The historical method is a method for people to study and understand things. It uses time as a clue to trace the law of occurrence and development of things. The basis of its method is that people believe that the occurrence and development of anything is a function of time. As long as the time is sorted out clearly, you will find out the trajectory of researching duality and the law of freedom, so as to serve people better. History is widely used in different disciplines and research fields.
Chinese name
historical law
meaning
A way for people to study and understand things
clue
time
Purpose
Pursue the law of occurrence and development of things
fast
navigation
research steps
definition
The historical method tries to explain history in accordance with the order of development and historical facts, which is commonly referred to as the positive method. The advantage of this method is that it opposes the arbitrariness and subjectivity of explaining history, and the disadvantage is that it tends to stay on the surface of historical phenomena and cannot explain the deep reasons and laws of historical changes.
An important feature of the development of Western history in the 20th century is that it pays more and more attention to the application of theories and methods of sociology, economics, cultural anthropology and other related disciplines in historical research.
Marxism has three sources and three components, three of which are: classical philosophy in Germany, classical political economy in England, utopian socialism in France, and three components are: Marxist philosophy, Marxist political economy and scientific socialism. In fact, in a certain sense, Marxism is also the product of the combination of history and other social sciences. Moreover, in the development of Marxism, in addition to continuously summarizing fresh experience from the three major practices of production struggle, class struggle and scientific experiment, it is also necessary to continuously absorb beneficial nutrition from newly emerging theories and academic achievements in philosophy and social sciences. As far as research methods are concerned, Marxism attaches great importance to the unity of historical and logical methods. On the one hand, Marx and Engels advocated that "research must collect rich materials, analyze its different development forms, and explore the internal connections of these various forms" (Marx: "Das Kapital" second edition postscript); emphasized that "principles are not The starting point of research, but its final result", "It is not that nature and human beings are suitable for principles, but on the contrary, principles are correct only when they are suitable for nature and history" (Engels "Anti-Dühring Argument").
Emphasizing historical evidence is a fine tradition of Chinese historiography. The empirical method, the historical method, is the basis of historical research work, which must not be ignored. Ignoring historical evidence, it is easy to fall into the quagmire of groundless lobbying or formulaism.
research steps
The steps of the historical research method are divided into three major steps: the first step is to collect materials. This is a basic step; no matter what kind of science you study, you can't do without it. The second step is analysis. According to the nature of the collected materials, various dissections are performed. This step of work can be divided into three stages: distinguishing the authenticity, knowing people and discussing the world, and understanding the meaning. The third step is synthesis. Summarize all the results obtained from the analysis and research. This step of work can also be divided into three stages: ascertaining the facts, compiling and writing, and compiling a monograph. In terms of method, the collection of materials is the starting point, and the completion of a book is the end point. In the middle, there must be a lot of analysis and synthesis. Let’s talk about the content again: historical materials are the starting point, the truth of the facts is the end point, and the intermediate bridge is the supplier of general historical materials.
The basic work of studying history is to collect materials. The types of historical materials can be distinguished according to two criteria; according to the form, they can be divided into two categories: (1) relics, which are material things left over from ancient times; (2) legends, which can be further divided into three categories Types: (A) written biography, content, can also be divided into two categories: (1) original, (2) sinful. It is generally believed that the original historical materials are works that have been heard and seen first-hand, and of course they are more reliable than the historical materials of evil students; because the historical materials that have been reproduced have been introduced by second-hand, third-hand, or even six or seven hands, it is easy to lose the original. the truth. This is a very reasonable word. But we must not think that the bred ones are not as good as the original ones. As far as the convenience of research is concerned, beautiful breeding materials can also help us who study history, because such beautiful works can definitely explain the origin of his materials, so that people who collect materials later can use this kind of book. To guide the search for historical materials. Another point is that beautiful breeding materials must be very precise in the work of textual research, which can also save future generations a lot of time. For example, Sima Guang didn't randomly gather all the materials for "Zi Zhi Tong Jian" without discriminating between them. When we read his book "Kao Yi", we can know that the materials of "Zi Zhi Tong Jian" are very carefully reviewed and very cautious. He was able to use all his materials and use various rigorous methods to determine their authenticity, and explained in detail the reasons why he took them in "Kao Yi". The spirit and attitude of the so-called historical research method in the modern West are nothing more than this. So if people want to quote Sima Guang's book, they can rest assured, because he has done a lot of research and research. Such bred material, which is beneficial to later generations of scholars, is not below the original material. This should be known.
