statement. Was the author in one of those situations which cause a man to make mistakes? As in dealing with good faith, we must look for these conditions both as affecting the document as a whole, and as affecting each of the particular statements in it.
The practice of the established sciences teaches us the conditions of an exact knowledge of facts. There is only one scientific procedure for gaining knowledge of a fact, namely, observation; every statement, therefore, must rest, directly or indirectly, upon an observation, and this observation must have been made correctly.
The set of questions by the aid of which we investigate the probabilities of error may be drawn up in the light of experience, which brings before us the most common cases of error.
(1) The author was in a situation to observe the fact, and supposed he really had observed it; he was, however, prevented from doing so by some interior force of which he was unconscious, an hallucination, an illusion, or a mere prejudice. It would be useless, as well as impossible, to determine which of these agencies was at work; it is enough to ascertain whether the author had a tendency to observe badly. It is scarcely possible in the case of a particular statement to recognise that it was the result of an hallucination or an illusion. At the most we may learn, either from information derived from other sources or by comparison, that an author had a general propensity to this kind of error.
There is a better chance of recognising whether a statement was due to prejudice. In the life or the works of an author we may find the traces of his dominant prejudices. With reference to each of his particular statements, we ought to ask whether it is not the result of a preconceived idea of the author on a class of men or a kind of facts. This inquiry partly coincides with the search for motives of falsehood: interest, vanity, sympathy, and antipathy give rise to prejudices which alter the truth in the same manner as wilful falsehood. We therefore employ the questions already formulated for the purpose of testing good faith. But there is one to be added. In putting forward a statement has the author been led to distort it unconsciously by the circumstance that he was answering a question? This is the case of all statements obtained by interrogating witnesses. Even apart from the cases where the person interrogated seeks to please the proposer of the question by giving an answer which he thinks will be agreeable to him, every question suggests its own answer, or at least its form, and this form is dictated beforehand by some one unacquainted with the facts. It is therefore necessary to apply a special criticism to every statement obtained by interrogation; we must ask what was the question put, and what were the preconceptions to which it may have given rise in the mind of the person interrogated.
(2) The author was badly situated for observing. The practice of the sciences teaches us what are the conditions for correct observation. The observer ought to be placed where he can see correctly, and should have no practical interest, no desire to obtain a particular result, no preconceived idea about the result. He ought to record the observation immediately, in a precise system of notation; he ought to give a precise indication of his method. These conditions, which are insisted on in the sciences of observation, are never completely fulfilled by the authors of documents.
It would be useless, therefore, to ask whether there have been chances of inaccuracy; there always have been, and it is just this that distinguishes a document from an observation. It only remains to look for the obvious causes of error in the conditions of observation: to inquire whether the observer was in a place where he could not see or hear well, as would be the case, for example, with a subordinate who should presume to narrate the secret deliberations of a council of dignitaries; whether his attention was greatly distracted by the necessity for action, as it would be on the field of battle, for example; whether he was inattentive because the facts had little interest for him; whether he lacked the special experience or general intelligence necessary for understanding the facts; whether he analysed his impressions badly, or confused different events. Above all, we must ask when he wrote down what he saw or heard. This is the most important point: the only exact observation is the one which is recorded immediately it is made; such is the constant procedure in the established sciences; an impression committed to writing later on is only a recollection, liable to be confused in the memory with other recollections. Memoirs written several years after the facts, often at the very end of the author's career, have introduced innumerable errors into history. It must be made a rule to treat memoirs with special distrust as second-hand documents, in spite of their appearance of being contemporary testimony.
(3) The author states facts which he could have observed, but to which he did not take the trouble to attend. From idleness or negligence he reported details which he has merely inferred, or even imagined at random, and which turn out to be false. This is a common source of error, though it does not readily occur to one, and is to be suspected wherever the author was obliged to procure information in which he took little interest, in order to fill up a blank form. Of this kind are answers to questions put by an authority (it is enough to observe how most official inquiries are conducted in our own day), and detailed accounts of ceremonies or public functions. There is too strong a temptation to write the account from the programme, or in agreement with the usual order of the proceedings. How many accounts of meetings of all kinds have been published by reporters who were not present at them! Similar efforts of imagination are suspected—sometimes, it is thought, clearly recognised—in the writings of mediæval chroniclers.[154] The rule, then, will be to distrust all narratives conforming too closely to a set formula.
(4) The fact stated is of such a nature that it could not have been learnt by observation alone. It may be a hidden fact—a private secret, for example. It may be a fact relating to a collectivity, and applying to an extensive area or a long period of time; for example, the common act of a whole army, a custom common to a whole people or a whole age, a statistical total obtained by the addition of numerous items. It may be a comprehensive judgment on the character of a man, a group, a custom, an event. Here we have to do with propositions derived from observations by synthesis or inference: the author can only have arrived at them indirectly; he began with data furnished by observation, and elaborated them by the logical processes of abstraction, generalisation, reasoning, calculation. Two questions arise. Does it appear that the author had sufficient data to work upon? Was he accurate, or the reverse, in his use of the data he had?
