Butterfield's 1931 text names finding a 'root' or 'anticipation' of the present in the past as the characteristic output of present-referenced history, and calls it a misleading analogy

whig-historyprecursoranachronismbutterfieldhistoriography

In the chapter "The Underlying Assumption" of The Whig Interpretation of History (Herbert Butterfield, 1931), the historian who studies the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present "is bound to construe his function as demanding him to be vigilant for likenesses between past and present, instead of being vigilant for unlikeness." The consequence, in Butterfield's words: "he will imagine that he has discovered a 'root' or an 'anticipation' of the twentieth 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."

The mechanism has three steps: (1) vigilance for likeness rather than unlikeness; (2) a found resemblance labelled a "root" or "anticipation"; (3) the label offered as history although it may rest on a superficial analogy.

The passage also fixes a scope limit. Butterfield says reference to the present is "unobjectionable" in one sense and "inescapable" in another; his objection is to the "direct and perpetual" form. The warning is therefore aimed at a particular use of resemblance, not at every comparison across time.

This is the first direct text in the vault for Butterfield's argument; the existing definitional note claim-butterfield-1931-coined-whig-history-as-present-referenced-past rests on Wikipedia (Tier 4). The vault's other Whig-history notes (claim-mahoney-warned-against-whig-history-of-computing, claim-weinberg-2015-defends-whig-history-as-legitimate-for-science, claim-weinberg-and-butterfield-both-explicitly-reject-hero-villain-narratives) can now be read against his own wording. Companion note on the payload step: claim-butterfield-1931-text-warns-historian-forgets-descent-line-is-his-own-construction-and-takes-it-for-causation.