[225] We meet with declarations like the following: "I have been long familiar with the documents of this period and this class. I have an impression that such and such conclusions, which I cannot prove, are true." Of two things one: either the author can give the reasons for his impression, and then we can judge them, or he cannot give them, and we may assume that he has none of serious value. [226] This difference has a tendency to disappear. The most recent alphabetical collections of historical facts (the _Realencyclopædie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft_ of Pauly-Wissowa, the _Dictionnaire des antiquités_ of Daremberg and Saglio, the _Dictionary of National Biography_ of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee) are furnished with a sufficiently ample apparatus. It is principally in biographical dictionaries that the custom of giving no proofs tends to persist; see the _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_, &c. [227] _Revue Critique_, 1874, i. p. 327. [228] The custom of appending to "histories," that is to narratives of political events, summaries of the results obtained by the special historians of art, literature, &c., still persists. A "History of France" would not be considered complete if it did not contain chapters on the history of art, literature, manners, &c., in France. However, it is not the summary account of special evolutions, described at second hand from the works of specialists, which is in its proper place in a scientific "History"; it is the study of those general facts which have dominated the special evolutions in their entirety. [229] It is hard to imagine what it is possible for the most interesting and best established results of modern criticism to become, in the hands of negligent and unskilful popularisers. The persons who know most of these possibilities are those who have occasion to read the improvised "compositions" of candidates in history examinations: the ordinary defects of inferior popularisation are here pushed sometimes to an absurd length. [230] Cf. _supra_, p. 266. [231] We have spoken above of the element of subjectivity which it is impossible to eliminate from historical construction, and which has been misinterpreted to the extent of denying history the character of a science: this element of subjectivity which troubled Pécuchet (G. Flaubert, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, p. 157) and Sylvestre Bonnard (A. France, _Le crime de Silvestre Bonnard_, p. 310), and which causes Faust to say: "Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst, Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln." ["Past times are to us a book with seven seals. What you call the spirit of the times is at bottom your own spirit, in which the times are mirrored."--Goethe, _Faust_, i. 3.]