The Logic of History. By C. G. Crump. (S.P.C.K. Bd.
net.) —This very shrewd little essay on the limitations of history—a science perhaps, but only an inverse science, like geology, because "its followers are continually employed in reasoning from what they know and see before them to what they have never known and never can see "—deserves attention in these days when the appeal to history is so often made, as the author Bays, "ignorantly and perversely." Men "like to see in the past what they wish to see in their own times " ; the Sinn Fciners, the Labour Party, and many other classes and sects reinforce their political claims by more or less fantastic interpretations of past history. Mr. Crump does well to remind us of the diffi- culty and uncertainty of the historian's task in dealing with evidence which is biassed, misleading, and always incomplete. He recalls Voltaire's suggestion that the Syrian shells found in Burgundy must have been brought home by the Crusaders in their baggage as an instance of how " commonsense " may lead a clever man astray. The historian has to put his beta together as a " constructed drama," but the drama is only a provisional approximation to the truth. In history, as in geology, rival theories have held the field in succession, only to be discarded as new facts emerge from the misty past.
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