DROYSEN'S 
 ■PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY 
 
 ANDREWS 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
 Shelf J&_^$ 
 
 UNITEB STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY 
 
 (GRUNDRISS DER HISTORIK) 
 
 - / 
 
 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN, 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN. 
 
 WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS, 
 
 FKESIDBUT OF BROWN U>IVEKSITY. 
 
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 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 
 GINN & COMPANY. 
 
 1893. 
 
Copyright, 1893, 
 By E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS. 
 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
 ©inn & Company 
 
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CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Translator's Preface v 
 
 Author's Preface ix 
 
 Author's Preface to the Third Edition xi 
 
 Biographical Sketch of Droysen xiv 
 
 Outline of the Principles of History 3 
 
 Introduction : 
 
 I. History 9 
 
 II. The Historical Method 12 
 
 III. The Problem of this " Outline " 16 
 
 The Doctrine of Method 17 
 
 I. Invention 18 
 
 II. Criticism 21 
 
 III. Interpretation 26 
 
 The Doctrine of System 32 
 
 I. The Work of History in Relation to its Kinds of 
 
 Matter 35 
 
 II. The Work of History in Relation to its Forms 36 
 
 III. The Work of History- in Relation to the Workers .... 43 
 
 IV. The Work of History in Relation to its Ends 46 
 
 The Doctrine of Systematic Presentation 49 
 
 Appendix I. The Elevation of History to the Rank of 
 
 a Science 61 
 
 Appendix II. Nature and History 90 
 
 Appendix III. Art and Method 105 
 
 Index 121 
 
 iii 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 I became interested in Professor Droysen as an his- 
 torian so early as 1882. In real grasp upon the nature 
 and meaning of history he seemed to me the superior 
 of Ranke. This view I have not changed. To assist 
 myself in comprehending his very deep thoughts I soon 
 began a translation of the Historik. At first I had no 
 idea of publishing, but as the value of the little work 
 impressed me more and more deeply, I at last deter- 
 mined to English it for others. I subsequently laid the 
 matter before Droysen, receiving his approval in the 
 genial letter which appears upon a preceding page. 
 I expected to finish the work in a few months from 
 the date of this letter, but more pressing labors came 
 and became permanent, so commanding my time that 
 I have never since been able to devote to the transla- 
 tion more than now and then an hour. At last, how- 
 ever, after so many years, it is completed, and I give 
 it to the public, appendices and all. These greatly 
 elucidate the " Outline " proper, and ma}' very appro- 
 priately be read first. Those who know Droysen's cum- 
 brous yet nervous and abbreviated style of writing will 
 not estimate the extent of my toil by the number of 
 pages in this book. 
 
 Such was my reverence for Droysen that, after his 
 death in 1884, I cherished the hope of preparing a 
 
yi TRANSLATORS PREFACE. 
 
 brief biography of him. I relinquished this half-formed 
 purpose partly for lack of time, and partly because 
 several excellent sketches of him presently appeared. 
 Max Duncker himself wrote two of these, one in Ivan 
 Midler's Biographical Year-Book for the Knowledge 
 of Antiquity, also published separately, and a more 
 extended one in the Prussian Year-Book for August, 
 1884 (LIV, Heft 2), edited by von Treitschke and Del- 
 briick. Duncker was Droysen's close friend, and had 
 access to much helpful material in manuscript. I in- 
 clined to translate one of his pieces for use in this 
 volume, but upon reflection thought the biography of 
 Dr. Hermann Kriiger likely to be more interesting to 
 American readers. Professor G. Droysen, son of the 
 author of the "Outline," considers Kriiger's account 
 on the whole better than aught else which was written 
 upon his father's life and work. This biography first 
 came out in the form of articles in the Mecklenburg 
 Anzeiger, the last one appearing on Saturday, August 2, 
 1884. Kriiger, too, was an intimate friend of Droy- 
 sen's. I could not have hoped to write anything better 
 than what these two competent and privileged biogra- 
 phers had presented. Besides, it was intimated to me 
 that Professor G. Droysen would sometime publish a 
 still ampler history of his distinguished father's life. 
 
 It is a reflection upon our times that such a man 
 as Droysen should so soon even seem to be forgotten. 
 I say this notwithstanding certain reasons for apathy 
 toward him grounded in the nature and habits of the 
 man. Owing to his intense application, and also to his 
 simple honesty, forbidding in him those arts by which 
 some German professors are popular, Droysen founded, 
 
translator's preface. vii 
 
 properly speaking, no school, though several of the 
 German historians who earned fame during his last 
 years and after his death were his pupils, inspired by 
 his spirit and impressing upon their works the stamp of 
 his manner. Among these may be mentioned Griin- 
 hagen, of Breslau, who has written so well on the first 
 two Silesian Wars ; Reinhold Koser, of Berlin, who has 
 edited several volumes of the Political Correspondence 
 of Frederick the Great ; and S. Isaacsohn, author of the 
 excellent Geschichte des preussischen Beamtenthums. Of 
 these Koser is perhaps the ablest, though Griinhagen is 
 famous for his fairness. In this he excels Droysen, who 
 was often too controversial and always too favorable 
 to Prussia. But not one of these younger historians 4 
 so much as approaches the master in that wonderful 
 wealth and control of materials exhibited by him in his s 
 Greschichte der preussischen Politik. 
 
 The " Outline " as it appears in English is in certain 
 points somewhat more than a reflex of the original. 
 In those paragraphs of Droysen's, and they are not 
 few, which he so painfully abbreviated, leaving them 
 hardly more than strings of catch-words for lecture-room 
 amplification, the statements have been carefully pieced 
 out into a fullness that will, it is hoped, give them clear 
 meaning. For the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian 
 with which the author loved to interlard his discourse, 
 English has in most cases been substituted, the origi- 
 nal being given either in brackets or in the margin. A 
 few brief explanatory notes have been added at points 
 where they seem most necessary. 
 
 I consider Droysen's Historik the weightiest book of 
 its size composed in our century, weightier than any 
 
Vlll TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 other, small or great, save certain treatises by Hegel. 
 Yet I know the present tendency of historical study 
 too well to expect that all the English and American 
 historical scholars will read this book who, in my judg- 
 ment, would greatly profit by reading it. In most 
 directions one finds a stronger zeal for the knowledge 
 of history than for the understanding of history. We 
 are so busy at gathering facts that no time is left us 
 to reflect upon their deeper meanings. Too many 
 who wish to be considered historians seem hardly less 
 enthusiastic over the history of some town pump, pro- 
 vided it is "fresh" and "written from the sources," 
 than over that of the rise of a constitution. Happily 
 this fault is less pronounced than it was. With increas- 
 ing clearness is it seen that history is rationally inter- 
 esting only as man's life is interesting, and that, touching 
 man's life, the element in which one may most legiti- 
 mately feel deep interest is its moral evolution. This 
 is emphatically Droysen's view, and in the " Outline " 
 he sets it forth in a more inspiring and convincing 
 manner than is done by any other writer whom it has 
 been my privilege to read. May this translation enable 
 many to derive from his profound conceptions even 
 more profit than they have brought me. 
 
