Principles and Facts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every / country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the / story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the / principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[1] After I / had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of / themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the / particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be / sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously / annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German / royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could / not recall the name.

[Footnote 1: / "The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of / evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces / which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the / first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own / circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the / present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, / and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, / that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no / wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the / sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap / of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a / dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the / former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the / examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were / adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, / it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition / of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened / eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, / when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, / Cesar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the / peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French / constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being / borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern / metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of / the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of / patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and / that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a / nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of / warning. " -- _Statesman's Manual_, p. 14.]