complete certainty, whenever the fact is merely probable—still more when it is open to suspicion—criticism supplies the fact to the historian accompanied by a label which he has no right to remove, and which prevents the fact from being definitively admitted into the science. Even those facts which, after comparison with others, end by being established, are subject to temporary exclusion, like the clinical cases which accumulate in the medical reviews before they are considered sufficiently proved to be received as scientific facts.
Historical construction has thus to be performed with an incoherent mass of minute facts, with detail-knowledge reduced as it were to a powder. It must utilise a heterogeneous medley of materials, relating to different subjects and places, differing in their degree of generality and certainty. No method of classifying them is provided by the practice of historians; history, which began by being a form of literature, has remained the least methodical of the sciences.
II. In every science the next step after observing the facts is to formulate a series of questions according to some methodical system; every science is composed of the answers to such a series of questions. In all the sciences of direct observation, even if the questions to be answered have not been put down in advance, the facts which are observed suggest questions, and require them to be formulated precisely. But historians have no discipline of this kind; many of them are accustomed to imitate artists, and do not even think of asking themselves what they are looking for. They take from their documents those parts which strike them, often for purely personal reasons, and reproduce them, changing the language and adding any miscellaneous reflections which come into