 E. BENJ. ANDREWS. 
 Brown University, 
 September 6, 1892. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 Lectures upon the Encyclopedia and Methodology 
 of History which I delivered from time to time, begin- 
 ning with 1857, led me to write out the skeleton of 
 the same in order to give my auditors a basis for my 
 oral amplification. In this way, as manuscript, first in 
 1858 and then again in 1862, the following "Outline" 
 was printed. Numerous requests, some of them from 
 foreign lands, determined me, when the little volume 
 had to be printed anew, to give it to the public. Hin- 
 drances and scruples of many kinds have delayed the 
 publication until now, when at last, according to my 
 provisional judgment at any rate, the work is ripe. 
 
 To the first impression, in order to give a general 
 idea of the questions discussed in the body of the 
 work, I had prefixed an introduction. This still stands 
 at the beginning. A couple of articles are appended 
 to the treatise, .which will, I trust, serve to illustrate 
 certain points touched therein. The first, entitled 
 "The Elevation of History to the Rank of a Science," 
 was occasioned by the appearance of Buckle's well- 
 known work, and printed in von Sybel's " Zeitschrift" 
 for 1852. The second, on "Nature and History," was 
 evoked by a discussion in which all the advantages of 
 the metaphysical point of view were on my opponent's 
 side. In the third article, under the title of "Art and 
 Method," I have collected what is hardly more than a 
 
X AUTHOR S PREFACE. 
 
 succession of aphoristic remarks, intended to bring to 
 memory the partly forgotten limits between dilletantism 
 and science. Some of them have already found place 
 in an academic lecture. See the Monatsberichte of the 
 Royal Academy of Sciences, July 4th, 1867. I hesi- 
 tated whether or not to add a fourth discussion, some 
 copies of which I had printed as an introduction to the 
 second part of my "History of Hellenism" in 1843. 
 I wished on the basis of this to investigate with scienti- 
 fic friends precisely this problem of the principles of 
 history, a problem from which the point of view be- 
 tween theology and philology held by me in the 
 History of Hellenism and branches of learning related 
 thereto, seemed to me to derive justification. This 
 discussion I have preferred to postpone, because it ap- 
 peared unlikely that readers would be as much inter- 
 ested as myself in knowing the point whence I set out 
 and the roads I traveled to reach the conclusions 
 presented in the following pages. The purpose of 
 this publication will be attained if it serves to incite 
 further inquiry into the questions which it treats, 
 touching the nature and task of History, its method 
 and its competency. 
 
 Berlin, November, 1867. 
 
PREFACE TO THE THIEI) EDITION. 
 
 In this new impression of the " Outline " the arrange- 
 ment has been in some points altered, into a form which 
 repeated delivery of the lectures indicated as better 
 answering my purpose. In the somewhat numerous 
 paragraphs which have double figures, 1 those in brackets 
 refer to the order in the editions of 1867 and 1875. 
 
 The " Outline " itself makes it clear that it does not 
 
 pretend to be a "Philosophy of History," and also why 
 
 it does not look for the essence of History in that 
 
 which has opened so splendid a career to natural 
 
 science. 
 
 JOH. GUST. DROYSEN. 
 Berlin, July 18, 1881. 
 
 1 Not reproduced in this translation. — Tr. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 By Dr. Hermann Kruger. 
 
 On the morning of June 19, 1884, in the Villa at 
 Schoneberg, near Berlin, whither he had removed upon 
 medical advice, died Johami Gustav Droysen, in whom 
 Germany lost one of its best men and one of its greatest 
 historians. To the author of these lines, a grateful 
 pupil of his, it is no less a necessity of the heart than 
 a duty of piety to lay a crown of honor upon this man's 
 grave. 
 
 Let us begin by briefly sketching the outward course 
 of Droysen's life. 
 
 Born on the 6th of July, 1808, at Treptow, on the 
 Rega, as son of a minister, and early left an orphan, 
 he obtained his preparation for the university at the 
 Mariemtift- Gymnasium in Stettin. He then studied 
 philology in Berlin, and obtained there his first position 
 as teacher, in the Gymnasium of the Gray Cloister. In 
 1833, having already published some studies in the 
 domain of Greek history, he habilitated as privat-docent 
 at the Berlin University, where he delivered philological 
 and historical lectures with great acceptance, and also 
 advanced very soon to the position of professor extra- 
 ordinary. In 1840 he accepted a call to become 
 ordinary (full) professor of history in the University of 
 Kiel, where he worked with great success till 1851. At 
 the same time he took an influential part as a politician 
 
xvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 in the agitations to which (lining the forties the popular 
 tion of Schleswig-Holstein had recourse in view of 
 Denmark's threat to take possession of these duchies by 
 force. In 1848 Droysen was sent from Kiel by the 
 provisional government of the duchies as their repre- 
 sentative to the Diet of the Confederation, and later 
 as deputy to the German National Assembly. 
 
 In the year 1851 Droysen was called to the University 
 of Jena, to which he belonged as one of its first 
 ornaments through the eight following years. From 
 there he accepted in 1859 a call to the University of 
 Berlin, where he had begun his academic career, and 
 where from this time on for another quarter century 
 he wrought Avith a success which was great and which 
 continued to the last. His lectures were among the 
 most frequented at the university. Particularly those 
 upon modern history drew together in his auditorium, 
 besides numerous students, also many high civil and 
 military officers and many savans. For Droysen was 
 not merely an eminent savant and historical investigator, 
 but also an extraordinary teacher. 
 
 As savant and historian he published, from every one 
 of the universities to which he successively belonged, 
 one or more works which have exalted his name as 
 among the most brilliant in the scientific world. 
 
 To his first Berlin period belongs the translation of 
 iEschylus that appeared in 1832, which Droysen, — 
 as a young philologist, also its an enthusiast for 
 the most powerful among the Greek dramatists, — 
 undertook at first in the interest of a friend not 
 adequately acquainted with the Greek, and only subse- 
 quently gave to the press. His appreciation of the 
 
JOHANK GUSTAV DROYSEN. Wll 
 
 Greek nature, his poetic endowment, and his unusual 
 mastery of the speech, begot by their union a translation 
 which stands forth masterful in its kind and has not 
 been surpassed even to this day. To be sure, the 
 philologists of ' strict observance ' most violently attacked 
 this free poetic imitation, which is true rather to the 
 spirit and thoughts of the writer than to the letter. 
 But Droysen was not drawn astra}-. Convinced that 
 he who will bring a Greek poet like ^Eschylus or 
 Aristophanes pleasurably to the understanding of a 
 German reader must utterly renounce the literal mode 
 of rendering, he immediately followed with his trans- 
 lation of Aristophanes. This, like that of iEschylus, 
 speedily found the favor of the public and has kept 
 it even to our own days. 
 
