INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY

In history there is nothing like this. One is apt to say that history is the "vision" of past events, and that it proceeds by "analysis": these are two metaphors, dangerous if we suffer ourselves to be misled by them. In history we see nothing real except paper with writing on it—and sometimes monuments or the products of art or industry. The historian has nothing before him which he can analyse physically, nothing which he can destroy and reconstruct. "Historical analysis" is no more real than is the vision of historical facts; it is an abstract process, a purely intellectual operation. The analysis of a document consists in a mental search for the items of information it contains, with the object of criticising them one by one. The analysis of a fact consists in the process of distinguishing mentally between its different details (the various episodes of an event, the characteristics of an institution), with the object of paying special attention to each detail in turn; that is what is called examining the different "aspects" of a fact,—another metaphor. The human mind is vague by nature, and spontaneously revives only vague collective impressions; to impart clearness to these it is necessary to ask what individual impressions go to form a given collective impression, in order that precision may be attained by a successive consideration of them. This is an indispensable operation but we must not exaggerate its scope. It is not an objective method which yields a knowledge of real objects; it is only a subjective method which aims at detecting those abstract elements which compose our impressions. From the very nature of its materials history is necessarily a subjective science. It would be illegitimate to