s, or are directed to some common end. These are collective
acts; but, in the imagination as in direct observation, they always
reduce to a sum of individual actions. The "social fact," as recognised
by certain sociologists, is a philosophical construction, not an
historical fact.

(3) Motives and conceptions. Human actions do not contain their own
cause within themselves; they have _motives_. This vague word denotes
both the stimulus which occasions the performance of an action, and the
_representation_ of the action which is in the mind of a man at the
moment when he performs it. We can imagine motives only as existing in a
man's mind, and in the form of vague interior representations, analogous
to those which we have of our own inward states; we can express them
only by words, generally metaphorical. Here we have _psychic_ facts,
generally called feelings and ideas. Documents exhibit three kinds of
such facts: (_a_) motives and conceptions in the authors' minds and
expressed by them; (_b_) motives and ideas attributed by the authors to
contemporaries of theirs whose actions they have seen; (_c_) motives
which we ourselves may suppose to have influenced the actions related in
the documents, and which we represent to ourselves on the model of our
own motives.

Physical facts, human actions (both individual and collective), psychic
facts--these form the objects of historical knowledge; they are none of
them observed directly, they are all _imagined_. Historians--nearly all
of them unconsciously and under the impression that they are observing
realities--are occupied solely with images.

IV. How, then, is it possible to imagine facts without their being
wholly imaginary? The facts, as they exist in the historian's mind, are
necessarily subjective; that is one of the reasons given for refusing to
recognise history as a science. But subjective is not a synonym of
unreal. A recollection is only an image; but it is not therefore a
chimera, it is the representation of a vanished reality. It is true that
the historian who works with documents has no personal recollections of
which he can make direct use; but he forms mental images on the model of
his own recollections. He assumes that realities (objects, actions,
motives), which have now disappeared, but were formerly observed by the
authors of the documents, resembled the realities of his own day which
he has himself seen and which he retains in his memory. This is the
p