 Both translations, on which Droysen, as is proved by 
 the rendering of certain verses and the change of 
 various expressions, has been working right along, exist 
 now in third editions. What power they have to afford 
 high satisfaction and delight even to the most rigid 
 philologists, the writer of these lines learned when, 
 during his time in Leipzig, he listened to the exposition 
 of the Knights of Aristophanes by Ritschl, and more 
 than once heard that eminent critic express his 
 admiring approval of Droysen's version. 
 
 Meantime there unfolded itself in Droysen, side by 
 side with his philological genius, still more emphatically 
 the talent and the inclination for historical investigation 
 and exposition; and having once pressed his way into 
 the sphere of Hellenic things, he saw in the thorough 
 investigation of Grecian antiquity the principal task of 
 his scientific calling. A fruit of these Hellenic studies 
 
will BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 was the History of Hellenism, begun in Berlin, finished 
 later in Kiel, to which work of several volumes the 
 History of Alexander the Great serves in a way as 
 introduction. ' It is,' says the author in his preface, 
 ' a highly significant yet almost forgotten development 
 of political and national relations which we have 
 endeavored to fathom and expound/ The result was 
 a satisfactory presentation of an epoch till then little 
 known, yet highly important, — wherein, amid the 
 violent and often confused struggles of Alexander's 
 generals and successors, those diadochi and epigoni, the 
 Greek spirit was brought into connection with the 
 Oriental nature, so as, by a process of fermentation, de- 
 composition, and illumination, to cause a mighty trans- 
 formation in the thinking and feeling of the ancient 
 world, by which, withal, the path was leveled for 
 Christianity. Droysen apprehends his problem from 
 elevated points of view and solves it, bringing clearness 
 into the tangled chaos of overpowering material, with 
 undeniably great dexterity. Leo, in his Universal 
 History, names this work ' an excellent treatment of the 
 subject.' Upon this, too, however, sharp attacks were 
 not wanting, and they were partly well founded. For 
 Droysen, still at that time a thorough Hegelian, had in 
 his handling of the epoch allowed quite too much play 
 to the Hegelian method of constructing history, thus 
 thrusting much, particularly respecting Alexander and 
 his plans, into incorrect perspective and false lights. 
 Subsequently he saw this himself, and in the preface to 
 the second edition of this work, with the perfect honor 
 peculiar to his character, he confessed his error. 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. xix 
 
 Here in Kiel, where Droysen completed his remark- 
 able work, the History of Hellenism, he completed also 
 his transition from ancient to modern history. In 184(3 
 he published his lectures on the History of the Wars 
 for Freedom. In an ingenious manner, with an almost 
 perfect art of luminous construction and rich coloring 
 in his presentation, such as he equaled nowhere else in 
 his works, that period so excessively abounding in 
 struggles, transformations, developments, and results, is 
 unfolded and depicted in speech that is fresh, resonant, 
 often out and out ravishing. Whoever wishes a per- 
 fectly clear consciousness of the difference between 
 the born and schooled historian and the dilettante, should 
 compare this History of the Wars for Freedom, which for 
 a long time has not in our judgment been sufficiently 
 appreciated, with Beitske's much lauded work upon 
 the same period. Although in many parts left behind 
 by more recent investigations, this work of Droysen's 
 still presents such a fullness of spirited remarks and 
 incisive historical observations, that the perusal of it 
 even affords genuine enjoyment. 
 
 A second work which Droysen beg^rn at Kiel but 
 finished later in Jena, was the famous Biography of 
 Field Marshal York of Wartenburg, at present in its 
 ninth edition. To say anything at so late a day in 
 praise of this book, which in its classic completeness 
 stands forth simply unique in biographical literature, 
 would be carrying owls to Athens. We will only 
 remark that although the occasion for the composition 
 of the book was an outward one, Droysen nevertheless 
 seized upon it with joy, in the conviction that in that 
 lax period of peace nothing was better adapted to 
 
XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 strengthen the people's patriotic and moral conscious- 
 ness than the example of a great personality like York, 
 energetic, yet ruled by the most rigid sense of duty. 
 The portrayal of this hero's character was especially 
 intended to be an example to strengthen in the simple 
 service of duty the young Prussian army, exposed in 
 its long and often tedious garrison life to the danger of 
 laxity. 
 
 It was in the time of deep political excitement 
 and exhaustion which naturally followed the stirring 
 period of the later forties, when Droysen began his 
 labors at Jena. A condition of almost entire discourage- 
 ment had come in as to the vigorous reconstruction of 
 Germany. The national dreams, wishes and strivings 
 lay upon the ground like a sea of blossoms. Droysen 
 understood this general despair but did not share it. It 
 was his irrefragable conviction that although this first 
 attempt to erect the German Empire again had failed, 
 it would be followed by others, and that at last, pro- 
 vided Prussia would only, in proper recognition of her 
 historical calling, brace herself up to an energetic policy, 
 the loosely connected German states would unite under 
 her lead into a firm whole, and thus realize after all the 
 perpetual dream of a new German Empire. 
 
 Borne on by this firm hope and conviction, Droysen 
 began his colossal work, the History of Prussian Policy, 
 the first volume appearing in 1855. In this path-break- 
 ing work, which furnishes evidence no less of the 
 author's unwearied lust for toil than of his prodigious 
 power for toil, Droysen introduces us into the history 
 of the origin of the Prussian state, and shows how this 
 state, amid perpetual struggles with inner and outer 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DKOYSEN. XXI 
 
 difficulties, with labor most intense and efforts often in 
 vain, in ever new, energetic onsets, toiled its way up, 
 furthered and utilized all the powers necessary for the 
 subsistence and prosperity of the modern state, so as at 
 last to enter, a German state with full credentials, into 
 the rank of Europe's great powers. A prodigious plen- 
 itude of material from the archives was for the first time 
 wrought into form and published in this work. In con- 
 sequence, many views previously accepted as certain 
 have been given up, some facts placed in new lights, 
 and much else brought to the day as absolutely new. 
 
 However, this epoch-making work, which we peruse 
 now in thirteen thick volumes, will hardly prove 
 popular in the sense in which Mommsen's Roman 
 History, for instance, or Ranke's History of the Refor- 
 mation, has become so. Such a result is prevented not 
 only by the great compass of the treatise but more than 
 all by the circumstance that it does not present a history 
 of the Prussian state, embracing and unfolding in richly 
 colored view the entire breadth and manifoldness of 
 the state's life, but simply, as the title says, a history 
 of Prussia's 'policy,' to follow out which in its pro 
 gressive realization of exalted ideals is for one not an 
 historian often wearying. 
 
