Historical Modes of Thought.—What is or what would constitute a distinctive mode of historical thought? Some would say it was Ranke who formalized historical method and professionalized the discipline, but much of Ranke’s method was already implicitly present in early modern histories, as with Étienne Pasquier, discussed by Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Critical textual studies date all the way back to Lorenzo Valla, who proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery in the early fifteenth century. The formalization of text criticism is a means to an end, and the end is the reconstruction of past time from evidence available in the present. In other words, the historical mode of thought is the reconstruction of synchronic evidence as diachronic sequence. Collingwood’s a priori historical imagination is a method of reconstruction in the light of ellipses in the historical record. Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences is the weighting of an event in reconstructed time in relation to another event in reconstructed time, the better to produce a diachronic sequence. Varve chronology and dendrochronoloy are reconstructions of past time facilitated by advances in technology and scientific technique—advances that continue in the form of nuclear dating techniques and DNA sequencing. Again, this begins early with the laws of superposition in Nicolas Steno; the use of advanced technologies tend to overshadow the fact that these are new tools in the old quest to reconstruct the past. Perhaps the most distinctive of methods of historical reconstruction is seriation. Here the historians (or the archaeologists) can claim originality. It could be argued that all historical reconstruction is a form of seriation, because we do not find the events of history in serial order, but must render them in a series, and this is the work of reconstruction—transposing the simultaneous order of the present into the serial order of the past. It is here that we should seek after ideographic rigor.
