hat in the end they will be discovered;
but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.

To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the
secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is
a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we
must not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on
an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be
made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who
makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but
alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is
already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as
bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do
these documents contain all the life of the Church? Much is still
wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses
are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few
fragments.

Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books
were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one
historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents,
forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who
from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy
to tremble.

Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image, and
we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect
to find it again.

But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most
authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive
and irrevocable judgments.

It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve
one's opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be
present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they
reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it
requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts
questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or
to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only
an ignoramus.

But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to
pronounce sent