"History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesPeople from ParisImmigrants to the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, & History (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 5. "History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun
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Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education.
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