. i. (Paris, 1887, 8vo), Introduction.

[163] And yet Niebuhr made use of the Roman legends to construct a
theory, which it was afterwards necessary to demolish, of the struggle
between the patricians and the plebeians; and Curtius, twenty years
after Grote, looked for historical facts in the Greek legends.

[164] See _supra_, pp. 93 _sqq._

[165] Cf. _supra_, p. 166.

[166] It is often said, "The author would not have dared to write this
if it had not been true." This argument does not apply to societies in a
low state of civilisation. Louis VIII. dared to write that John Lackland
had been condemned by the verdict of his peers.

[167] See above, p. 153. Similarly, the particular facts which compose
the history of forms (palaeography, linguistic science) are directly
established by the analysis of the document.

[168] Primitive Greece has been studied in the Homeric poems. Mediaeval
private life has been reconstructed principally from the _chansons de
gestes_. (See C. V. Langlois, _Les Traditions sur l'histoire de la
societe francaise au moyen age d'apres les sources litteraires_, in the
_Revue historique_, March-April, 1897.)

[169] Most historians refrain from rejecting a legend till its falsity
has been proved, and if by chance no document has been preserved to
contradict it, they adopt it provisionally. This is how the first five
centuries of Rome are still dealt with. This method, unfortunately still
too general, helps to prevent history from being established as a
science.

[170] For the logical justification of this principle in history see C.
Seignobos, _Revue Philosophique_, July-August 1887. Complete scientific
certitude is only produced by an agreement between observations made on
different _methods_; it is to be found at the junction of two different
paths of research.

[171] This case is studied and a good example given by Bernheim,
_Lehrbuch_, p. 421.

[172] It is hardly necessary to enter a caution against the childish
method of counting the documents on each side of a question and deciding
by the majority. The statement of a single author who was acquainted
with a fact is evidently worth more than a hundred statements made by
persons who knew nothing about it. The rule has been formulated long
ago: _Ne numerentur, sed ponderentur_.

[173] Cf. _supra_, p. 94.

[174] It is hardly possible to study here the special difficulties which
arise in the application of these principles, as when the a