The intuitive faculty, indispensable in research, is not less indispensable in historical exposition; since it is necessary to intuite the actual fact, not in a fugitive and sketchy manner, but so firmly as to be able to express it and to fix it in words, in such a way as to transmit its genuine life to others. Hence the specially artistic character that must be possessed by true historians. Here they resemble pure artists, painting pictures, as they do, composing poems and writing tragic dialogues. Certainly, every thought, even that of the most abstruse philosopher and mathematician, becomes concrete in artistic form. But the historian (in the somewhat empirical sense of the word) approximates much more nearly to those who express pure intuitions, since he gives literary preference to the subject over the predicate. This has been generally recognized both by historians, who have freely presented themselves as bards of their race invoking the Muse who represents History upon Parnassus, while there is there no representative of Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science; and by theorists, who have constantly debated the question as to _whether history is art._ It seems indeed to be art, when the predicate or logical element is so well concealed that hardly any attention is paid to it. [Sidenote: _Difference between history and art. The predicate or logical element in history._] I say _hardly_; because if no attention whatever be paid to it, if literary emphasis become logical mutilation, art will remain, but history will have gone. A book of history will no longer merely _resemble_ a poem or romance, but will _be_ a poem or a romance. What is it that, from the point of view of intuition, distinguishes an imaginative vision and an historical narrative? If we open the _Divine Comedy_ or the _Rime_ of Petrarch and read: "In the middle pathway of our life, I found myself in a dark forest ...," or, "I raised my thought to where she whom I seek was and find not upon earth ..."; and if we open Livy's _History,_ at the place where he recounts the battle of Cannae, and read: "_Consules satis exploratis itineribus sequentes Poenum, ut ventum ad Cannas est, ubi in conspecta Poenum habebant, bina, castra communiunt,"_ nothing at first seems changed; both are narratives. Yet everything is changed. If we read Livy as we read Dante or Petrarch, the battle of Cannae in the same way as the voyage of Dante to the Inferno, or the passage of the spirit of Petrarch to the third heaven, Livy is no longer Livy, but a story book. In like manner, if we read a book of stories, as, for example, the _Kings of France_ or the _Guerin Meschino,_ in the same way as they are read by the uneducated man of the people, who seeks history in them, the story book becomes transformed into a historical book, although of a kind that must be criticized and refuted when a higher degree of culture has been attained. This suffices to show the importance of that predicate,