erience fails to
verify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of
hypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.

[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts.]

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character
of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly
superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal
detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated
by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum _ad
infinitum_ would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called
infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete
historical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for
intelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are
many things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to
know--namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind's
fortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of
immediate experience in other minds or in one's own past; and just as it
is better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone
sensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous
pulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant
in character.

An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived
would be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above
the world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would
flatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence,
with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not
come to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey
of events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in
matter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palaeontology,
and archaeology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning
would dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of
boredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may
enter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but
which ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.

[Sidenote: Historical theory.]

The profit of studying history lies in something else than in a dead
knowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternative
might be to say that the profit of it