to establish just so
much as admits of being established; if, avoiding all false pretensions
and irrelevant display of scientific forms and historical parallels, it
had kept close to the subject, and gone hand in hand with those who must
conduct affairs in the field by their own natural genius.

CHAPTER VI. ON EXAMPLES

EXAMPLES from history make everything clear, and furnish the best
description of proof in the empirical sciences. This applies with more
force to the Art of War than to any other. General Scharnhorst, whose
handbook is the best ever written on actual War, pronounces historical
examples to be of the first importance, and makes an admirable use of
them himself. Had he survived the War in which he fell,(*) the fourth
part of his revised treatise on artillery would have given a still
greater proof of the observing and enlightened spirit in which he sifted
matters of experience.

But such use of historical examples is rarely made by theoretical
writers; the way in which they more commonly make use of them is rather
calculated to leave the mind unsatisfied, as well as to offend the
understanding. We therefore think it important to bring specially into
view the use and abuse of historical examples.

(*) General Scharnhorst died in 1813, of a wound received in
the battle of Bautzen or Grosz Gorchen--EDITOR.

Unquestionably the branches of knowledge which lie at the foundation of
the Art of War come under the denomination of empirical sciences; for
although they are derived in a great measure from the nature of things,
still we can only learn this very nature itself for the most part from
experience; and besides that, the practical application is modified by
so many circumstances that the effects can never be completely learnt
from the mere nature of the means.

The effects of gunpowder, that great agent in our military activity,
were only learnt by experience, and up to this hour experiments are
continually in progress in order to investigate them more fully. That an
iron ball to which powder has given a velocity of 1000 feet in a
second, smashes every living thing which it touches in its course is
intelligible in itself; experience is not required to tell us that; but
in producing this effect how many hundred circumstances are concerned,
some of which can only be learnt by experience! And the physical is not
the only effect which we have to study, it is the moral which we are in
search of,