And yet, if we allow our sensitivities scope, we are entitled to our own responses to the material which we read. One of the tricks of our discourse is the use of rhetoric to provide a veneer of respectable argument for subjective impressions. It is a truism that what we are will affect our historical interpretation, but it is evidently difficult to come to terms with this, so that instead one is expected to worship at the shrine of superficial objectivity. There is, of course, a need for the drier and more precise explication of historical material and some may find that this is where their inclinations best serve the discipline. The archaeologists' rubble was once alive with human interaction.
History can easily fall into a trap of unreality.
In seeking to create an ordered account of past events one is drawn by reason and categorization, to assume rational cause and effect and, with the actors, consistency. Yet the discovered order may be illusory, as elements of huma-nity are neglected. History examines the manifestations of man's freewill in connexion with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it defines this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science only in so far as this freewill is defined by those laws. Since that was written his-torians and philosophers have had much to say on causation and the notion of cause has been debated, dissected, rejected, reinstated, refined. 1 Words do have a way of creating their own logical sequence as they emerge, to a degree where they seem to take over, but the obstacle that concerns me is the appreciation that reality involves a great deal which defeats strictly logical analysis.