Nothing, however, occurred to alter the inductive view of historical method which I described in my first lecture: first collect your facts, then interpret them. It was assumed without question that this was also the method of science.
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Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his environment. The presuppositions and the methods of the physicist, the geologist, the psychologist, and the historian differ widely in detail; ……… But historians and physical scientists are united in the fundamental purpose of seeking to explain, and ... (查看原文)
It is perhaps unfair to hold Sir Isaiah Berlin responsible for his disciples. Even when he talks nonsense, he earns our indulgence by talking it in an engaging and attractive way. The disciples repeat the nonsense, and fail to make it attractive. (查看原文)
The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts and a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection has been made-- by others as well as by himself.
As he works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly unconscious changes through the reciprocal action of one or the other.
And this reciprocal action also involves reciprocity between present and past, since the historian is part of the present and the facts belong to the past.
The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.
My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process... (查看原文)
……two important truths: first, that you cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of the historian unless you have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approached it; secondly, that that standpoint is itself rooted in a social and historical background.… The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history. (查看原文)
The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present. (查看原文)
