GEOFFREY ELTON

If we seek such truth as historical inquiry is capable of finding, we must study the past for its own sake and guided by its own thoughts and practices.

the present must be kept out of the past if the search for the truth of that past is to move towards such success as in the circumstances is possible.

partial and uneven evidence must be read in the context of the day that produced it. Reading it must never be governed by any desire to justify or explain or even just to understand the present.

the worst of all methods is one that I would call dogmatic: it uses past evidence selectively to underpin answers previously arrived at

the next worst method reads the evidence under the general instruction of some critical or philosophical theory put up today (and usually soon replaced by another such clever device)

Working on history means working on what is gone. Therefore, inevitably, we know what happened next, and the risk is always considerable that the historian will fall victim to the old false proposition, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the succeeding event being read as a necessary consequence of the earlier event. And yet we neither can escape hindsight nor can we do without it, because only a knowledge of what came next draws attention to a given bit of the past as demanding treatment….

I can only state my principles, though I can claim that they are principles which I have seen employed successfully by myself and others. Nor are they very obscure, and they do not need to hide behind pseudo-intellectual jargon.

1. THE FIRST PRINCIPLE READS:  separate your question from your answer. By this I mean no more than that the question one puts to the evidence should not be biased towards an answer already in mind. One solicits questions from the evidence.
2. THE SECOND PRINCIPLE SAYS: remember that you have the advantage and burden of hindsight, whereas the people you are talking about lacked this. This is one of the essential points in what I have called studying the past on its own terms, with proper respect for it and its inhabitants.
3. THE THIRD AND LAST GENERAL PRINCIPLE THAT I PROPOSE SAYS:  keep an open mind. Allow further study and fuller knowledge, whether it comes from your own work or that of others, to modify what you have thought and said. We all tend to get committed to our reconstructions and… find it burdensome when they are contradicted, perhaps disproved.

HAJO HOLBORN

Historians should keep their feet firmly planted in the life of their own age and participate bravely in its labors. They will not thereby gain answers to the problems of history, but they will be able to formulate questions with with to approach the past. And history gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.