, language, style,
doctrines, customs, events. The Mesha inscription furnishes facts
bearing on Moabite handwriting and language, the belief in the god
Chemosh, the practices belonging to his cult, the war between the
Moabites and Israel. Thus the facts reach us pell-mell, without
distinction of nature. This mixture of heterogeneous facts is one of the
characteristics which differentiate history from the other sciences. The
sciences of direct observation choose the facts to be studied, and
systematically limit themselves to the observation of facts of a single
species. The documentary sciences receive the facts, already observed,
at the hands of authors of documents, who supply them in disorder. For
the purpose of remedying this disorder it is necessary to sort the facts
and group them by species. But, for the purpose of sorting them, it is
necessary to know precisely what it is that constitutes a _species_ of
historical facts; in order to group them we need a principle of
classification applicable to them. But on these two questions of capital
importance historians have not as yet succeeded in formulating precise
rules.

(2) Historical facts present themselves in very different degrees of
generality, from the highly general facts which apply to a whole people
and which lasted for centuries (institutions, customs, beliefs), down to
the most transient actions of a single man (a word, a movement). Here
again history differs from the sciences of direct observation, which
regularly start from particular facts and labour methodically to
condense them into general facts. In order to form groups the facts must
be reduced to a common degree of generality, which makes it necessary to
inquire to what degree of generality we can and ought to reduce the
different species of facts. And this is what historians do not agree
about among themselves.

(3) Historical facts are localised; each belongs to a given time and a
given country. If we suppress the time and place to which they belong,
they lose their historical character; they now contribute only to the
knowledge of universal humanity, as is the case with facts of folk-lore
whose origin is unknown. This necessity of localisation is also foreign
to the general sciences; it is confined to the descriptive sciences,
which deal with the geographical distribution and with the evolution of
phenomena. It obliges the historian to study separately the facts
belonging to different countries