The facts of the past, the stuff out of which men write their Histories, are used for many things besides the manufacture of history. The economist, the politician, the musician, the ecclesiastic--in fact, specialists of all sorts, have their own use for the facts that make up history; they make themselves more expert in their special departments by studying the historical side of those departments, but they are not historians any more than is the architect who tries to make himself a better architect by finding out how houses used to be ventilated. The theorist makes his generalisations out of the facts of the past, and talks about the laws that govern the movements of history and the things that determine progress and the goal to which human development is moving--but he is not a historian any more than the priest talking about Providence is a historian, although both these deal with interpretations of history. They are simply philosophers trying to interpret man’s experience of life to man. The Historian’s interest in the past is not the economist’s or the philosopher’s interest in it, he loves the past for its own sake and tries to live in it, tries to live over again the lost life of yesterday, turning it back as one would turn back the pages of a book to re-read what has gone before; and he seeks to see the past as a far-country and to think himself into a different world. And so the use that he makes of the accumulated facts that tell about the past, is to recapture a bygone age and turn it into something that is at once a picture and a story. History, then, means the world looking back upon itself, and storing up memories that are pictures. History is any tale that the old world can tell when it starts remembering. It is just the world’s Memory.