THE NATURE AND SCOPE
statement, in the form of narrative, of what had happened in the past.
Now, of all possible modes of explanation, the Earliest and the most universal is that naive form which is represented in story-telling. This consists in going back to some selected beginning, and carrying forward a narrative of happenings from that point to the situation which the nartator has undertaken to make clear. It matters nothing that, in its earliest manifestations, historical narrative starts with some imaginary beginning, such as the Mosaic account of Creation or Hesiod's Golden Age, the principle is the same in all cases, namely, the acceptance of a situation that comes first, and the emergence from this of a complexity which has its conclusion in a known eventuality.
The initial difficulty for the historian, once his starting-point has been decided upon, is that he cannot include ali the available facts of past occurrences in the narrative which as a literary artist he is bent upon creating. The creation, as in all art, involves the selection of facts for presentation, and while this selection must depend ultimately upon what the narrator or artist himself is, it can be made only in the light of some
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