ishment of the science.

Science is a saving of time and labour, effected by a process which
provides a rapid means of learning and understanding facts; it consists
in the slow collection of a quantity of details and their condensation
into portable and incontrovertible formulae. History, which is more
encumbered with details than any other science, has the choice between
two alternatives: to be complete and unknowable, or to be knowable and
incomplete. All the other sciences have chosen the second alternative;
they abridge and they condense, preferring to take the risk of
mutilating and arbitrarily combining the facts to the certainty of being
unable either to understand or communicate them. Scholars have preferred
to confine themselves to the periods of ancient history, where chance,
which has destroyed nearly all the sources of information, has freed
them from the responsibility of choosing between facts by depriving them
of nearly all the means of knowing them.

History, in order to constitute itself a science, must elaborate the raw
material of facts. It must condense them into manageable form by means
of descriptive formulae, qualitative and quantitative. It must search for
those connections between facts which form the ultimate conclusions of
every science.

II. The facts of humanity, with their complex and varied character,
cannot be reduced like chemical facts to a few simple formulae. Like the
other sciences which deal with life, history needs descriptive formulae
in order to express the nature of the different phenomena.

In order to be manageable, a formula must be short; in order to give an
exact idea of the facts, it must be precise. Now, in the knowledge of
human affairs, precision can only be obtained by attention to
characteristic details, for these alone enable us to understand how one
fact differed from others, and what there was in it peculiar to itself.
There is thus a conflict between the need of brevity, which leads us to
look for concrete formulae, and the necessity of being precise, which
requires us to adopt detailed formulae. Formulae which are too short make
science vague and illusory, formulae which are too long encumber it and
make it useless. This dilemma can only be evaded by a perpetual
compromise, the principle of which is to compress the facts by omitting
all that is not necessary for the purpose of representing them to the
mind, and to stop at the point where omission would suppr