- [89] It would be instructive to draw up a list of the celebrated historical works, such as Augustin Thierry's Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands, whose authority has been completely destroyed after the authorship of their sources has been studied. Nothing amuses the gallery more than to see an historian convicted of having built a theory on falsified documents. Nothing is more calculated to cover an historian with confusion than to find that he has fallen into the error of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all.
- [90] One of the crudest (and commonest) forms of "uncritical method" is that which consists in employing as if they were documents, and placing on the same footing as documents, the utterances of modern authors on the subject of documents. Novices do not make a sufficient distinction, in the works of modern authors, between what is added to the original source and what is taken from it.
- [91] See a list of examples in Bernheim's Handbuch, pp. 283, 289.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY
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