On the probable inaccuracies of an author, general indications may be obtained from an examination of his writings. This examination will show us how he worked: whether he was capable of abstraction, reasoning, generalisation, and what were the mistakes he was in the habit of making. In order to determine the value of the data, we must criticise each statement separately; we must imagine the conditions under which the author observed, and ask ourselves whether he was able to procure the necessary data for his statement. This is an indispensable precaution in dealing with large totals in statistics and descriptions of popular usages; for it is possible that the author may have obtained the total he gives by a process of conjectural valuation (this is the ordinary practice in stating the number of combatants or killed in a battle), or by combining subsidiary totals, all of which were not accurate; it is possible that he may have extended to a whole people, a whole country, a whole period, that which was true only of a small group known to him.[155]
VI. These two first series of questions bearing on the good faith and the accuracy of the statements in the document are based on the supposition that the author has observed the fact himself. This is a feature common to all reports of observations in the established sciences. But in history there is so great a dearth of direct observations, of even moderate value, that we are obliged to turn to account documents which every other science would reject.[156] Take any narrative at random, even if it be the work of a contemporary, it will be found that the facts observed by the author are never more than a part of the whole number. In nearly every document the majority of the statements do not come from the author at first hand, but are reproductions of the statements of others. Even where a general relates a battle in which he commanded, he does not communicate his own observations, but those of his officers; his narrative is in a large measure a "second-hand document."[157]
In order to criticise a second-hand statement it is no longer enough to examine the conditions under which the author of the document worked: this author is, in such a case, a mere agent of transmission; the true author is the person who supplied him the information. The critic, therefore, must change his ground, and ask whether the informant observed and reported correctly; and if he too had the information from some one else (the commonest case), the chase must be pursued from one intermediary to another, till the person is found who first launched the statement on its career, and with regard to him the question must be asked: Was he an accurate observer?
Logically such a search is not inconceivable; ancient collections of Arab traditions give lists of their successive guarantors. But, in practice, lack of documents nearly always prevents us from getting as far as the observer of a fact; the observation remains anonymous. A general question then presents itself: How are we to criticise an anonymous statement? It is not only "anonymous documents" with which we are concerned, where the composition as a whole is the work of an unknown author; even when the author is known, this question arises with respect to each statement of his drawn from an unknown source.
Criticism works by reproducing the conditions under which an author wrote, and has hardly anything to take hold of where a statement is anonymous. The only method left is to examine the general conditions of the document. We may inquire whether there is any feature common to all the statements of a document indicating that they all proceed from persons having the same prejudices or passions: in this case the tradition followed by the author is biassed; the tradition followed by Herodotus has both an Athenian bias and a Delphic bias. In respect of each fact derived from such a tradition we must ask whether it has not been distorted by the interest, the vanity, or the prejudices of the group concerned. We may even ignore the author, and ask whether there was anything likely to make for or against correct observation, common to all the men of the time and country in which the observation must have been made: for example, what means of information, and what prejudices, had the Greeks of Herodotus' time with respect to the Scythians.
The most useful of all these general inquiries has reference to that mode of transmitting anonymous statements which is called tradition. No second-hand statement has any value except in so far as it reproduces its source; every addition is an alteration, and ought to be eliminated. Similarly, all the intermediary sources are valueless except as copies of the original statement founded directly on observation. The critic needs to know whether this transmission from hand to hand has preserved or distorted the original statement; above all, whether the tradition embodied in the document was written or oral. Writing fixes a statement, and ensures its being transmitted faithfully; when a statement is communicated orally, the impression in the mind of the hearer is apt to be modified by confusion with other impressions; in passing from one intermediary to another the statement is modified at every step,[158] and as these modifications arise from different causes, there is no possibility of measuring or correcting them.
Oral tradition is by its nature a process of continual alteration; hence in the established sciences only written transmission is accepted. Historians have no avowable motive for proceeding differently, at any rate when it is a case of establishing a particular fact. We must therefore search documents for statements derived from oral tradition in order that we may suspect them. We rarely have direct information as to statements being thus derived; authors who borrow from oral tradition are not anxious to proclaim the fact.[159] There is thus only an indirect method, and that is to ascertain that written transmission was impossible; we may then be sure that the fact reached the author only by oral tradition. We have therefore to ask the question: In this period and in this group of men was it customary to commit to writing facts of this kind? If the answer is negative, the fact considered rests on oral tradition alone.
