All judgments, certainly all judgments dea1ing with facts, rest on--embody--generalizations, whether of fact or value• or of both, and would make no sense save in terms of such generalizations. This truism, while it does not seem startling in itself, can nevertheless lead to formidable fallacies. Thus some of the heirs of Descartes who assume that whatever is true must be capable of being (at any rate in principle) stated in the form of scientific (i.e. at least quasi-mathematical or mathematically clear) generalizations conclude, as Comte and his disciples did, that the generalizations unavoidable in historical judgments must; to be worth anything, be capable of being so formulated, i.e. as demonstrable sociological laws; while valuations, if they cannot be stated in such terms, must be relegated to some `subjective' lumber room, as `psychological' odds and ends, expressions of purely personal attitudes, unscientific superfluities, in principle capable of being eliminated altogether, and must certainly be kept out so far as possible from the objective realm in which they have no place. Every science (we are invited to believe) must sooner or later shake it self free of what are at best irrelevances, at worst serious impediments, to dear vision. This view springs from a very understandable fascination with the morally `neutral' attitude of natural scientists, and a desire to emulate them in other fields. But it rests on a false analogy. For the generalizations of the historians differ from those of the scientists in that the valuations which, they embody, whether moral, political, aesthetic, or (as they often suppose) purely historical, are intrinsic, and not, as in the sciences, external, to the subject-matter. If I am an historian and wish to explain the causes of the great. French Revolution, I naturally assume or take for granted certain general propositions. Thus I assume that all the ordinarily accepted physical laws of the external world apply. I also assume that all or most men need and consciously seek food, clothing, shelter, some degree of protection for their persons, and facilities for getting their grievances listened to or redressed. Perhaps I. assume something more specific, namely, that persons who have acquired a certain degree of wealth or economic power will not be indefinitely content to lack political rights or social status; or that human beings are prey to various, passions--greed, envy, lust for power; or that some men are more ambitious, ruthless, cunning, or fanatical than others; and so forth. These are the assumptions of common experience; some of them are probably false; some are exaggerated, some confused, or inapplicable to given situations. Few among them are capable of being formulated in the form of hypotheses of natural science; still fewer are testable by crucial experiment, because they are not often sufficiently clear and sharp and precisely defined to be capable of being organized in a formal structure which allows of systematic mutual entailments or exclusions, and consequently of strictly logical or mathematical treatment. More than this: if they do prove capable of such formulation they will lose some of their usefulness; the idealized models of economics (not to speak of those of physics or physiology) will be of limited use in historical research or description; These inexact disciplines depend on a certain measure of concreteness, vagueness, ambiguity, suggestiveness, vividness, and so on, embodied in the properties of the language of common sense and of literature and the humanities. Degrees and kinds of precision doubtless depend on the context, the field, the subject-matter; and the rules and methods of algebra lead to absurdities if applied to the art of, say, the novel, which has its own appallingly exacting standards. The precise disciplines of Racine' or Proust require a degree of genius, and are as creditable to the intellect (as well as to the imagination) of the human race as those of Newton or Darwin or Hilbert, but these kinds of method (and there is no theoretical limit to their number) are not interchangeable; They may have much or little to learn from each other; Stendhal may have learnt something from the Sensationalists of the eighteenth century, or the Idéologues of his own time, or from the Code Napoléon. But when Zola seriously contemplated the possibility of a literally `experimental novel', founded directly on, and controlled by, the results of scientific methods and conclusions, the idea remained largely still born, as, for similar reasons, the collective novel of the early Russian communist theorists still remains; and that not because we do not (as yet) know a sufficient number of facts (or laws), but because the concepts involved in the worlds described by novelists (or historians) are not the artificially refined concepts of scientific models--the idealized entities in terms of which natural laws are formulated--but a great deal richer in content and less logically simple or streamlined in structure; Some interplay there is, of course, between a given scientific `world-picture' and views of life in the normal meaning of this word ; the.former can give very sharp impulsions to the latter. Writers like H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley would