f each
conception. The duration, geographical distribution, origin, and
filiation of conceptions belong to historical synthesis. Internal
criticism has nothing to do here; the fact is taken directly from the
document.

We may advance a step farther. In themselves conceptions are nothing but
facts in psychology; but imagination does not create its objects, it
takes the elements of them from reality. Descriptions of imaginary facts
are constructed out of the real facts which the author has observed in
his experience. These elements of knowledge, the raw material of the
imaginary description, may be sought for and isolated. In dealing with
periods and with classes of facts for which documents are
rare--antiquity, for example, and the usages of private life--the
attempt has been made to lay under contribution works of literature,
epic poems, novels, plays.[168] The method is legitimate, but only
within the limits of certain restrictions which one is very apt to
forget.

(1) It does not apply to social facts of a psychological order, the
moral or artistic standards of a society; the moral and aesthetic
conceptions in a document give at most the individual standards of the
author; we have no right to conclude from these to the morals or the
aesthetic tastes of the age. We must at least wait till we have compared
several different authors of the same period.

(2) Descriptions even of physical facts and objects may be products of
the author's imagination. It is only the _elements_ of them which we
know to be certainly real; all that we can assert is the separate
existence of the irreducible elements, form, material, colour, number.
When the poet speaks of golden gates or silver bucklers, we cannot infer
that golden gates and silver bucklers ever existed in reality; nothing
is certain beyond the separate existence of gates, bucklers, gold, and
silver. The analysis must therefore be carried to the point of
distinguishing those elements which the author must necessarily have
taken from experience: objects, their purpose, ordinary actions.

(3) The conception of an object or an action proves that it existed, but
not that it was common; the object or action may have been unique, or
restricted to a very small circle; poets and novelists are fond of
taking their models from an exceptional world.

(4) The facts yielded by this method are not localised in space or time;
the author may have taken them from a time or country not his