ect few. The
natural tendency, even of historians who work methodically, is to read
the text with the object of extracting information directly from it,
without any thought of first ascertaining what exactly was in the
author's mind.[131] This procedure is excusable at most in the case of
nineteenth-century documents, written by men whose language and mode of
thought are familiar to us, and then only when there is not more than
one possible interpretation. It becomes dangerous as soon as the
author's habits of language or thought begin to differ from those of the
historian who reads him, or when the meaning of the text is not obvious
and indisputable. Whoever, in reading a text, is not exclusively
occupied with the effort to understand it, is sure to read impressions
of his own into it; he is struck by phrases or words in the document
which correspond to his own ideas, or agree with his own _a priori_
notion of the facts; unconsciously he detaches these phrases or words,
and forms out of them an imaginary text which he puts in the place of
the real text of the author.[132]

II. Here, as always in history, method consists in repressing the first
impulse. It is necessary to be penetrated by the principle, sufficiently
obvious but often forgotten, that a document only contains the ideas of
the man who wrote it, and to make it a rule to begin by understanding
the text by itself, _before_ asking what can be extracted from it for
the purposes of history. We thus arrive at this general rule of method:
the study of every document should begin with an analysis of its
contents, made with the sole aim of determining the real meaning of the
author.

This analysis is a preliminary operation, distinct and independent.
Experience here, as in the tasks of critical scholarship,[133] has
decided in favour of the system of slips. Each slip will contain the
analysis of a document, of a separate part of a document, or of an
episode in a narrative; the analysis ought to indicate not only the
general sense of the text, but also, as far as possible, the object and
views of the author. It will be well to reproduce verbally any
expressions which may seem characteristic of the author's thought.
Sometimes it will be enough to have analysed the text mentally: it is
not always necessary to put down in black and white the whole contents
of a document; in such cases we simply enter the points of which we
intend to make use. But against the ever-pr