History, as most people understand it, is the product of an intense effort to describe in an objective way and in rigorous chronological order events which have occurred in past time. Before the Renaissance the historian compiled traditions, chronicles, and statements, with no concern to verify the correctness of his data; thus legend was mixed with truth in confused and picturesque narration. Now, however, the investigator, established as a judge of inquiry, begins research on a chosen subject within his competence (...) by unleashing his critical judgment, rather like a hound on the trail of suppositions. He unearths documents and confronts them, weeding out the false from the authentic, subjects the most diverse witnesses to close comparison, and then with great patience, whether gifted or inept, he presents his thesis to the assembly of the learned. These, like a jury, either accept his conclusions, admit only a part of them, or reject them completely. Thus, from the time of the humanists who cleared the way up to the present day, an extraordinary legion of specialists, as patient as the ancient Benedictines are said to have been, have made efforts to clarify past events to establish the bases of an objective text of what has actually taken place. Hence the work of the great historian consisted in joining and fusing this labor into a homogeneous unit that would be the approximate reflection of the epoch under study. (shrink)

Scientific thought today is dominated by the spirit of synthesis, in contrast with eighteenth and nineteenth century works which were characterized by their analytical impulse. However, this movement is still lurking in the collective unconscious, and not having achieved as yet its complete flowering, it remains ignored by most of the intellectual élite. Not only because it is impossible to see the forest for the trees, but especially because, influenced by an academic tradition inherited from the great masters of past (...) centuries, the élite today is loathe to open its eyes to the reality of our own times. Official science, most universities and specialists have been trained to feel a horror for general ideas. It would, therefore, seem that this intellectual tendency is not likely to favor the creation of vast conceptions, were it not for the fact, as we shall see later, that despite themselves, scholars and researchers are carried along by the same movement of ideas. For, in order to advance into the most varied domains of scientific thought in our time, it is sometimes necessary to establish such intimate relationships among special fields, widely separated from each other in terms of their subject matter, that actually the sketching out of veritable syntheses is taking place to some degree everywhere. It is really very simple; in the absence of such generalizations, one would be pawing the ground. (shrink)