 We may regret that Droysen did not choose to write 
 a comprehensive history of the Prussian state ; we 
 may blame him for falling, in this work, too, here and 
 there, though less frequently than before, into the 
 Hegelian habit of historical construction ; yet the 
 History of Prussian Policy remains forever a standard 
 treatise, path-breaking, foundation-laying, epoch-mak- 
 ing. No subsequent historian having to explore the 
 
XX11 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 same domain, will be permitted with impunity to slight 
 Droysen's labors. That the author was awarded for it 
 by the scientific commission appointed to make the 
 award, the great prize of a thousand Thalers founded 
 by Frederick William IV, to be given every five years 
 for the best historical work appearing during the same, 
 was only the proper recognition of the astonishing 
 industry, great critical acumen and scientific thorough- 
 ness characterizing the elaboration of this work ; a 
 work which insures Droysen for all time the glory of 
 being reckoned among Germany's most remarkable 
 historians. It ends, at present, with the account of 
 the first two Silesian wars. On the basis of private 
 information which has come to me to the effect that 
 the remainder was found in his desk ready for the 
 press, quietly and peacefully closed, as what he wished 
 to give to the public, we may cherish the hope that a 
 fourteenth volume will follow, bringing us to the begin- 
 ning of the Seven Years' War. 1 
 
 Droysen has been not only an historical investigator 
 especially favored of heaven, but also a preeminently 
 remarkable teacher of history. He brought great 
 inborn talent to the teacher's calling ; yet this would 
 perhaps not have attained so full activity had he not 
 learned before his entrance upon his academic career, 
 namely as teacher at the Gray Cloister, to exercise and 
 develop this talent practically in minor relations. 
 This first period of teaching was a decided advantage 
 to him in his entire later activity as university in- 
 structor. 
 
 1 This has since been published, and reaches to the opening of the 
 Seven Years' War. — TV. 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. XX111 
 
 Masterly was Droysen's knack of grouping his his- 
 torical material in his lectures so as to render it visible 
 clearly and visible all together, and of maintaining the 
 essentials thereof in harmonious relation with minor 
 historical details. The matter did not press itself 
 upon the attention in a too massive manner, nor on the 
 other hand was it swamped 1)}- historical observations. 
 In his portrayal of given epochs, in his characterization 
 of towering personalities, in his definite grasp of lead- 
 ing points of view, he possessed the art of a great 
 master. Yet to go further and portray historical per- 
 sonalities in their outward manifestation, as Ranke 
 loves to do and does in such a brilliant manner, Droysen 
 invariably refused. w Whether any one has yellow hair 
 and blue eyes,' he once said derisively, 'is a question 
 on which nothing depends ; in devoting attention to 
 that sort of thing an historian descends to miniature 
 painting.' It would cerf!ainly have been welcome to 
 many of his hearers and readers if he had not so 
 completely renounced this means of concrete represen- 
 tation. 
 
 Droysen held you spell-bound in his lectures, which 
 moved upon the middle line between free utterance 
 and literal delivery from manuscript. He did this by 
 his splendid diction, by his sharp and ingenious exposi- 
 tion, by his extraordinary art of letting, at the right time 
 and place and often only by a brief, hint-like remark, a 
 surprising blaze of light flash upon special personali- 
 ties. Great also was the effect of the powerful, manly 
 spirit which got expression in all these ways. 
 
 Hence Droysen's lectures could not but convoke 
 a great company of listeners. They did this even to 
 
XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 his last days, although other and younger lights with 
 equally great power of attraction later arose at his side 
 as colleagues. To hear Droysen was, as one often heard 
 said, a delight, and for the sake of this delight many of 
 his hearers neglected taking notes. Yet any one who, 
 like the undersigned, in spite of the great temptation 
 merely to listen, consistently practiced taking notes, 
 knows how durable and precious a treasure he possesses 
 in a Heft written down from Droysen's deliverances. 
 
 But what so permanently chained his pupils and 
 made them hearken to their teacher's words, almost as 
 if in worship, and what drew them always again 
 straight to his lectures, was at bottom, if I see rightly, 
 Droysen's peculiar, mighty personality, which, with its 
 powerful tendency to the ideal, had its roots deep in the 
 moral. Such a personality ever exercises upon academic 
 youth, so susceptible to the ideal, an irresistible magical 
 effect, not to be undervalued. For the best that a 
 teacher who is, besides, an ethical personality, can give 
 to his pupils, is and remains in the last analysis, 
 himself. This is as true in a certain sense of the 
 university teacher as of any. Droysen was a personality 
 full of high moral earnestness, and he always energet- 
 ically asserted even in his lectures the point of view 
 of the moral judgment. ' The moral,' so he expressed 
 himself on one occasion, ' is that which constitutes every 
 man's final worth, that is, his only worth.' How much 
 sympathy he has therefore (compare the first volume of 
 the History of Prussian Policy) with Henry VII, of 
 Luxemburg, and how little for the talented Talleyrand 
 in his utter frivolousness ! Not rich talent, or preeminent 
 genius with its egoistic tendency, but unselfish sur- 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. XXV 
 
 render to the idea of the good, he viewed as alone 
 worthy of respect and admiration. 'What,' he once 
 asked, ' is the truly great in history ? It is controlled, 
 ennobled, glorified passion'; but yet, so it reads further 
 in his Principles of History, 'everything historically 
 great is only a sun-mist in the manifestation of God.' 
 
 Not in the sphere of the Greek world — as people 
 have supposed, and as Hans Prutz has again recently 
 asserted and emphasized in the National-Zeitung — not 
 in the sphere of the Greek world did Droysen's moral 
 view of the universe have its roots, but in the soil of 
 Christianity. In his thought the development of 
 humanity — whose preparatory stages he characterizes as 
 recognition of self and recognition of the world (see his 
 Principles of History) — completes itself in the recogni- 
 tion of God. History itself is to him ' not the light and 
 the truth but only a witness and a conservation of them, 
 a sermon upon them; as John was not himself the Light 
 but sent to bear witness of the Light.' The warmth 
 and luminousness of this deep moral view streamed out 
 through his lectures, although it was not Droysen's 
 manner to repeat or to express it in definitely formu- 
 lated utterances or propositions. 
 
 During his exuberant activity Droysen delivered over 
 two hundred courses of lectures, before assemblies 
 always numerous, of academic youth. They embraced 
 as well ancient as modern and the most recent history. 
 Besides, he lectured over and over again upon the 
 Encyclopedia and Methodology of History. This 
 course presented an infinite abundance of instructive 
 and inspiring matter, and, in the opinion of the under- 
 signed, was for the prospective historian simply 
 
XXVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 indispensable. Perhaps not too strong was the recent 
 assertion that it is doubtful whether a course like that 
 of Droysen's on the Encyclopedia of History will ever 
 be delivered again by any university teacher. 
 
 Many placed his course of lectures on Greek history 
 at the head. This certainly combined Droysen's compre- 
 hensive knowledge of the ancient world with his deep 
 understanding of Greek affairs, his sympathetically 
 reproductive sense for Greek thinking and action, and 
 for the changing forms of Greek political life and 
 of Greek national art, in such wise as to render it a 
 highly interesting and instructive course. What 
 Droysen presented was not mere dry information, that 
 pains had hunted up and collected; but, supported 
 by the thorough and many-sided knowledge that he had 
 won by long years of study, he reconstructed from the 
 fullness of his living vision the Greek world in its 
 political and social development, in its aspects of light 
 and shade, in its rise and its decadence. 
 
