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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
“ The doubtful story of successive events.” With this contemptuous phrase1 Bernard Bosanquet brushed aside the claim of history to be considered a study deserving the attention of a thoughtful mind. Unsatisfactory in form, because never rising above uncertainty; unsatisfactory in matter, because always concerned with the transitory, the successive, the merely particular as opposed to the universal; a chronicle of small beer, and an untrustworthy chronicle at that. Yet Bosanquet was well read in history; he had taught it as a young man at Oxford, and his first published work had been a translation of a recent German book on the Athenian constitution; he knew that a vast amount of the world's best genius in the last hundred years had been devoted to historical studies; and when, late in life, he asked himself what it came to, that was all he could say.
page 213 note 1 The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 78.
page 222 note 1 It may be worth while to point out that even a rigidly cogent historical argument always seems to contain loopholes for doubt, to a critic unfamiliar with the matter in hand; a reader, e.g., who does not know enough numismatics to know what the possible alternatives in a given case are, cannot judge the solidity of an expert numismatist's discussion of that case, because he will see that certain alternatives are tacitly ruled out, without knowing why. Had the numismatist been writing for beginners, he ought to have explained why; not otherwise. One might have supposed that the logic of an historical argument could be judged by one ignorant of its subject-matter; that is not the case. But I must not enlarge on this here.
