Owing to the necessity for the subject or intuitive element, history cannot be constructed by pure reason. The vision of the thing done is necessary and is the sole _source_ of history. In treatises upon historical method the sources are usually divided into _remains_ and _narratives,_ meaning by remains (_Ueberreste_) the things which remain as traces of an event (for example, a contract, a letter, a triumphal arch), and by narratives the accounts of the event as they have been communicated by those who were more or less eye-witnesses, or by those who have consulted the notes of eye-witnesses. But, in truth, narratives are valuable just in so far as it is presumed that they place us in direct contact with the thing that happened and make us live it again, drawing it forth from the obscure depth of the memories that the human race bears with it. Had they not this virtue, they would be altogether useless, as are the narratives to which for one reason or another credence is refused. A hundred or a thousand narratives lacking authenticity are not equal to the poorest authentic document. An authentic narrative is both a document and remains; it is the reality of the fact as it was _lived_ and as it vibrates in the spirit of him who took part in it. The search for veracity and the criticism of the value of sources are reducible in the ultimate analysis, to the isolation of this genuine resonance of fact, by its liberation from perturbing elements, such as the illusions, the false judgments, the preoccupations and passions of the witness. Only in so far as this can be successfully done, and in the measure in which it is successful, do we have the first condition of history as act of cognition--that something can be _intuited_ and thereby transformable into the _subject_ of the individual judgment, that is to say, into historical narrative. [Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical research._·]