Leopold Von Ranke

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/history/ranke/index.html#misc

About truth

I see the time coming when we will base modern history no longer on secondhand reports, or
even on contemporary historians, save where they had direct knowledge, and still less on works
yet more distant from the period; but rather on eyewitness accounts, and on the most genuine,
the most immediate, sources. For the epoch treated in the following work, that prospect is no
very distant one. I myself have made use of a number of records which I found while in pursuit
of another subject, in the archives of Vienna, Venice, Rome, and especially Florence. Had I
gone into further detail, I should have run the risk of losing sight of the subject as a whole, or,
given the necessary lapse of time, the risk of breaking the unity of conception which had arisen
before my mind in the course of my researches.

And thus I proceeded boldly to the completion of my work, being convinced that when an
investigator has made researches of some extent in authentic records, with an earnest spirit
and a genuine desire for truth, though future discoveries may indeed determine certain details
more precisely, they can only strengthen his fundamental conception. For Truth can be
but One.

Here is the end of Ranke's Forward (Vorrede) to his History of Germany in the Reformation.
This extract continues past the quotation already given as an aphorism, to the end of the
document. It gives a slightly more consecutive sense of the man than does the shorter
aphorism, and it concludes with a statement of his confidence that Truth (behind which term,
Ranke, a pious Lutheran, certainly saw some form of God) was everywhere in history. We may
read his words in a more objective sense, a sense for which Ranke's own work has prepared
us, as affirming that the past does exist, and that all correct descriptions of it tend to converge.

Ich sehe die Zeit kommen, wo wir die neuere Geschichte nicht mehr auf die Berichte, selbst
nicht der gleichzeitigen Historiker, ausser insoweit ihnen eine originale Kenntnis beiwohnte,
geschweige denn auf die weiter abgeleiteten Bearbeitungen zu gründen haben, sondern aus
den Relationen der Augenzeugen und den echtesten, unmittelbarsten Urkunden aufbauen
werden. Für die hier behandelte Epoche ist diese Aussicht schon nicht mehr fern. Mir selbst
kam noch eine Anzahl Aktenstücke zugute, die ich bei einem früheren Unternahmen in den
Archiven zu Wien, Venedig, Rom und besonders Florenz gefunden. Hätte ich das Detail weiter
vermehren wollen, so hätte ich fürchten müssen, es nicht mehr übersehen oder auch in der
Länge der Zeit die Einheit des Gedankens nicht festhalten zu können, der sich mir aus den
bisherigen Studien erhoben hatte.

Und so schritt ich mutig an die Ausarbeitung dieses Werkes, überzeugt, dass, wenn man nur
mit ernstem und warheitsbeflissenern Sinne in den echten Denkmalen einigermassen
umfassende Forschungen angestellt hat, spätere Entdeckungen zwar wohl das einszelne näher
bestimmen werden, aber die Grundwahrnehmungen doch zuletzt bestätigen müssen. Denn die
Warheit kann nur eine sein.

About hidtorians must be old

The diary entry containing these extracts was made in January 1877, six years after Ranke's
retirement, and nine years before his death. His wife had died six years earlier. Half blind, he
was left alone with his books, dependent on readers and scribes for his ability to continue his
researches.

The proverb tells us that poets are born. Not only in the arts, but even in some scholarly fields,
young men develop into full bloom, or at least display their originality. Musicians and
mathematicians have the expectation of attaining eminence in early years. But a historian must
be old, not only because of the immeasurable extent of his field of study, but because of the
insight into the historical process which a long life confers, especially under changing
conditions.

It would hardly be bearable for him to have only a short span of experience. For his personal
development requires that great events complete their course before his eyes, that others
collapse, that new forms be attempted.

Ranke himself met this standard. During his lifetime he had seen the rise and fall of the French
New Order in Europe under Napoleon, and the unification of the German States under
Bismarck.