The most striking form of oral tradition is legend. It arises among groups of men with whom the spoken word is the only means of transmission, in barbarous societies, or in classes of little culture, such as peasants or soldiers. In this case it is the whole group of facts which is transmitted orally and assumes the legendary form. There is a legendary period in the early history of every people: in Greece, at Rome, among the Germanic and Slavonic races, the most ancient memories of the people form a stratum of legend. In periods of civilisation popular legends continue to exist in reference to events which strike the imagination of the people.[160] Legend is exclusively oral tradition.
When a people has emerged from the legendary period and begun to commit its history to writing, oral tradition does not come to an end, but only applies to a narrower sphere; it is now restricted to facts which are not registered, whether because they are by their nature secret, or because no one takes the trouble to record them, such as private actions, words, the details of events. Thus arise anecdotes, which have been named "the legends of civilised society." Like legends they have their origin in confused recollections, allusions, mistaken interpretations, imaginings of all kinds which fasten upon particular persons and events.
Legends and anecdotes are at bottom mere popular beliefs, arbitrarily attached to historical personages; they belong to folk-lore, not to history.[161] We must therefore guard against the temptation to treat legend as an alloy of accurate facts and errors out of which it is possible by analysis to extract grains of historical truth. A legend is a conglomerate in which there may be some grains of truth, and which may even be capable of being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law of refraction."
The crudest analytical procedure consists in rejecting those details in the legendary narrative which appear impossible, miraculous, contradictory, or absurd, and retaining the rational residue as historical. This is how the Protestant rationalists of the eighteenth century treated biblical narratives. One might as well amputate the marvellous part of a fairy tale, suppress Puss in Boots, and keep the Marquis of Carabas as an historical character. A more refined but no less dangerous method is to compare different legends in order to deduce their common historical basis. Grote[162] has shown, with reference to Greek tradition, that it is impossible to extract any trustworthy information from legend by any process whatever.[163] We must make up our minds to treat legend as a product of imagination; we may look in it for a people's conceptions, not for the external facts in that people's history. The rule will be to reject every statement of legendary origin; nor does this apply only to narratives in legendary form: a narrative which has an historical appearance, but is founded on the data of legend, the opening chapters of Thucydides for example, ought equally to be discarded.
In the case of written transmission it remains to inquire whether the author reproduced his source without altering it. This inquiry forms part of the critical investigation of the sources,[164] so far as it can be pursued by a comparison of texts. But when the source has disappeared we are reduced to internal criticism. We ask, first of all, whether the author can have had exact information, otherwise his statement is valueless. We next put to ourselves the general question: Was the author in the habit of altering his sources, and in what manner? And in regard to each separate second-hand statement we ask whether it has the appearance of being an exact reproduction or an arrangement. We judge by the form: when we meet with a passage whose style is out of harmony with the main body of the composition, we have before us a fragment of an earlier document; the more servile the reproduction the more valuable is the passage, for it can contain no exact information beyond what was already in the source.
VII. In spite of all these investigations, criticism never succeeds in determining the parentage of all the statements to the extent of finding out who it was that observed, or even recorded, each fact. In most cases the inquiry ends in leaving the statement anonymous.
We are thus confronted with a fact, observed we know not by whom nor how, recorded we know not when nor how. No other science accepts facts which come in such a condition, without possibility of verification, subject to incalculable chances of error. But history can turn them to account, because it does not, like the other sciences, need a supply of facts which are difficult to ascertain.
The notion of a fact, when we come to examine it precisely, reduces to an affirmative judgment having reference to external reality. The operations by which we arrive at such a judgment are more or less difficult, and the risk of error is greater or smaller according to the nature of the realities investigated and the degree of precision with which we wish to formulate them. Chemistry and biology need to discern facts of a delicate order, rapid movements, transient states, and to measure them in exact figures. History can work with facts of a much coarser kind, spread over a large extent of space or time, such as the existence of a custom, of a man, of a group, even of a people; and these facts may be roughly expressed in vague words conveying no idea of accurate measurement. With such easily observed facts as these to deal with, history can afford to be much less exacting with regard to the conditions of observation. The imperfection of the means of information is compensated by a natural faculty of being satisfied with information which can easily be obtained.
Documents supply little else besides ill-verified facts, subject to many risks of falsehood or error. But there are some facts in respect of which it is very difficult to lie or be mistaken. The last series of questions which the critic should ask is intended to distinguish, in the mass of alleged facts, those which by their nature are little subject to the risk of alteration, and which are therefore very probably correct. We know what, in general, are the classes of facts which enjoy this privilege; we are thus enabled to draw up a list of questions for general use, and in applying them to any particular case we ask whether the fact in question comes under any of the heads specified in advance.
(1) The fact is of a nature to render falsehood improbable. A man lies in order to produce an impression, and has no motive to lie in a case where he believes that the false impression would be of no use, or that the falsehood would be ineffectual. In order to determine whether the author was in such a situation there are several questions to be asked.
