ABSTRACT
All historians agree that their methods can and should be improved, and each historian would like his own scholarship to endure rather than to pass out of fashion with the next change in the climate of opinion. Arthur M. Schlesinger pointed out the historical problem of determining the causes of the Civil War as an example of the type of significant question which no “scientific” method can answer any better than traditional methods. Like Charles Beard, in “Written History as an Act of Faith,” Schlesinger argued that the complex human factors which compose such an important part of the historical process cannot be scientifically dissected or quantified and that the historian is always subjectively related to what he studies. Where the democratic view assumes a measure, however limited, of free choice and individual responsibility, science, Professor B. F. Skinner suggests, refutes such fancies and absorbs everything in a system of comprehensive determinism.
