Well, bearing all this in mind, just recall what happened with each of those Karburators whose history has been presented to you. Multiply these incidents a hundred thousand times, and you will grasp at once the unhappy position of the present chronicler. How gladly he would journey with you after each new Karburator, see it loaded on the wagon, and offer a bit of hay or bread or a lump of sugar to the heavy draught-horses, with their broad and kingly backs, which drag the new copper cylinders on the rattling lorry to the factory! How gladly he would look on while they set it up, standing with his hands behind his back and giving the erectors his advice, and then wait until it was set in motion! How eagerly then he would peer into people’s faces to note when “it” would begin to affect them, when the Absolute would creep into their being by the nose or ears or any other part, and begin to dissolve the hardness of their nature, overpower their personal tendencies, and cure their moral wounds; to watch the Absolute turn them up with its heavy plough, warm them, master them, and shape them anew; to see it lay open to them a world so marvellous and yet intrinsically so human, of wonders, ecstasy, enlightenment, inspiration and belief! For you must know that the chronicler admits that he is incapable of writing a history. Where the historian uses the press or pounder of his historical learning, documentary lore, abstracts, synthesis, statistics, and other professional devices, to squeeze thousands and hundreds of thousands of little vital personal incidents into a dense and arbitrary conglomerate known as “a historical fact,” “a social phenomenon,” “a mass movement,” “evolution,” “the mind of the race,” or “historical truth” in general, the chronicler sees only the individual cases and even finds them pleasing in themselves.

Now suppose that he had to describe and explain, say, pragmatically, progressively, theoretically, and synthetically, the “religious wave” which swept over the whole world before the year 1950. Once he sees this grandiose task before him, he begins collecting the “religious phenomena” of his own time; and there, in the course of these researches, he comes, for example, upon Jan Binder, ex-variety artiste, wandering from place to place in his striped jersey with his atomic merry-go-round. Historical synthesis, of course, requires the chronicler to omit the striped jersey, the merry-go-round, even Jan Binder himself, and retain as the “historical nucleus” or scientific result, only the discovery that “these religious phenomena from the very outset affected the most diverse classes of society.”