“Only philosophers should write history,” he said.38“In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded by centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.”39“History,” he concludes,”is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”;40
