From Butterfield, H. The Whig Interpretation of History (9) "In reality the historian postulates that the world is in some sense always the same world and that even men most dissimilar are never absolutely unlike" (10) "For the chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikeliness between the past and present and his chief function is to act in this way as a mediator between other generations and our own". (10) "It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past" (12) "... so that he will find it easy to say that he has seen the present in the past, he will imagine that he has discovered a 'root' or an 'anticipation' of the 20th century, when in reality he is in a world of different connotations altogether, and he has merely tumbled upon what could be shown to be a misleading analogy" (21) "It is only by understanding an actual piece of research and looking at some point in history through the microscope that we can visualize the complicated movements that lie behind any historical change" (25) "... the crooked is made straight" (52) "As though Protestantism itself had no atecedents, as though it were a fallacy to go behind the great watershed, as though indeed it would blunt the edge of our story to admit the workings of a process instead of assuming the interposition of direct agency" (69) "The whole process of historical study is a movement towards historical research -- it is to carry us from the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete, from the thesis that the Reformation led to liberty to an actual vision of all the chances and changes which brought about the modern world" (93) "We go to the past to discover not facts only but significances. It is necessary that we should go with instinct and sympathy alive and all our humanity awake. It is necessary that we should call up from the resources of our nature all the things which deflect the thought of the scientist but combine to enrich the poet's".