authors of partial syntheses (monographs) designed to serve as materials
for more comprehensive syntheses ought to agree among themselves to work
on a common method, in order that the results of each may be used by the
others without preliminary investigations. Lastly, workers of experience
should be found to renounce personal research and devote their whole
time to the study of these partial syntheses, in order to combine them
scientifically in comprehensive works of historical construction. And if
the result of these labours were to bring out clear and certain
conclusions as to the nature and the causes of social evolution, a truly
scientific "philosophy of history" would have been created, which
historians might acknowledge as legitimately crowning historical
science.

Conceivably a day may come when, thanks to the organisation of labour,
all existing documents will have been discovered, emended, arranged, and
all the facts established of which the traces have not been destroyed.
When that day comes, history will be established, but it will not be
fixed: it will continue to be gradually modified in proportion as the
direct study of existing societies becomes more scientific and permits a
better understanding of social phenomena and their evolution; for the
new ideas which will doubtless be acquired on the nature, the causes,
and the relative importance of social facts will continue to transform
the ideas which will be formed of the societies and events of the
past.[231]

II. It is an obsolete illusion to suppose that history supplies
information of practical utility in the conduct of life (_Historia
magistra vitae_), lessons directly profitable to individuals and peoples;
the conditions under which human actions are performed are rarely
sufficiently similar at two different moments for the "lessons of
history" to be directly applicable. But it is an error to say, by way of
reaction, that "the distinguishing feature of history is to be good for
nothing."[232] It has an indirect utility.

History enables us to understand the present in so far as it explains
the origin of the existing state of things. Here we must admit that
history does not offer an equal interest through the whole extent of
time which it covers; there are remote generations whose traces are no
longer visible in the world as it now is; for the purpose of explaining
the political constitution of contemporary England, for example, the
study of the