For the rigorous application of Zadig's logic to the results of
accurate and long-continued observation has founded all those
sciences which have been termed historical or palaetiological,
because they are retrospectively prophetic and strive towards
the reconstruction in human imagination of events which have
vanished and ceased to be.
History, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is based upon
the interpretation of documentary evidence; and documents would
have no evidential value unless historians were justified in
their assumption that they have come into existence by the
operation of causes similar to those of which documents are, in
our present experience, the effects. If a written history can be
produced otherwise than by human agency, or if the man who wrote
a given document was actuated by other than ordinary human
motives, such documents are of no more evidential value than so
many arabesques.
Archaeology, which takes up the thread of history beyond the
point at which documentary evidence fails us, could have no
existence, except for our well grounded confidence that
monuments and works of art or artifice, have never been produced
by causes different in kind from those to which they now owe
their origin.
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