n which each part or
event bears definite relations to all others. Collection and collation
are not enough. The historian must "work up his field notes," as the
geologists say, so as to extract from his data all the useful results
which they are capable of yielding.

I am quite certain that in these objections I can count on the suffrages
of most. For the majority of authors write history in a style widely
different from that which I have been describing. They are distinctly
teachers, though not at all in accord as to what they teach. They are
generally advocates, and with more or less openness maintain what I call
the second theory of the aim of history, to wit:

2. History should be a collection of evidence in favor of certain
opinions.

In this category are to be included all religious and political
histories. Their pages are intended to show the dealings of God with
man; or the evidences of Christianity, or of one of its sects,
Catholicism or Protestantism; or the sure growth of republican or of
monarchial institutions; or the proof of a divine government of the
world; or the counter-proof that there is no such government; and the
like.

You will find that most general histories may be placed in this class.
Probably a man cannot himself have very strong convictions about
politics or religion, and not let them be seen in his narrative of
events where such questions are prominently present. A few familiar
instances will illustrate this. No one can take either Lingard's or
Macauley's History of England as anything more than a plea for either
writer's personal views. Gibbon's anti-Christian feeling is as
perceptibly disabling to him in many passages as in the church
historians is their search for "acts of Providence," and the hand of God
in human affairs.

All such histories suffer from fatal flaws. They are deductive instead
of inductive; they are a _defensio sententiarum_ instead of an
_investigatio veri_; they assume the final truth as known, and go not
forth to seek it. They are therefore "teleologic," that is, they study
the record of man as the demonstration of a problem the solution of
which is already known. In this they are essentially "divinatory,"
claiming foreknowledge of the future; and, as every ethnologist knows,
divination belongs to a stadium of incomplete intellectual culture, one
considerably short of the highest. As has been well said by Wilhelm von
Humboldt, any teleologic theory "disturbs an