 Years after, there came back to me a vivid recollection 
 of those lectures. I was temporarily residing in Berlin 
 and was taking a walk with Droysen in the Thiergarten 
 one fine August evening. It was, if I mistake not, 
 in the summer of 1877. Our conversation led to the 
 contests of the diadochi, and from these back to 
 Alexander and Demosthenes. Knowing Droysen's derog- 
 atory judgment of the statesman Demosthenes, I found 
 it easy by an utterance of a contrary tenor to evoke his 
 contradiction and to lead him on to a fundamental 
 justification of his view. In speech that was all life and 
 motion Droysen now not only unfolded in the most 
 various directions an astonishing abundance of ready 
 
.roll ANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. xxvii 
 
 information, but swept forwards and backwards, with so 
 deep a grasp of Greek relations, that a wish more lively 
 than ever came over my soul : Oh that this man had 
 chosen to think out a Greek history for us ! Oh that 
 he in preference to so many others had been called 
 to fill up this painful gap so long felt ! 
 
 Still larger than Droysen's classes in ancient history 
 were those which heard him upon modern and the 
 most recent periods. The lectures upon the latter were 
 of even more universal interest than the others. In 
 them he took his hearers from about the middle of the 
 fifteenth century on to the fifties of the present cen- 
 tury, setting down and maintaining as landmarks to 
 his separate but continuous lectures the Thirty Years' 
 War, the Seven Years' War, the Wars for Freedom, 
 and the Revolutionary time of 1848 with its proxi- 
 mate results. These lectures bore, like the others, a 
 thoroughly spirited, inspiring and at the same time 
 strongly scientific character ; but they had an incom- 
 parably greater practical effect upon the immediate 
 present, many securing through the deeper understand- 
 ing which these lectures afforded of German history, 
 a better insight into the present and its tasks, so that 
 the power of the political shibboleth, which especially 
 in the first half of the sixties dominated so much the 
 musings and aspirations of our youth, was more and 
 more broken. 
 
 It is equally true that Droysen extremely seldom 
 allowed himself, near as the temptation often lay, an 
 allusion to present political revolutions, and when he 
 did indulge it was done in a brief and definite word. 
 Thus, once, in the winter of 1864, when the constitu- 
 
XXVlii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 tional conflict was at its height, he closed a lecture with 
 these words : ' It was the curse of this party that it, 
 precisely like our party of progress to-day, ended by 
 placing party-interest above interest in the Fatherland.' 
 In consequence of this concluding utterance, his entire 
 academic audience, which was then in great part feeling 
 the touch of progressist breath, became excited. The 
 students determined, against the next evening, should 
 Droysen in his customary brief recapitulation again be 
 guilty of a remark so deeply injurious to progressist 
 feelings, to raise the cry of ' scandal ' and to make an 
 infernal racket. Apprised of this plot, Droysen came 
 on the following evening into the large auditorium, 
 this time full even to suffocation, ascended the platform 
 with easy step, and, glancing over the assembly with a 
 firm look out of his large dark eyes, began : ' We con- 
 cluded yesterday evening, gentlemen, with the words ' : 
 and then followed exactly the final words of the pre- 
 ceding lecture. All was silent ; not a person stirred. 
 Every one had the feeling that he who stood upon that 
 platform was a man. 
 
 As in his lectures, Droysen's special talent for teach- 
 ing showed itself also in the historical society con- 
 ducted by him, whose members assembled around him 
 every Saturday in his study. The reading of the paper 
 that had been prepared on the assigned theme was 
 followed by a debate, Droysen leading, in which he, in 
 a fashion open and free yet of extreme forbearance, 
 criticised what had been presented, and thereby set 
 forth the method of historical investigation in a manner 
 at once thorough and inspiring. His efforts progress- 
 ively to form his pupils to scientific, independent 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. xxix 
 
 investigations and undertaking's, had great and endur- 
 ing support in his ability quietly and surely to find 
 his way into every one's individuality. 
 
 During the time of conflict in the sixties, when, 
 among others, his colleague, Herr von Sybel, fought 
 boldly in the ranks of the then party of progress against 
 Bismarck and the Prussian government, Droysen de- 
 clined participation by speech or writing, and only occa- 
 sionally indicated his position, which was not that of the 
 opposition. Subsequently, too, when those great events 
 and transformations leading to the erection of the 
 national state were taking place, he greeted them 
 rather with silent joy than with loud acclaim, and, in 
 general, the older he grew, he held himself more and 
 more aloof from the political contests of the day, in 
 order by silence and solitude to live more entirely in 
 his scientific labors. 
 
 Yet Droysen, too, had his time in which duty and 
 conscience seemed to command him to come forward 
 publicly with a manly word. It was during his period 
 of labor at Kiel. The decrees of the provisional 
 estates-assembly held at Roeskild in the year 1844, 
 threatened the rights of the duchies, Schleswig and 
 Holstein, and would have been dangerous had the 
 Danish crown followed them. These acts called 
 Droysen into the political arena. He composed what 
 has become celebrated as the k Kiel Address,' which met 
 with a storm of approval and was instantly covered 
 with thousands of subscriptions. As in this writing, 
 so subsequently, in a second, namely when Frederick 
 VII announced the consolidated-constitution of Den- 
 mark, Droysen came out with noble manliness, and 
 
XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 glowing through and through with patriotic wrath, in 
 opposition to Danish arrogance. 'What business,' a 
 passage of it reads, 'has Denmark with us? What we 
 with Denmark ? We have no mind for any price what- 
 ever to be guilty of treason to ourselves and to Ger- 
 many.' ' Heed,' he further warns the Danes, ' heed the 
 evolving time. Disdain ye what we have spoken, fill 
 ye the king's ear with adverse counsel and your heart 
 with the unrighteous plunder ; 1 then see to it what 
 sort of advice ye are giving yourselves ! We are the 
 wards of a great people, a great Fatherland.' 
 
 Droysen's intervention in this patriotic way for the 
 cause of the duchies in those evil days, his accurate 
 knowledge of the relations in question, and his sharp 
 political vision, specially qualified him to represent the 
 cause of the duchies elsewhere as well. He was there- 
 fore sent by the provisional government subsequently 
 established, as its confidential agent to the Diet of the 
 Germanic Confederation at Frankfort. When, then, in 
 consequence of that movement which shook Germany 
 in the spring of 1848, the National Assembly convened 
 at Frankfort, Droysen was chosen to this also. He 
 joined the so-called hereditary-imperial party, and, as 
 member of the committee on the constitution, drew up 
 its protocol. Afterwards, when men's hope-filled 
 dreams of a new, united Germany had melted like 
 snow, Droysen, with Dahlmann, E. M. Arndt and 
 others, in May 1849, left the National Assembly. 
 