(a) Is the fact stated manifestly prejudicial to the effect which the author wished to produce? Does it run counter to the interest, the vanity, the sentiments, the literary tastes of the author and his group; or to the opinions which he made a point of not offending? In such a case there is a probability of good faith. But in the application of this criterion there is danger; it has often been wrongly used, and in two ways. One of these is to take for a confession what was meant for a boast, as the declaration of Charles IX. that he was responsible for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Or again, we trust without examination an Athenian who speaks ill of the Athenians, or a Protestant who accuses other Protestants. But it is quite possible the author's notions of his interest or honour were very different from ours;[165] or he may have wished to calumniate fellow-citizens who did not belong to his own party, or co-religionists who did not belong to his own sect. This criterion must therefore be restricted to cases where we know exactly what effect he wished to produce, and in what group he was mainly interested.
(b) Was the fact stated so obviously known to the public that the author, even if tempted to falsehood, would have been restrained by the certainty of being detected? This is the case with facts which are easy to verify, which are not remote in point of time or space, which apply to a wide area or a long period, especially if the public had any interest in verifying them. But the fear of detection is only an intermittent check, opposed by interest whenever the author has any motive for deceiving. It acts unequally on different minds—strongly on men of culture and self-control who understand their public, feebly in barbarous ages and on passionate men.[166] This criterion, therefore, is to be restricted to cases where we know what idea the author had of his readers, and whether he was dispassionate enough to keep them in mind.
(c) Was the fact stated indifferent to the author, so that he had no temptation to misrepresent it? This is the case with facts of a general kind, usages, institutions, objects, persons, which the author mentions incidentally. A narrative, even a false one, cannot be composed exclusively of falsehoods; the author must localise his facts, and needs to surround them with a framework of truth. The facts which form this framework had no interest for him; at that time every one knew them. But for us they are instructive, and we can depend on them, for the author had no intention of deceiving us.
(2) The fact was of a kind to render error improbable. Numerous as the chances of error are, still there are facts so "big" it is hard to be mistaken about them. We have, then, to ask whether the alleged fact was easy to ascertain: (a) Did it cover a long period of time, so that it must have been frequently observed? Take, for example, the case of a monument, a man, a custom, an event which was in progress for a considerable time. (b) Did it cover a wide area, so that many people observed it?—as, for example, a battle, a war, a custom common to a whole people. (c) Is it expressed in such general terms that superficial observation was enough to discover it?—as the mere existence of a man, a city, a people, a custom. Facts of this large and general kind make up the bulk of historical knowledge.
(3) The fact was of such a nature that it would not have been stated unless it was true. A man does not declare that he has seen something contrary to his expectations and habits of mind unless observation has compelled him to admit it. A fact which seems very improbable to the man who relates it has a good chance of being true. We have, then, to ask whether the fact stated was in contradiction with the author's opinions, whether it is a phenomenon of a kind unknown to him, an action or a custom which seems unintelligible to him; whether it is a saying whose import transcends his intelligence, such as the sayings of Christ reported in the Gospels, or the answers made by Joan of Arc to questions put to her in the course of her trial. But we must guard against judging of the author's ideas by our own standards: when men who are accustomed to believe in the marvellous speak of monsters, of miracles, of wizards, there is nothing in these to contradict their expectations, and the criterion does not apply.
VIII. We have at last reached the end of this description of the critical operations; its length is due to the necessity of describing successively operations which are performed simultaneously. We will now consider how these methods are applied in practice.
If the text be one whose interpretation is debatable, the examination is divided into two stages: the first comprises the reading of the text with a view to the determination of the meaning, without attempting to draw any information from it; the second comprises the critical study of the facts contained in the document. In the case of documents whose meaning is clear, we may begin the critical examination on the first reading, reserving for separate study any individual passages of doubtful meaning.
We begin by collecting the general information we possess about the document and the author, with the special purpose of discovering the conditions which may have influenced the production of the document—the epoch, the place, the purpose, the circumstances of its composition; the author's social status, country, party, sect, family, interests, passions, prejudices, linguistic habits, methods of work, means of information, culture, abilities, and mental defects; the nature of the facts and the mode of their transmission. Information on all these points is supplied by the preparatory critical investigation of authorship and sources. We now combine the different heads, mentally applying the set of general critical questions; this should be done at the outset, and the results impressed on the memory, for they will need to be present to the mind during the remainder of the operations.
Thus prepared, we attack the document. As we read we mentally analyse it, destroying all the author's combinations, discarding all his literary devices, in order to arrive at the facts, which we formulate in simple and precise language. We thus free ourselves from the deference imposed by artistic form, and from all submission to the author's ideas—an emancipation without which criticism is impossible.
The document thus analysed resolves into a long series of the author's conceptions and statements as to facts.