not have described (or so egregiously misunderstood) both social and individual life as at times they did, had, they not been influenced by the natural sciences of their day to an excessive degree. But even such writers as these do not actually deduce anything from scientific generalizations; do not in their writings use any semblance of truly scientific methods; for this cannot be done outside its proper field without total absurdity. The relation of the sciences to historical writing is complex and close: but it is certainly not one of identity or even similarity. Scientific method is indispensable in, say, such disciplines as palaeography, or, epigraphy, or archaeology, or economics; or in other activities which are propaedeutic to history, and supply it with evidence, and help to solve specific problems. But what they establish can never suffice to constitute an historical narrative. We select certain events or persons because we believe them to have had a special degree of `influence' or `power' or `importance'. These. attributes are not, as a rule, quantitatively measurable, or capable of being symbolized in the terminology of an exact, or even semi-exact science. Yet they can no more be subtracted or abstracted from the facts-- from events or persons--than physical or chronological characteristics; they enter even the driest, barest chronicles of events-- it is a truism to say this. And is it so very clear that the most obviously moral categories, the notions of good and bad, right and wrong, so far as they enter into our assessments of societies, individuals, characters, political action, states of mind, are in principle utterly different from such indispensable `non-moral' categories of value as `important', `trivial', `significant', &c.? It might perhaps be maintained that views of what is generally regarded as `important'--the conquests of Alexander or Genghis Khan, or the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution, or the rise and fall of Hitler--embody relatively more stable assessments than more obviously `ethical' valuations, or that there would be more general agreement about the fact that the French or Russian Revolutions are `major' events (in the sense in which the tune which I hummed yesterday afternoon is not) than about whether Robespierre was a good man or a bad one, or whether it was right or wrong to execute the leaders of the National Socialist regime in Germany. And no doubt some concepts and categories are in this sense more universal or more `stable' `than others.2.19 But they are not therefore `objective' in some absolutely clear sense in which ethical notions are not. For our historical language, the words and thoughts with which we attempt to reflect about or describe past events and persons, embody moral concepts and categories--standards both permanent and transient--just as deeply as other notions of value. Our notions of Napoleon or Robespierre as historically important, as worthy of our attention in the sense in which their minor followers are not (as well as the very meaning of terms like `major' and `minor'), derive from the fact that the part of the former in forwarding or retarding the interests or the ideals of a great many of their contemporaries (with which our own are bound up) was very considerable; but then so do our `moral' judgments about them. Where to draw the line--where to exclude judgments as being too subjective to be admitted into an account which we desire to make as `objective' as possible, that is, as well supported by publicly discoverable, inspectable, comparable facts as we can make it--that is a question for ordinary judgment, that is to say for what passes as such in our society, in our own time and place, among the people to whom we are addressing ourselves, with all the assumption which are taken for granted, more or less, in normal communication. Because there is no hard and fast line between `subjective' and `objective', it does not follow that there is no line at all; and because judgments of `importance', normally held to be `objective', differ in some respects from moral judgments which are so often suspected of being merely `subjective', it does not follow that `moral' is tantamount to `subjective': that there is some mysterious property in virtue of which those quasi-aesthetic or political judgments which distinguish essential from inessential; or crucial from trivial, are somehow intrinsic to our historical thinking and description. It does not follow that whereas the ethical implications, concerned with responsibility and moral worth, can somehow be sloughed off as if they constituted an external adjunct, a set of subjective emotional attitudes towards a body of commonly accepted, `hard', publicly inspectable facts; as if these `facts' `were not themselves shot through with such valuations, as if a hard and fast distinction could be made, by historians or anyone else, between what is truly factual and what is a valuation of the facts, in the sense in which such a valuation truly would be an irrelevant and avoidable intrusion in, say, such fields as physics or chemistry (and doubtfully so in economics or sociology), where `facts' can and should, according to the rules of these sciences, be described, as far as possible, with no moral overtones.