 'Pale as a corpse,' so Droysen once told the story in 
 after years, ' Dahlmann entered the hall in order to set 
 his name to the notification of departure. All eyes 
 
 1 ' Gdleht.'' 
 
,M)HANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. XXXI 
 
 were upon him. Deeply moved and scarcely master of 
 himself, he seized the pen and subscribed. What he 
 suffered was for him notification of the death of all 
 his patriotic hopes.' Droysen was less destitute of 
 courage, though he, too, was bowed to the very earth. 
 Even in those most evil days he could not and would 
 not let go the hope of a renewal of the German Empire. 
 Henceforth, as before, he placed his entire reliance on 
 Prussia, whose calling to advance to the pinnacle of 
 a newly united Fatherland he viewed as irrefutably 
 demonstrated by her history. 
 
 As an historian he conceived to be equally certain his 
 duty to stamp this historical calling of Prussia fast and 
 deep upon the soul of the despairing race of his days — 
 a promise, as it were, of a better future. He accord- 
 ingly began that work of his, planned in the broadest 
 style, the History of Prussian Policy. In this he now 
 espied the principal task of his life, and to it he hence- 
 forth consecrated his entire strength. 
 
 After his service at Frankfort Droysen never again 
 came forward as member of a political body. It was, 
 we have already remarked, not without hope in his 
 heart that he bade farewell to Frankfort. He had looked 
 upon the business of the first German parliament as 
 simply a first, though unsuccessful effort, to be followed 
 by others with happier result; and in the album pro- 
 vided for its members — characteristically enough of 
 his then view of things — he wrote, slightly altering the 
 Vergilian verse : Tantae molis erat Grermanam eondere 
 gentem! But he would not again accept a commission 
 to public political activity, and he declined with 
 emphasis an election to the parliament at Erfurt. 'Any 
 
XXXU BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 one who has made such a fiasco as we did at Frankfort,' he 
 expressed himself on a later occasion in his open, honest 
 way, ' ought to give these things once for all a wide 
 berth and relegate them to other and more artful hands.' 
 
 However, in his scientific labors and in pushing for- 
 ward his masterpiece, he continually nourished his own 
 hope and that of his nation. And when the mighty events 
 of the year 1866 announced the break of a new day, 
 and in the autumn of that year the author of these 
 lines again visited him at his home, almost his first 
 words, spoken with joyful confidence, were, 'Now the 
 movement will go through and what we have been so 
 long striving for will succeed.' A few years more and 
 he saw his prediction, boldly spoken in a time of 
 discouragement, that the Hohenzollern would sometime 
 take the place of the Hohenstauffen, fulfilled to the 
 letter. The splendor of the Empire, fresh from its 
 resurrection, glorified the evening of his declining life. 
 
 Droysen's nature had the build of genius. His ability 
 was many-sided. To a sharp, deeply penetrating intel- 
 lect he joined a lively, mobile imagination, along with a 
 fine feeling for form and a decided sense for the realities 
 of life and for their worth. His poetic sensibility, 
 which qualified* him beyond many others for the 
 translation of an Aeschylus and an Aristophanes, did not 
 hinder him from becoming and remaining, as a pupil of 
 Boeckh's, likewise a philologist in the best sense of the 
 word. Full as he was of ideal elevation, it was not in 
 the circle of thoughts prevalent in the Hellenic world, 
 whose deep shadows he recognized beyond almost every 
 other historian, but in the real sphere of Christianity, 
 that he found full and enduring satisfaction for the 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. XXX111 
 
 moral need of his nature. Once an enthusiastic pupil 
 of Hegel, he later became a thorough connoisseur and 
 admirer of Aristotle. Indeed, a decided inclination to 
 philosophic thinking formed a strongly prominent feature 
 of his character. To the end of his days Droysen 
 applied himself to philosophical studies with a persist- 
 ence and a thoroughness hard to be matched by any 
 modern historian, although the results of this are not 
 immediately manifest in his writings, unless we take 
 into account his tendency, which increased with his 
 years, toward abstract expressions. 
 
 Amid this abundance of richest endowment Droy- 
 sen did not dissipate his power, but with the un- 
 usual energy characteristic of him, was able to limit 
 himself to the realm for which it was manifest he was 
 peculiarly adapted, that of history. A master in investi- 
 gating details, as is shown by his minor but thoroughly 
 classical treatises upon Pufendorf, Eberhard Windeck, 
 the Marchioness of Bayreuth, the Strahlendorf Opinion, 
 and others, he was at the same time an historical 
 investigator on a larger scale, who never in viewing the 
 particular lost from his eye its connection with the 
 great whole. His innate drawing to Universal History 
 led him to cultivate departments farthest removed from 
 one another, the world of antiquity llo less than that of 
 the closing Middle Age and modern times. Yet these 
 different periods appeared to him not as disconnected 
 fragments, but as an historic totality organically united. 
 This susceptibility of his for universal history, as well 
 as the sharpness and thoroughness with which he 
 investigated, and equally with these the great variety 
 of his scientific works, assure to Droysen for all time 
 
XX Xiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 his place among the Coryphcei of German historians, 
 putting him among moderns in immediate connection 
 with Ranke. And he is, indeed, so far as I have 
 observed, as yet the only historian whom any one, as 
 Professor Manrenbrecher essayed to do in discussion 
 some years ago — has ventured to compare with Ranke. 
 The relation between these two great historians, who 
 for years worked side by side at the same university, 
 was unfortunately not the best. The causes of this 
 may here so much the better be left unexplained, in 
 that the undersigned, to tell the truth, is unable clearly 
 to assign the ultimate reason for the phenomenon. 
 Meanwhile let us all the more rejoice — remembering 
 a word from Goethe — in the fact that we can call two 
 such men with their mighty creations forever 'our own.' 
 The aged Ranke still l works away with the strength 
 of youth upon his Universal History, for whose com- 
 pletion all adherents and admirers of this great his- 
 torian heartily wish him undiminished mental as well 
 as bodily freshness. Droysen, some thirteen years 
 younger, to the great pain of his numerous pupils 
 and reverers, is much earlier than many expected re- 
 moved from temporal scenes. With a constitution ten- 
 der on the whole, Droysen long ago felt his power de- 
 clining, and nothing but the great energy with which 
 he bore up in spite of increasingly morbid conditions 
 made it possible for him to continue his lectures till 
 just before last Whitsuntide. Even three days before 
 this festival he delivered in his customary manner his 
 carefully elaborated paper in the Academy of Sciences, 
 a member of which he had been for years. 
 
