ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 191

words of Ranke, wie es eigentlich gewesen* History as the knowledge of
individual facts was gradually detaching itself as an autonomous study
from Science as the knowledge of general laws.'*

The contemporary historian-critic of the historians' thesis presents an
identical picture in a different light:

'In historical science, and particularly in the upper regions of the study,
a ... policy of abstraction has become customary. Historians, limited by
the kind of apparatus they use and the concrete evidence on which they
must rely, restrict their realm, to what we might almost call the mechanism
of historical processes: the tangible factors involved in an episode, the
displacements produced in human affairs by an observed event or a
specific influence, even the kind of movements that can be recorded in
statistics.'3

The difference, brought out in this pair of passages, between the
twentieth-century Western historians' and the contemporary Western
scientists' respective usages of the word 'scientific' is driven home by our
historian-philosopher in the following hammer-strokes with which he
batters the devoted heads of 'positivistic historians . . . who have con-
ceived the true or highest task of History as the discovery of causal laws
connecting certain constant types of historical phenomena':

'Perversions of History on these lines all share one characteristic in
common, namely a distinction between two kinds of History: empirical
history which merely discharges the humble office of ascertaining the facts,
and philosophical or scientific history, which has the nobler task of dis-
covering the laws connecting the facts. . . .*

At this point the philosopher-historian deals the unphilosophic his-
torians a blow in the face with his left fist, and the scientists a blow in
the face with his right:

'There is no such thing as empirical history, for the facts are not empiri-
cally present to the historian's mind: They are past events, to be appre-
hended not empirically but by a process of inference according to rational
principles from data given or rather discovered in the light of these prin-
ciples ; and there is no such thing as the supposed further stage of philo-
sophical or scientific history which discovers their causes or laws or in
general explains them, because an historical fact, once genuinely ascer-
tained, grasped by the historian's re-enactment of the agent's thought in
his own mind, is already explained. For the historian there is no difference
between discovering what happened and discovering why it happened.'4

It will be seen that this philosopher-historian's exposition of the
twentieth-century Western historians' creed comes near to asserting that

* Geschickten der Romartischen und Germanischen Volker, preface to the ist ed. (Leo-
pold Ranke's Werke, vol. xxxiii-xxxiv, and ed. (Leipzig 1874, Duncker and Humblot),
p. vii).—AJ.T.

a Collingwood, R. G.: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Clarendon Press), pp. 128
and 130-1.

3 Butterfield, Herbert: Christianity and History (London 1949, Bell), p. 19. The
quotations from this book have been made with the permission of the author and the
publishers.

4 Collingwood, R. G.: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Clarendon Press), pp. 176-7.
Cp. pp. 263-6.