h, which will grudge no time and
pains in tracing out even what might seem a trivial matter.
Secondly, keen observation, which can fasten upon small points, and
discover in isolated data the basis for some generalisation, or the
illustration of some principle. Thirdly, a sound and calm judgment,
which will subject all inferences and generalisations, both one's
own and other people's, to a searching review, and weigh in delicate
scales their validity. These two last-mentioned qualifications taken
together make up what we call the critical faculty, _i.e._ the power
of dealing with evidence as tending to establish or discredit
statements of fact, and those general conclusions which are built on
the grouping of facts. Neither acuteness alone nor the judicial
balance alone is enough to make the critic. There are men quick in
observation and fertile in suggestion whose conclusions are
worthless, because they cannot weigh one argument against another,
just as there are solid and well-balanced minds that never enlighten
a subject because, while detecting the errors of others, they
cannot combine the data and propound a luminous explanation. To the
making of a true critic, in history, in philosophy, in literature,
in psychology, even largely in the sciences of nature, there should
go not only judgment, but also a certain measure of creative
power. Fourthly, the historian must have imagination, not indeed
with that intensity which makes the poet, but in sufficient volume
to let him feel the men of other ages and countries to be living
and real like those among whom he moves, to present to him a large and
full picture of a world remote from himself in time--as a world
moving, struggling, hoping, fearing, enjoying, believing, like the
near world of to-day--a world in which there went on a private life
of thousands or millions of men and women, vaster, more complex,
more interesting than that public life which is sometimes all that
the records of the past have transmitted to us. Our imaginative
historian may or may not be able to reconstruct for us the private
and personal as well as the public or political life of the past. If
he can, he will. If the data are too scanty, he may cautiously
forbear. Yet he will still feel that those whose movements on the
public stage he chronicles were steeped in an environment of natural
and human influences which must have affected them at every turn;
and he will so describe them as to make us fee