... and indeed to any sensible historian's approach, was the need for abstraction from 'raw' evidence, and the classification and organisation of historical facts. It may seem obvious, but, "How, without preliminary distillation, can one make of phenomena, having no other common character than that of being not contemporary with us, the matter of rational knowledge?" Without categorisation, synthesis and simplification, it is extremely doubtful whether any scholar could make much sense out of the sea of evidence available, and even if by some effort of mind he could, the resultant writings, lacking any sort of organisation, would be totally unreadable. However, since there is no absolute and objective set of categories with which one can compartmentalise historical facts, the criteria by which evidence is judged and organised, used and rejected, have to be invented by the historian. This is not to say that this historical judgement necessarily differs widely from historian ...

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