It has a mixed character, fluctuating between a science of generalities and a narrative of adventures. The difficulty of classing this hybrid under one of the categories of human thought has often been expressed by the childish question: Is history a science or an art?
III. The general table given above may be used for the determination of all the species of habits (usages or institutions) of which the history may be written. But before applying this general scheme to the study of any particular group of habits, language, religion, private usages, or political institutions, there is always a preliminary question to be answered: Whose were the habits we are about to study? They were common to a great number of individuals; and a collection of individuals with the same habits is what we call a group. The first condition, then, for the study of a habit is the determination of the group which has practised it. At this point we must beware of the first impulse; it leads to a negligence which may ruin the whole of our historical construction.
The natural tendency is to conceive the human group on the model of the zoological species—as a body of men who all resemble each other. We take a group united by a very obvious common characteristic, a nation united by a common official government (Romans, English, French), a people speaking the same language (Greeks, ancient Germans), and we proceed as if all the members of this group resembled each other at every point and had the same usages.
As a matter of fact, no real group, not even a centralised society, is a homogeneous whole. For a great part of human activity—language, art, science, religion,