ng form of human apperception;
the view would remain a theory, an instrument of comprehension
and survey fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly
heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative of any of those
experiences which it would artificially connect and weave into a
pattern. Mythology and theology are the most striking illustrations
of this human method of incorporating much diffuse experience
into graphic and picturesque ideas; but steady reflection will hardly
allow us to see anything else in the theories of science and
philosophy. These, too, are creatures of our intelligence, and have
their only being in the movement of our thought, as they have their
only justification in their fitness to our experience.

Long before we can attain, however, the ideal unification of
experience under one theory, the various fields of thought demand
provisional surveys; we are obliged to reflect on life in a variety of
detached and unrelated acts, since neither can the whole material
of life be ever given while we still live, nor can that which is given
be impartially retained in the human memory. When omniscience
was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness
of human thought may console us for its imperfection.

History, for instance, which passes for the account of facts, is in
reality a collection of apperceptions of an indeterminate material;
for even the material of history is not fact, but consists of
memories and words subject to ever-varying interpretation. No
historian can be without bias, because the bias defines the history.
The memory in the first place is selective; official and other
records are selective, and often intentionally partial. Monuments
and ruins remain by chance. And when the historian has set
himself to study these few relics of the past, the work of his own
intelligence begins. He must have some guiding interest. A history
is not an indiscriminate register of every known event; a file of
newspapers is not an inspiration of Clio. A history is a view of the
fortunes of some institution or person; it traces the development of
some interest. This interest furnishes the standard by which the
facts are selected, and their importance gauged. Then, after the
facts are thus chosen, marshalled, and emphasized, comes the
indication of causes and relations; and in this part of his work the
historian plunges avowedly into speculation, and becomes a
philosophical poet. Ev