 1 July, 1884. Kanke died on May 23, 188(3. 
 
JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. XXXV 
 
 Only a little while before his end, upon the 
 pressing advice of his physician, he saw himself neces- 
 sitated to announce by a notice upon the blackboard 
 a cessation of his lectures for that Semester. He was 
 destined never to resume them. His strength sank 
 rapidly. His children hurried anxiously to his side, 
 to ease by their devoted and loving care the last days 
 of their father, who since the death of his dearly loved 
 second wife had been alone. Meantime his weakness 
 increased, unconsciousness alternating with conscious- 
 ness. Once more, however, four days before his end, 
 Droysen's strong love for work came back. He had 
 himself carried to his writing-desk and his pen handed 
 him. But the fingers that had so often guided it now 
 refused the service. Deeply moved, Droysen laid down 
 the pen, tears streaming from his eyes. He knew it 
 now ; he was at the goal. He proceeded to arrange 
 everything with care, even in respect to his funeral. 
 On the evening of June 18th the shadows of death 
 sank down around him deeper and deeper. But yet, 
 clear to the last, he had for every tender service of 
 love, bringing its brief alleviation, its transient coolness 
 to the heated head, a mild, friendly smile of thanks. 
 Thus, surrounded by the faithful, ministering love of 
 his children, he fell softly and calmly asleep. 
 
 Wind and clouds now play over the spot which con- 
 ceals what of Droysen was mortal ; but the breath of 
 immortality also sighs above that grave and sweeps 
 withal through the works which he created. 
 
 Have, i>in anima. 
 
 Dr. HERM. KRUGER. 
 
 BoLTENHAGEN, July, 1884. 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 
 
Outline of the Principles of History. 
 
 No one will withhold from historical studies the 
 recognition of having, like others, their place in the 
 living scientific movement of our age. New historical 
 discoveries are busily making, old beliefs are examined 
 afresh, and the results presented in appropriate form. 
 
 But if we demand a scientific raison cC etre for these 
 studies, if we wish to know their relation to other 
 forms of human knowledge, and the underlying reason 
 why they take the course they do, they are not in con- 
 dition to give satisfactory information. 
 
 Not that they regard themselves logically above such 
 questions, or incompetent to solve them. Now and 
 then an attempt has been made to do this, the solution 
 having been sometimes put forward within the very 
 circle of historical studies, sometimes borrowed from 
 other branches of learning. By some the history of 
 the world is assigned a place in the Encyclopedia of 
 Philosophy. Writers of a different tendency, skeptical 
 about logical necessities, all the more confidently on 
 this account recommend us to develop history out of 
 material conditions, out of the figures put down in 
 statistics. Another, and he only expresses in the form 
 of a theory what men without number are thinking or 
 have thought, questions the very existence of ' so-called 
 history.' w Peoples exist purely in the abstract ; the 
 
 3 
 
4 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 individual is the real thing. The history of the world 
 is strictly a mere accidental configuration, destitute of 
 metaphysical significance.' Elsewhere, pious zeal - 
 pious, of course, more in appearance than in reality, 
 insists upon substituting the miraculous workings of 
 God's power under his unsearchable decree, for the 
 natural causal connection of human things, a doctrine 
 having this advantage, at least, that, being stated, it is , 
 under no further indebtedness to the understanding. 
 
 Within the sphere of historical studies, even so early 
 as the close of the Eighteenth Century, the Gottingen 
 school of that day had busied itself with these general 
 questions ; and they have been handled afresh from 
 time to time ever since. Writers have undertaken to 
 show that history is ' essentially political history,' and 
 that the many sorts of elementary, auxiliary and other 
 sciences belonging to our department group themselves 
 around this kernel. Then the essence of history has 
 been recognized as consisting in method, and this __ 
 characterized as a ' criticism of the sources,' as a setting 
 forth of the '■pure fact.' Others have found the de- 
 finitive task of our science in artistic exposition, ; the 
 work of the historical artist,' and even celebrate as the 
 greatest historian of our time him whose exposition 
 approaches nearest to Sir Walter Scott's romances. 
 
 The historical sense is too active in human nature 
 not to have been forced to find its expression early, 
 and, wherever conditions were fortunate, in appropriate 
 forms ; and it is this natural tact which points out the 
 way and gives the form to our studies even at the 
 present time. But the pretensions of the science 
 could not be satisfied with this. It must make clear 
 
PEmCIPLES OF HISTORY. 5 
 
 to itself its aims, its means, its foundations. Only 
 thus can it exalt itself to the height of its task ; only 
 thus, to use expressions from Bacon, can it set aside 
 the preconceptions now governing its procedure, the 
 idols of the theatre, tribe, forum and den, for whose 
 maintenance just as powerful interests are active now 
 as once interposed in favor of astrology, of lawsuits 
 against witches, and of belief in pious and impious 
 witchcraft. By thus becoming conscious, history will 
 make good its jurisdiction over an incomparably wider 
 realm of human interests than it is likely or possible 
 that the science should master otherwise. 
 
 The need of attaining clear conceptions touching our 
 science and its problem, every instructor who has to 
 introduce youth into the study will feel, just as I have, 
 though others will have found out how to satisfy it in 
 a different manner. I for my part was urged to such 
 investigations especially by a sort of questions which 
 are usually passed over because in our daily experience 
 they seem to have been solved long ago. 
 
 The political events of to-day, to-morrow belong to 
 history. The business transaction of to-day, if of con- 
 sequence enough, takes rank after a generation, as a 
 piece of history. How is it that these mere affairs turn 
 into history ? 1 What criterion is to determine whether 
 they become history or not? The contract of purchase 
 concluded to-day between private individuals, — is it 
 the thousand years that transforms it into an historical 
 document ? 
 
 Every one declares history to be an important means 
 of culture ; and in the education of to-day it certainly 
 1 Geschafte into Gexrhichte. 
 
6 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 is a weighty element. But why is it thus ? In what 
 form ? Did not history render the same service to the 
 Greeks of the age of Pericles'? To be sure the form 
 was different then, — probably that of the Homeric 
 Songs. And how can national poems have had to 
 Greeks and to Germany under the Hohenstauffen the 
 educational value of historical instruction? 
 
 Observation of the present teaches us how, from 
 different points of view, every matter of fact is differ- 
 ently apprehended, described and connected with 
 others ; how every transaction in private as well as in 
 public life receives explanations of the most various 
 kinds. A man who judges carefully will find it 
 difficult to gather out of the plenitude of utterances 
 so different, even a moderately safe and permanent 
 picture of what has been done and of what has been 
 purposed. Will the correct judgment be any more 
 certain to be found after a hundred years, out of the so 
 soon lessened mass of materials ? Does criticism of the 
 sources lead to anything more than the reproduction of 
 views once held? Does it lead to the 'pure fact? ' 
 
 And if such querying is possible as to the ' objective ' 
 content of history, what becomes of historical truth? 
 Can history be in any sense characterized by truth 
 without being correct? Are those right who speak of 
 history in general as a fable agreed upon ? A certain 
 natural feeling, as well as the undoubting and agreeing 
 judgment of all times tells us that it is not so, that 
 there is in human things a unity, a truth, a might, 
 which, the greater and more mysterious it is, so much 
 the more challenges the mind to fathom it and to get 
 acquainted with it. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. i 
 
 Right here another list of questions presented itself, 
 questions touching the relation of this potency in his- 
 tory to the individual, touching his position between 
 this and the moral potencies which bear him on and 
 bring him to self-realization, touching his duties and 
 his highest duty; considerations leading far beyond the 
 immediate compass of our study, and of course, con- 
 vincing us that the problem by them presented was to 
 be investigated only in its most general connections. 
 Could one venture to undertake such investigation 
 with only the circle of information and attainments 
 that grow out of the historian's studies? Could 
 these studies presume, as the studies of nature have 
 done with so splendid a result, to make themselves 
 their own foundation ? One thing was clear : that if 
 the historian, with his merely historical cognizance of 
 what philosophy, theology, the observation of nature, 
 etc., have wrought out, was to take hold of these 
 difficult problems, he must have no inclination to 
 speculate, but must in his own empirical way proceed 
 from the simple and solid basis of what has been done 
 and discovered. 
 
