and different epochs.

(4) The facts which have been extracted from documents by critical
analysis present themselves accompanied by a critical estimate of their
probability.[178] In every case where we have not reached complete
certainty, whenever the fact is merely probable--still more when it is
open to suspicion--criticism supplies the fact to the historian
accompanied by a label which he has no right to remove, and which
prevents the fact from being definitively admitted into the science.
Even those facts which, after comparison with others, end by being
established, are subject to temporary exclusion, like the clinical cases
which accumulate in the medical reviews before they are considered
sufficiently proved to be received as scientific facts.

Historical construction has thus to be performed with an incoherent mass
of minute facts, with detail-knowledge reduced as it were to a powder.
It must utilise a heterogeneous medley of materials, relating to
different subjects and places, differing in their degree of generality
and certainty. No method of classifying them is provided by the practice
of historians; history, which began by being a form of literature, has
remained the least methodical of the sciences.

II. In every science the next step after observing the facts is to
formulate a series of questions according to some methodical
system;[179] every science is composed of the answers to such a series
of questions. In all the sciences of direct observation, even if the
questions to be answered have not been put down in advance, the facts
which are observed suggest questions, and require them to be formulated
precisely. But historians have no discipline of this kind; many of them
are accustomed to imitate artists, and do not even think of asking
themselves what they are looking for. They take from their documents
those parts which strike them, often for purely personal reasons, and
reproduce them, changing the language and adding any miscellaneous
reflections which come into their minds.

If history is not to be lost in the confusion of its materials, it must
be made a rule to proceed here, as in the other sciences, by way of
question and answer.[180] But how are the questions to be chosen in a
science so different from the others? This is the fundamental problem of
method. The only way to solve it is to begin by determining the
essential characteristic of historical facts by which they are
differentiated