n to Madame de Maintenon, but without any
value for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to return, is
not yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it may be regarded,
and I shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian has to
contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come under his
notice: D'Alembert's suggestion that at the end of every century a
selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if it was really
intended seriously) could not, of course, be entertained for a moment. A
problem loses all its value when it becomes simplified, and the world
would be all the poorer if the Sybil of History burned her volumes.
Besides, as Gibbon pointed out, 'a Montesquieu will detect in the most
insignificant fact relations which the vulgar overlook.'

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the particular
elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing and extraneous
causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though sometimes, as in the
case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is enabled to observe phenomena
in a certain degree of isolation). So he is compelled either to use the
deductive mode of arguing from general laws or to employ the method of
abstraction which gives a fictitious isolation to phenomena never so
isolated in actual existence. And this is exactly what Polybius has done
as well as Thucydides. For, as has been well remarked, there is in the
works of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive;
whatever they write is penetrated through and through with a specific
quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose, which we may contrast
with the more comprehensive width as manifested not merely in the modern
mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides, regarding society as influenced
entirely by political motives, took no account of forces of a different
nature, and consequently his results, like those of most modern political
economists, have to be modified largely {207} before they come to
correspond with what we know was the actual state of fact. Similarly,
Polybius will deal only with those forces which tended to bring the
civilised world under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the
Thucydidean spirit points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in
his pages which is the result of the abstract method ([