What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
Let us look first at the concept of laws. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, scientists assumed that laws of nature - Newton's laws of motion, the law of
gravitation, Boyle's law, the law of evolution, and so forth - had been discovered and
definitely established, and that the business of the scientist was to discover and establish
more such laws by process of induction from observed facts. The word 'law' came down
trailing clouds of glory from Galileo and Newton. Students of society, consciously or
unconsciously desiring to assert the scientific status of their studies, adopted the same
language and believed themselves to be following the same procedure. The political
economists seem to have been first in the held with Gresham's law, and Adam Smith's
laws of the market. Burke appealed to 'the laws of commerce, which are the laws of
nature, and consequently the Laws of God'. Malthus propounded a law of population;
Lassalle an iron law of wages; and Marx in the preface to Capital claimed to have
discovered 'the economic law of motion of modern society'. Buckle in the concluding
words of his History of Civilization expressed the conviction that the course of human
affairs was 'permeated by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity'.
Today this terminology sounds as old-fashioned as it is presumptuous; but it sounds
almost as old-fashioned to the physical scientist as it does to the social scientist. In the
year before Bury delivered his inaugural lecture, the French mathematician Henri Poincare
published a small volume called La Science et I'hypothese which started a revolution in
scientific thinking. Poincare's main thesis was that the general propositions enunciated by
scientists, where they were not mere definitions or disguised conventions about the use of
language, were hypotheses designed to crystallize and organize further thinking, and were
subject to verification, modification, or refutation. All this has now become something of a
commonplace. Newton's boast 'Hypotheses non fingo' rings hollow today; and though
scientists, and even social scientists, still sometimes speak of laws, so to speak, for old
time's sake, they no longer believe in their existence in the sense in which scientists of the
eighteenth and nineteenth century universally believed in them. It is recognized that
scientists make discoveries and acquire fresh knowledge, not by establishing precise and
comprehensive laws, but by enunciating hypotheses which open the way to flesh inquiry.
A standard text-book on scientific method by two American philosophers describes the
method of science as 'essentially circular':
We obtain evidence for principles by appealing to empirical material, to what is alleged to
be 'fact'; and we select, analyse, and interpret empirical material on the basis of principles.'
The word 'reciprocal' would perhaps have been preferable to 'circular'; for the result is not
to return to the same place, but to move forward to fresh discoveries through this process
of interaction between principles and facts, between theory and practice. Ah thinking
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