 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
175
the interaction of biological and social factors. It took years of patiently following the life histories of many
men and women to establish the linkages between smoking or diet and disease; it will also take
375 years to unravel the complex and subtle ways in which intelligence, temperament, hormonal levelsand
other traits combine with family circumstances and later experiences in school and elsewhere to produce
human character.
From: The New York Times Magazine, August 4, 1985.
WHAT IS A HISTORICAL FACT?
by E.H.Carr
What is a historical fact? This is a crucial question into which we must look a little more closely.
According to the commonsense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians, and
5
which form, so to speak, the backbone of history — the fact, for example, that the Battle of Hastings was
fought in 1066. But this view calls for two observations. In the first place, it is not with facts like these that
the historian is primarily concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the great battle was fought in
10
1066 and not in 1065 10 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. The
historian must not get these things wrong. But when points of this kind are raised, I am reminded of
Housman's remark that «accuracy is a duty, not a virtue». To praise a historian for-his accuracy is like
15
praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a
necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that
the historian is entitled to rely on what have been called the «auxiliary sciences» of history — archaeology,
20
epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth. The historian is not required to have the special skills
which enable the expert to determine the origin and period of a fragment of pottery or marble, to decipher
25
an obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate astronomical calculations necessary to establish a precise
date. These so-called basic facts, which are the same for all historians, commonly belong to the category of
the raw materials of the historian rather than of history itself. The second observation is that the necessity
30
to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an a priori decision of
the historian. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak
only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what
35
order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack — it won't
stand up till you've put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was
fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has
40
decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history,
whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all. The
fact that you arrived in this building half an hour ago on foot, or on a bicycle, or in a car, is just as much of
45
a fact about the past as the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will probably be ignored by
historians. Professor Talcott Parsons once called science «a selective system of cognitive orientations to
reality». It might perhaps have been put more simply. But history is, among other things, that. The
50
historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and
independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which is very hard to
eradicate.
When I studied ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject «Greece in
55
the period of the Persian Wars». I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it for granted
that there, recorded in these volumes, I and all the facts relating to my subject. Let us assume — it was
60
very nearly true — that those volumes contained all the facts about it that were then known, or could be
known. It never occurred to me to inquire by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of
facts, out of all the myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody, had survived to become the
65
facts of history. I suspect that even today one of the fascinations of ancient and medieval history is that it
gives us the illusion of having all the facts at our disposal within a manageable compass: the nagging
distinction between the facts of history and other facts about the past vanishes, because the few known
70
facts are all facts of history. As Bury, who had worked in both periods, said, «the records of ancient and
medieval history are starred with lacunae». History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of
missing parts. But the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae. Out picture of Greece in the fifth
75
century . . is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but