ao8 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

and the awareness of the possible pitfalls increased in a remarkable manner
as time went on. . . . The development of the scientific method in nine-
teenth-century historiography did not merely mean that this or that fact
could be corrected, or the story told in greater detail, or the narrative
amended at marginal points. It meant that total reconstructions proved
to be necessary, as in the detective stories, where a single new fact might
turn out to be a pivotal one; and what had been thought to be an accident
might transform itself into an entirely different story of murder. In these
circumstances, evidence which had seemed to mean one thing might prove
to be capable of an entirely different construction.'1

This nineteenth-century experience had two psychological effects.
The Modern Western historians' discovery for themselves of the classic
technique of 'detective-work' gave them an unwarranted sense of mas-
terly power; the dissolution of once hard-looking facts under corro-
sively acid documentary tests gave the same historians an undue sense
of helpless impotence. The more confident they became of their tech-
nical ability to handle the facts, the less confident they remained of
their intellectual ability to apprehend these facts, not to speak of making
any sense out of them; and these two conflicting psychological forces
found their resolution in a concentration on professional technique both
as an end in itself and as a mental city of refuge ;a for here were sands in
which an ostrich could reassuringly bury his head when the sight of a
pursuing Hound of Heaven had got upon the fugitive's nerves.

The snare of historical technique has been exposed by the Western
Christian historian whom we have just quoted:

'We fall into certain habits of mind and easily become the slaves of them,
when in reality we only adopted them for the purpose of a particular
technique. It is as though people could be so long occupied in tearing
flowers to pieces and studying their mechanism that they forget ever to
stand back again and see the buttercup whole. It is possible that in the
transition to the modern outlook the World was guided much less by any
deliberated philosophy than is often assumed, and I think that few people
could be said to have come to that modern outlook by an authentic process
of thinking things out. Men are often the semi-conscious victims of habits
of mind and processes of abstraction like those involved in technical his-
torical study or in physical science. They decide that for purposes of
analysis they will only take notice of things that can be weighed and
measured, and then they forget the number they first started from and
come to think that these are the only things that exist. . . .'3

politicians seldom fail to act on it. Among the official documents with which the writer
of this Study happened to be acquainted, the Hossbach Memorandum of the xoth
November, 1937, recording the minutes of a conference held in the Reichsfcansslei,
Berlin, on the sth November, was perhaps the only one that, by any stretch of the
imagination, could be supposed to have been manufactured out of ut'fercnee to an

exemplary official document was, however, a joker in a pack in which moat other cards
were severely practical in their design. It was not Hitler's Colonel Hoasbaeh, but the
Four Hundred's anonymous secretary, who was the typical representative of the official
document manufacturers' profession, and it was surely significant that an ingenuous
Hossbach should have been an ingenuous Ranke's fellow-countryman.—AJ.T,

i Butterfield, Herbert: Christianity and History (London 1949, Bell), pp. la, 13, and
14-15. * See the passage of Butterfield's work quoted on p, IQI, above,

3 Butterfield, op. cit,, p ai.