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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
Scholarship … is the product of personal temperament and what it brings … is only temperament returned to temperament in the form of an embodied activity.
(Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 1952, p. 330)So soon as a thing can be demonstrated, the whole flavour of religion leaves it, and the mystery retires one step backward into the shadow of the incomprehensible.
(Sir Alfred Lyall, Letters from Vamadeo Shastri, 1885, in Asiatic Studies, 1899, second series, pp. 38–9)A beautiful lady I once knew told me that when she was a girl at a convent, she was taken to an aged nun who was dying. The nun had given her entire long life to Catholic observances, and all she could think of saying on her death bed was ‘Goodness, I shall look a fool if it isn't true.’
(Auberon Waugh, The Spectator, 4 December 1976)An historical work rests, as F. H. Bradley pointed out in The Presuppositions of Critical History, on prejudications of what could have been the case. But Bradley's idea may be extended; it may be argued that all writing rests on prejudications not only of what could have been, or can be, the case but also of what should have been, or should be, the case. To say this is to acknowledge that a book carries with it intuitions about what the world ought to be like, judgements about what the world is like and the assumption that the world deserves praise, or blame, for being what it is.
Some of the prejudications involved in writing are obvious, and yield to straightforward analysis.
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