With regard to each statement, we ask ourselves whether there is a probability of their being false or erroneous, or whether, on the other hand, there are exceptional chances in favour of good faith and accuracy, working through the list of critical questions prepared for particular cases. This list of questions must be always present to the mind. At first it may seem cumbersome, perhaps pedantic; but as it will be applied more than a hundred times in each page of the document, it will in the end be used unconsciously. As we read a text, all the reasons for distrust or confidence will occur to the mind simultaneously, combined into a single impression.
Analysis and critical questioning will then have become a matter of instinct, and we shall have acquired for ever that methodically analytical, distrustful, not too respectful turn of mind which is often mystically called "the critical sense," but which is nothing else than an unconscious habit of criticism.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DETERMINATION OF PARTICULAR FACTS
Critical analysis yields in the result a number of conceptions and statements, accompanied by comments on the probability of the facts stated being accurate. It remains to examine how we can deduce from these materials those particular historical facts which are to form the basis of scientific knowledge. Conceptions and statements are two different kinds of results, and must be treated by different methods.
I. Every conception which is expressed in writing or by any illustrative representation is in itself a definite, unimpeachable fact That which is expressed must have first been present in the mind of some one—if not in that of the author, who may have reproduced a formula he did not understand, then in the mind of the man who originated the formula. The existence of a conception may be learnt from a single instance and proved from a single document. Analysis and interpretation are thus sufficient for the purpose of drawing up the complete list of those facts which form the basis of the history of the arts, the sciences, or of doctrines.[167] It is the task of external criticism to localise these facts by determining the epoch, the country, the author of each conception. The duration, geographical distribution, origin, and filiation of conceptions belong to historical synthesis. Internal criticism has nothing to do here; the fact is taken directly from the document.
We may advance a step farther. In themselves conceptions are nothing but facts in psychology; but imagination does not create its objects, it takes the elements of them from reality. Descriptions of imaginary facts are constructed out of the real facts which the author has observed in his experience. These elements of knowledge, the raw material of the imaginary description, may be sought for and isolated. In dealing with periods and with classes of facts for which documents are rare—antiquity, for example, and the usages of private life—the attempt has been made to lay under contribution works of literature, epic poems, novels, plays.[168] The method is legitimate, but only within the limits of certain restrictions which one is very apt to forget.
(1) It does not apply to social facts of a psychological order, the moral or artistic standards of a society; the moral and æsthetic conceptions in a document give at most the individual standards of the author; we have no right to conclude from these to the morals or the æsthetic tastes of the age. We must at least wait till we have compared several different authors of the same period.
(2) Descriptions even of physical facts and objects may be products of the author's imagination. It is only the elements of them which we know to be certainly real; all that we can assert is the separate existence of the irreducible elements, form, material, colour, number. When the poet speaks of golden gates or silver bucklers, we cannot infer that golden gates and silver bucklers ever existed in reality; nothing is certain beyond the separate existence of gates, bucklers, gold, and silver. The analysis must therefore be carried to the point of distinguishing those elements which the author must necessarily have taken from experience: objects, their purpose, ordinary actions.
(3) The conception of an object or an action proves that it existed, but not that it was common; the object or action may have been unique, or restricted to a very small circle; poets and novelists are fond of taking their models from an exceptional world.
(4) The facts yielded by this method are not localised in space or time; the author may have taken them from a time or country not his own.
All these restrictions may be summarised as follows: before drawing any inference from a work of literature as to the state of the society in which the author lived, we should ask ourselves what would be the worth of a similar inference as to contemporary manners drawn from a modern novel.
With the facts yielded by conceptions we may join those indifferent facts of an obvious and elementary character which the author has stated almost without thinking. Logically we have no right to call them certain, for we do sometimes meet with men who make mistakes about obvious and elementary facts, and others who lie even on indifferent matters. But such cases are so rare that there is not much danger in admitting as certain facts of this kind which are supported by a single document, and this is how we deal, in practice, with periods of which little is known. The institutions of the Gauls and Germans are described from the unique texts of Cæsar and Tacitus. Facts so easy to discover are forced upon the authors of descriptions much as realities are forced upon poets.
II. On the other hand, a statement in a document as to an objective fact is never enough to establish that fact. The chances of falsehood or error are so many, the conditions which gave rise to the statement are so little known, that we cannot be sure that none of these chances has taken effect. The critical examination provides no definitive solution; it is indispensable if we are to avoid error, but it is insufficient to conduct us to truth.
Criticism can prove no fact; it only yields probabilities. Its end and result is to decompose documents into statements, each labelled with an estimate of its value—worthless statement, statement open to suspicion (strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, statement of unknown value.
