“Only philosophers should write history,” he said. “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.”152 “History,” he concludes, “is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”; we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot “history proves that anything can be proved by
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