Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish, which seem to beg for pity.
It is the same with the landscapes of history.

Narrow minds cannot accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist studies a body.

It is very possible that there may be laws for historic evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered; but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents.

This is a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we must not deceive ourselves as to its significance.

All the documents on an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who makes it.