There is another aspect in which it
may be regarded, and I shall now proceed to treat of it.
One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian
has to contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come
under his notice: D'Alembert's suggestion that at the end of every
century a selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if
it was really intended seriously) could not, of course, be
entertained for a moment. A problem loses all its value when it
becomes simplified, and the world would be all the poorer if the
Sibyl of History burned her volumes. Besides, as Gibbon pointed
out, 'a Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant fact
relations which the vulgar overlook.'
Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the
particular elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing
and extraneous causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though
sometimes, as in the case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is
enabled to observe phenomena in a certain degree of isolation). So
he is compelled either to use the deductive mode of arguing from
general laws or to employ the method of abstraction, which gives a
fictitious isolation to phenomena never so isolated in actual
existence.
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