Of all these different kinds of results one only is definitive—the statement of an author who can have had no information on the fact he states is null and void; it is to be rejected as we reject an apocryphal document.[169] But criticism here merely destroys illusory sources of information; it supplies nothing certain to take their place. The only sure results of criticism are negative. All the positive results are subject to doubt; they reduce to propositions of the form: "There are chances for or against the truth of such and such a statement." Chances only. A statement open to suspicion may turn out to be true; a statement whose truth is probable may, after all, be false. Instances occur continually, and we are never sufficiently well acquainted with the conditions under which the observation was made to know whether it was made ill or well.
In order to obtain a definitive result we require a final operation. After passing through the ordeal of criticism, statements present themselves as probable or improbable. But even the most probable of them, taken by themselves, remain mere probabilities: to pass from them to categorical propositions in scientific form is a step we have no right to take; a proposition in a science is an assertion not open to debate, and that is what the statements we have before us are not. It is a principle common to all sciences of observation not to base a scientific conclusion on a single observation; the fact must have been corroborated by several independent observations before it is affirmed categorically. History, with its imperfect modes of acquiring information, has less right than any other science to claim exemption from this principle. An historical statement is, in the most favourable case, but an indifferently made observation, and needs other observations to corroborate it.
It is by combining observations that every science is built up: a scientific fact is a centre on which several different observations converge.[170] Each observation is subject to chances of error which cannot be entirely eliminated; but if several observations agree, this can hardly be in virtue of a common error: the more probable explanation of the agreement is that the observers have all seen the same reality and have all described it correctly. Errors are personal and tend to diverge; it is the correct observations that agree.
Applied to history, this principle leads to a last series of operations, intermediate between purely analytical criticism and the synthetic operations—the comparison of statements.
We begin by classifying the results yielded by critical analysis in such a way as to bring together those statements which relate to the same fact. The operation is facilitated mechanically by the method of slips. Either each statement has been entered on a separate slip, or else a single slip has been assigned for each fact, and the different statements relating to it entered upon the slip as met with in the course of reading. By bringing the statements together we learn the extent of our information on the fact; the definitive conclusion depends on the relation between the statements. We have, then, to study separately the different cases which may occur.
III. Most frequently, except in contemporary history, the documents only supply a single statement on a given fact. In such a case all the other sciences follow an invariable rule: an isolated observation is not admitted into science; it is quoted (with the observer's name), but no conclusions are drawn from it. Historians have no avowable motive for proceeding otherwise. When a fact is supported by no more than the statement of a single man, however honest he may be, historians ought not to assert it, but to do as men of science do—give the reference (Thucydides states, Cæsar says that ...); this is all they have a right to affirm. In reality they all retain the habit of stating facts, as was done in the middle ages, on the authority of Thucydides or of Cæsar; many are simple enough to do so in express terms. Thus, allowing themselves to be guided by natural credulity, unchecked by science, historians end by admitting, on the insufficient presumption afforded by a unique document, any statement which does not happen to be contradicted by another document. Hence the absurd consequence that history is more positive, and seems better established in regard to those little known periods which are represented by a single writer than in regard to facts known from thousands of documents which contradict each other. The wars of the Medes known to Herodotus alone, the adventures of Fredegonda related by none but Gregory of Tours, are less subject to discussion than the events of the French Revolution, which have been described by hundreds of contemporaries. This is a discreditable state of things which cannot be ended except by a revolution in the minds of historians.
IV. When we have several statements relating to the same fact, they may contradict each other or they may agree. In order to be certain that they really do contradict each other, we have to make sure that they do actually relate to the same fact. Two apparently contradictory statements may be merely parallel; they may not relate exactly to the same moment, the same place, the same persons, the same episodes of an event, and they may be both correct.[171] We must not, however, infer that they confirm each other; each comes under the category of unique statements.
If the contradiction is real, at least one of the statements is false. In such cases it is a natural tendency to seek to reconcile them by a compromise—to split the difference. This peace-making spirit is the reverse of scientific. A says two and two make four; B says they make five. We are not to conclude that two and two make four and a half; we must examine and see which is right. This examination is the work of criticism. Of two contradictory statements, it nearly always happens that one is open to suspicion; this should be rejected if the competing statement has been judged very probably true. If both are open to suspicion, we abstain from drawing any conclusion. We do the same if several statements open to suspicion agree together as against a single statement which is not suspected.[172]
V. When several statements agree, it is still necessary to resist the natural tendency to believe that the fact has been demonstrated. The first impulse is to count each document as one source of information. We are well aware in matters of every-day life that men are apt to copy each other, that a single narrative often serves the turn of several narrators, that several newspapers sometimes happen to publish the same correspondence, that several reporters sometimes agree to let one of their number do the work for all. We have, in such a case, several documents, several statements—have we the same number of observations? Obviously not. When one statement reproduces another, it does not constitute a new observation, and even if an observation were to be reproduced by a hundred different authors, these hundred copies would amount to no more than one observation. To count them as a hundred would be the same thing as to count a hundred printed copies of the same book as a hundred different documents. But the respect paid to "historical documents" is sometimes stronger than obvious truth. The same statement occurring in several different documents by different authors has an illusory appearance of multiplicity; an identical fact related in ten different documents at once gives the impression of being established by ten agreeing observations. This impression is to be distrusted. An agreement is only conclusive when the agreeing statements represent observations which are independent of each other. Before we draw any conclusion from an agreement we must examine whether it is an agreement between independent observations. Two operations are thus required.
