Objectivity and Selectivity in Historical Inquiry

. . . Memory gives us access to the past, but not a direct vision of it. Thus all we can claim is to have a point of contact with past events, enabling us perhaps to divine their true shape in some degree, but not such that we can check our reconstructions by comparing them with it to see how far they are correct. For the rest, the sole criterion of truth available to us, in history as in other branches of factual knowledge, is the internal coherence of the beliefs we erect on that foundation.