To collect materials, of course, we must learn from the catalog. Probably there is a very important principle in the collection of materials, which is the four words "comprehensive and exhaustive". This should be the case not only in the study of history, but also in the study of natural science. However, I think it is very difficult to collect materials and seek completeness in our Chinese books. Because Chinese books rarely have systematic catalogs, and the books themselves have no content indexes.
Under the situation in China, since there are no indexes for all books, it is of course very difficult to collect materials. Therefore, we have to have the virtue of hard work and the spirit of sacrifice to do this kind of work. If we want to write an article about history, we must collect extremely complete materials before we start; otherwise, we would rather stop writing; because otherwise, we will be in danger of missing everything. For example, we want to make an article, assuming that there are ten kinds of materials about this article; but I only found nine kinds, and there is the most important and most valuable one. If I can’t find it, I will publish it rashly. But another person's work has already found that kind of work, so the value of my work will be greatly reduced. Maybe because of the lack of this kind of material, other people's works have been completely overturned, and I don't know. Therefore, when we study history, we must aim to collect materials comprehensively. This must have the spirit of sacrifice and the virtue of hard work and hard work.
Identifying the authenticity of historical materials In historical materials, many books were forged by later generations, and there were also many mistakes due to repeated copying. When we encounter this kind of situation, how should we distinguish? This point is also very important in the study of history. They didn't pay much attention to how far the truth of the matter was from what was said in the historical materials, and whether there were any mistakes in the historical materials. This kind of easily successful works not only does not conform to the principle of modern inductive method; Therefore, those who are engaged in the study of history must hold a skeptical attitude towards anyone's words. We must not blindly believe Confucius or Sima Qian just because they said so; what they [2] said should be studied one by one. The attitudes of Wang Chong, Liu Zhiji, Cui Shu, and the so-called Sinologists of the Qing Dynasty are good models for us.
Generally speaking, it is easier to distinguish the authenticity of manuscripts than printed copies. In the method of identifying counterfeit manuscripts, we must first pay attention to his paper. The differences between the paper made in the Ming Dynasty and the paper in the Song Dynasty, the paper found in the Dunhuang stone chamber and the paper we use are obvious. If the paper of a certain book does not match the paper used by a certain generation, we can know that it is a forgery. The second is to pay attention to his calligraphy. The fonts of different dynasties are different; the current calligraphy is not only different from the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, but also very different from the handwriting of people in the first half of the Qing Dynasty; , can be seen at a glance. In addition, if you look at its content, you can roughly distinguish the authenticity of the book. So we have to distinguish the authenticity of the manuscript, the method is relatively simple.
It is more difficult to distinguish the authenticity of printed copies. The binding and font of the woodblock books of the past and the printed books of the present bookstores are always roughly the same; the formal characteristics of each book are completely buried. We want to distinguish their authenticity, the only way is to examine his content. First of all, we must pay attention to whether the words and the times are consistent. Because each era has its own articles, and each has its own style. If a person in the Qing Dynasty wanted to forge books from the Ming Dynasty, he must unknowingly incorporate the charm of the Qing Dynasty writers. Another example is that many new terms have been coined since the end of the Qing Dynasty. If these new terms are used to fake ancient books, it will definitely become a joke. In addition, it is also necessary to look at whether the views and vision of the scholar are in line with the general intellectual situation of that era. The methods mentioned above are only the most superficial part, and there are many places that rely entirely on experience. We must know that it is not an easy task to distinguish the authenticity of ancient books. The authenticity of many ancient books is still in dispute, such as "Zhou Li" and "Zuo Zhuan" in the "Thirteen Classics" are examples.
When we study ancient books, on the one hand, we need to distinguish its authenticity, and on the other hand, we need to correct its mistakes. Word errors are unavoidable in ancient books or books published today. Errors can be divided into two types: (1) Intentional errors. This is probably due to the cleverness of the copyist or proofreader. They often don't ask about things they don't understand about the original manuscript—maybe they can't ask—the author just makes do with it according to their own ideas. This is what Yan Shigu meant when he said, "If you don't learn the skin, or you don't understand it, if you have doubts, you will always increase or decrease." This kind of error is often specious, extremely difficult to distinguish, and even never corrected. (2) Unintentional mistakes. Some fonts are confused; some are reversed; some combine two characters into one, or analyze one character into two; this is common in ancient books, especially in books with bad editions. We only need to look at Wang Niansun's "Reading Magazine" to see it.