(1) We begin by inquiring whether the statements are independent, or are reproductions of one and the same observation. This inquiry is partly the work of that part of external criticism which deals with the investigation of sources;[173] but that investigation only touches the relations between written documents, and stops short when it has determined which passages of an author are borrowed from other authors. Borrowed passages are to be rejected without discussion. But the same work remains to be done in reference to statements which were not committed to writing. We have to compare the statements which relate to the same fact, in order to find out whether they proceeded originally from different observers, or at least from different observations.
The principle is analogous to that employed in the investigation of sources. The details of a social fact are so manifold, and there are so many different ways of looking at the same fact, that two independent observers cannot possibly give completely coincident accounts; if two statements present the same details in the same order, they must be derived from a common observation; different observations are bound to diverge somewhere. We may often apply an a priori principle: if the fact was of such a nature that it could only be observed or reported by a single observer, then all the accounts of it must be derived from a single observation. These principles[174] enable us to recognise many cases of different observations, and still more numerous cases of observations being reproduced.
There remains a great number of doubtful cases. The natural tendency is to treat them as if they were cases of independent observation. But the scientific procedure would be the exact reverse of this: as long as the statements are not proved to be independent we have no right to assume that their agreement is conclusive.
It is only after we have determined the relations between the different statements that we can begin to count them and examine into their agreement. Here again we have to distrust the first impulse; the kind of agreement which is really conclusive is not, as one would naturally imagine, a perfect similarity between two narratives, but an occasional coincidence between two narratives which only partially resemble each other. The natural tendency is to think that the closer the agreement is, the greater is its demonstrative power; we ought, on the contrary, to adopt as a rule the paradox that an agreement proves more when it is confined to a small number of circumstances. It is at such points of coincidence between diverging statements that we are to look for scientifically established historical facts.
(2) Before drawing any conclusions it remains to make sure whether the different observations of the same fact are entirely independent; for it is possible that one may have influenced another to such a degree that their agreement is inconclusive. We have to guard against the following cases:—
(a) The different observations have been made by the same author, who has recorded them either in the same or in different documents; special reasons must then be had before it can be assumed that the author really made the observation afresh, and did not content himself with merely repeating a single observation.
(b) There were several observers, but they commissioned one of their number to write a single document. We have to ascertain whether the document merely gives the statements of the writer, or whether the other observers checked his work.
(c) Several observers recorded their observations in different documents, but under similar conditions. We must apply the list of critical questions in order to ascertain whether they were not all subject to the same influences, predisposing to falsehood or error; whether, for example, they had a common interest, a common vanity, or common prejudices.
The only observations which are certainly independent are those which are contained in different documents, written by different authors, who belonged to different groups, and worked under different conditions. Cases of perfectly conclusive agreement are thus rare, except in reference to modern periods.
The possibility of proving an historical fact depends on the number of independent documents relating to it which have been preserved, and the preservation of the documents is a matter of chance; this explains the share which chance has in the formation of historical science.
The facts which it is possible to establish are chiefly those which cover a large extent of space or time (sometimes called general facts), customs, doctrines, institutions, great events; they were easier to observe than the others, and are now easier to prove. Historical method is not, however, essentially powerless to establish facts of short duration and limited extent (those which are called particular facts), such as a saying, a momentary act. It is enough that several persons should have been present when the fact occurred, that they should have recorded it, and that their writings should have come down to us. We know what were the words which Luther uttered at the Diet of Worms; we know that he did not say what tradition puts in his mouth. This concurrence of favourable conditions becomes more and more frequent with the organisation of newspapers, of shorthand writers, and of depositories of documents.
In the case of antiquity and the middle ages historical knowledge is limited to general facts by the scarcity of documents. In dealing with contemporary history it is possible to include more and more particular facts. The general public supposes the opposite of this; it is suspicious about contemporary facts, with reference to which it sees contradictory narratives circulating, and believes without hesitation ancient facts, which it does not see contradicted anywhere. Its confidence is at its greatest in respect of that history which we have not the means of knowing, and its scepticism increases with the means of knowledge.
VI. Agreement between documents leads to conclusions which are not all of them definitive. In order to complete and rectify our conclusions we have still to study the harmony of the facts.
