group of men: a convenient basis is thus afforded for the division and arrangement of facts. We have the history of a period, of a country, of a nation, of a man (biography); the ancient historians and those of the Renaissance used no other type. Within this general scheme the subdivisions are formed on the same principle, and facts are arranged in chronological and geographical order, or according to the groups to which they relate. As to the selection of facts to be arranged in this scheme, for a long time it was made on no fixed principle; historians followed their individual fancy, and chose from among the facts relating to a given period, country, or nation all that they deemed interesting or curious. Livy and Tacitus mingle accounts of floods, epidemics, and the birth of monsters with their narratives of wars and revolutions.
Classification of facts by their intrinsic nature was introduced very late, and has made way but slowly and imperfectly. It took its rise outside the domain of history, in certain branches of study dealing with special human phenomena—language, literature, art, law, political economy, religion; studies which began by being dogmatic, but gradually assumed an historical character. The principle of this mode of classification is to select and group together those facts which relate to the same species of actions; each of these groups becomes the subject-matter of a special branch of history. The totality of facts thus comes to be arranged in compartments which may be constructed a priori by the study of the totality of human activities; these correspond to the set of general questions of which we have spoken in the preceding chapter.
In the following table we have attempted