Bury's lecture continues by defending the claim that history is not literature, which in turns questions the need for a historian's narrative in the discussion of historical facts and essentially evokes the question: is a narrative necessary? But Bury describes his "science" by comparing it to Leopold von Ranke's idea of science and the German phrase that brought Ranke's ideas fame when he exclaimed "tell history as it happened" or ""Ich will nur sagen wie es eigentlich gewesen ist."" only want to say how it actually happened. Bury's final thoughts during his lecture reiterate his previous statement with a cementing sentence that argues "...she is herself simply a science, no less and no more".