Several facts which, taken in isolation, are only imperfectly proved, may confirm each other in such a manner as to produce a collective certainty. The facts which the documents present in isolation have sometimes been in reality sufficiently near each other to be connected. Of this kind are the successive actions of the same man or of the same group of men, the habits of the same group at different epochs separated by short intervals, or of similar groups at the same epoch. It is no doubt possible that one of several analogous facts may be true and another false; the certainty of the first does not justify the categorical assertion of the second. But yet the harmony of several such facts, each proved imperfectly, yields a kind of certainty; the facts do not, in the strict sense of the word, prove, but they confirm[175] each other. The doubt which attached to each one of them disappears; we obtain that species of certainty which is produced by the interconnection of facts. Thus the comparison of conclusions which are separately doubtful yields a whole which is morally certain. In an itinerary of a sovereign, the days and the places confirm each other when they harmonize so as to form a coherent whole. An institution or a popular usage is established by the harmony of accounts, each of which is no more than probable, relating to different times and places.
This method is a difficult one to apply. The notion of harmony is a much vaguer one than that of agreement. We cannot assign any precise general rules for distinguishing facts which are sufficiently connected to form a whole, the harmony of whose parts would be conclusive; nor can we determine beforehand the duration and extent of that which may be taken to form a whole. Facts separated by half a century of time and a hundred leagues of space may confirm each other in such a way as to establish a popular usage (for example, among the ancient Germans); but they would prove nothing if they were taken from a heterogeneous society subject to rapid evolution (take, for example, French society in 1750, and again in 1800, in Alsace and in Provence). Here we have to study the relation between the facts. This brings us to the beginnings of historical construction; here is the transition from analytical to synthetic operations.
VII. But it remains to consider cases of discordance between facts established by documents and other facts established by other methods. It happens sometimes that a fact obtained as an historical conclusion is in contradiction with a body of known historical facts, or with the sum of our knowledge of humanity founded on direct observation, or with a scientific law established by the regular method of an established science. In the first two cases the fact is only in conflict with history, psychology, or sociology, all imperfectly established sciences; we then simply call the fact improbable. If it is in conflict with a true science it becomes a miracle. What are we to do with an improbable or miraculous fact? Are we to admit it after examination of the documents, or are we to pass on and shelve the question?
Improbability is not a scientific notion; it varies with the individual. Each person finds improbable what he is not accustomed to see: a peasant would think the telephone much more improbable than a ghost; a king of Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. It is important to know who precisely it is to whom the fact appears to be improbable. Is it to the mass who have no scientific culture? For these, science is more improbable than miracle, physiology than spiritualism; their notions of improbability are worthless. Is it to the man who possesses scientific culture? If so, we have to deal with that which seems improbable to a scientific mind, and it would be more accurate to say that the fact is contrary to the results of science—that there is disagreement between the direct observations of men of science and the indirect testimony of the documents.
How is this conflict to be decided? The question has no great practical interest; nearly all the documents which relate miraculous facts are already open to suspicion on other grounds, and would be discarded by a sound criticism. But the question of miracles has raised such passions that it may be well to indicate how it affects the historian.[176]
The general tendency to believe in the marvellous has filled with miraculous facts the documents of nearly every people. Historically the existence of the devil is much better proved than that of Pisistratus: there has not been preserved a single word of a contemporary of Pisistratus saying that he has seen him; thousands of "ocular witnesses" declare they have seen the devil; few historical facts have been established by so great a number of independent testimonies. However, we do not hesitate to reject the devil and to accept Pisistratus. For the existence of the devil would be irreconcilable with the laws of all the established sciences.
For the historian the solution of the problem is obvious.[177] The observations whose results are contained in historical documents are never of equal value with those of contemporary scientists; we have already shown why. The indirect method of history is always inferior to the direct methods of the sciences of observation. If its results do not harmonise with theirs, it is history which must give way; historical science, with its imperfect means of information, cannot claim to check, contradict, or correct the results of other sciences, but must rather use their results to correct its own. The progress of the direct sciences sometimes modifies the results of historical interpretation; a fact established by direct observation aids in the comprehension and criticism of documents. Cases of stigmata and nervous anæsthesia which have been scientifically observed have led to the admission as true of historical narratives of analogous facts, as in the case of the stigmata of certain saints and the possessed nuns of Loudun. But history cannot aid the progress of the direct sciences. It is kept at a distance from reality by its indirect means of information, and must accept the laws that are established by those sciences which come into immediate contact with reality. In order to reject one of these laws new direct observations are necessary. Such revolutions are possible, but they must be brought about from within. History has no power to take the initiative in them.
The solution is not so clear in the case of facts which do not harmonise with a body of historical knowledge or with the sciences, still in the embryonic stage, which deal with man. It depends on the opinion we form as to the value of such knowledge. We can at least lay down the practical rule that in order to contradict history, psychology, or sociology, we must have very strong documents, and this is a case which hardly ever occurs.