 I found in William von Humboldt's investigations 
 the thought which, so I believed, opened the way to a 
 sort of a solution to these problems. He seemed to me 
 to be for the historical sciences a Bacon. We cannot 
 speak of a philosophical system of Humboldt's, but 
 what the ancient expression ascribes to the greatest of 
 historians, 'political understanding and the power of 
 interpretation,' 1 these he possessed in remarkable har- 
 mony. His thinking, his investigations, likewise the 
 
 1 t/ <ruj>ecrts TroXtTiKri Kal r) dvva.fj.is epfj.Tjv€VTiKr/. 
 
8 JOHANN GUSTAV DKOYSEN. 
 
 wonderful knowledge of the world won through that 
 active life of his, led him to a view of the world which 
 had its centre of gravity in his own strong and 
 thoroughly cultivated sense of the ethical. As he 
 traced out the practical and the ideal creations of the 
 human race, languages in particular, he became ac- 
 quainted with the at once spiritual and sensuous nature 
 of the race, as well as with the perpetually creative 
 power which, as men mutually impart and receive, 
 belongs to the expression of this nature; these, the 
 nature and the power, being the two elements in which 
 the moral world, producing, so to speak, ever new 
 electric currents in ever new polarizations, moves by 
 creating forms and creates forms by moving. 
 
 It appeared to me possible by the aid of these 
 thoughts to pierce deeper into the cpiiestion of our 
 science, to explain its problem and its procedure, and, 
 from a true recognition of its nature, to develop in a 
 general way its proper form. 
 
 In the following paragraphs I have endeavored to 
 do this. They have grown out of lectures delivered 
 by me upon the Encyclopedia and Methodology of 
 History. My aim has been to give in this " Outline " 
 a general view of the whole subject, and to hint at 
 particulars only so far as seemed necessary to make 
 clear the sense and connection. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I. — HISTORY. 
 
 § 1. 
 
 Nature and History are the Avidest conceptions under 
 which the human mind apprehends the world of phe- 
 nomena. And it apprehends them thus, according to 
 the intuitions of time and space, which present them- 
 selves to it as, in order to comprehend them, it analyzes 
 for itself in its own way the restless movement of 
 shifting phenomena. 
 
 Objectively, phenomena do not separate themselves 
 according to space and time ; it is our apprehension 
 that thus distinguishes them, according as they appear 
 to relate themselves more to space or to time. 
 
 The conceptions of time and space increase in defin- 
 iteness and content in the measure in which the side- 
 by-side character of that which is and the successive 
 character of that which has become, are perceived, 
 investigated and understood. 
 
 §2. 
 
 The restless movement in the world of phenomena 
 causes us to apprehend things as in, a constant develop- 
 ment, this transition on the part of some seeming 
 merely to repeat itself periodically, in case of others 
 to supplement the repetition with ascent, addition, 
 
10 JOHANX GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 ceaseless growth, the system continually making, so to 
 speak, ' a contribution to itself.' x In those phenomena 
 in which we discover an advance of this kind, we take 
 the successive character, the element of time, as the 
 determining thing. These Ave grasp and bring together 
 as History. 
 
 §3. 
 
 To the human eye, only what pertains to man appears 
 to partake of this constant upward and onward motion, 
 and of this, such motion appears to be the essence and 
 the business. The ensemble of this restless progress 
 upward is the moral world. Only to this does the ex- 
 pression 'History' find its full application. 
 
 § 4. 
 
 The science of History is the result of empirical 
 perception, experience and investigation, laropia. All 
 empirical knowledge depends upon the ' specific energy ' 
 of the nerves of sense, through the excitation of which 
 the mind receives, not 'images' but signs of things 
 without, which signs this excitation has brought before 
 it. Thus it develops for itself systems of signs, in 
 which the corresponding external things present them- 
 selves to it, constituting a world of ideas. In these 
 the mind, continually correcting, enlarging and build- 
 ing up its world, finds itself in possession of the 
 external world, that is, so far as it can and must possess 
 this in order to grasp it, and, by knowledge, will and 
 formative power, rule it. 
 
 1 iirldoa-is els axn6. Aristotle, de anima, II, 5, 7. Appendix II at the 
 end of this " Outline " is an amplification of §§ 1 and 2 here. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 11 
 
 § 5. 
 All empirical investigation governs itself according 
 to the data to which it is directed, and it can only 
 direct itself to such data as are immediately present to 
 it and susceptible of being cognized through the senses. 
 The data for historical investigation are not past things, 
 for these have disappeared, but things which are still 
 present here and now, whether recollections of what 
 was done, or remnants of things that have existed and 
 of events that have occurred. 
 
 § 6. 
 
 Every point in the present is one which has come to 
 be. That which it was and the manner whereby it 
 came to be, — these have passed away. Still, ideally, 
 its past character is yet present in it. Only ideally, 
 however, as faded traces and suppressed gleams. 
 Apart from knowledge these are as if they existed not. 
 Only searching vision, the insight of investigation, is 
 able to resuscitate them to a new life, and thus cause 
 light to shine back into the empty darkness of the past. 
 Yet what becomes clear is not past events as past. 
 These exist no longer. It is so much of those past 
 things as still abides in the now and the here. These 
 quickened traces of past things stand to us in the 
 stead of their originals, mentally constituting the 
 'present' of those originals. 
 
 The finite mind possesses only the now and the here. 
 But it enlarges for itself this poverty-stricken 
 narrowness of its existence, forward by means of its 
 willing and its hopes, backward through the fullness of 
 
\± JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 it.s memories. Thus, ideally lo'eking together in itself 
 both the future and the past, it possesses an experience 
 analogous to eternity. The mind illuminates its 
 present with the vision and knowledge of past events, 
 which yet have neither existence nor duration save in 
 and through the mind itself. 'Memory, that mother of 
 Muses, who shapes all things,' 1 creates for it the forms 
 and the materials for a world which is in the truest 
 sense the mind's own. 
 
 §7. 
 It is only the traces which man has left, only what 
 mail's hand and man's mind has touched, formed, 
 stamped, that thus lights up before us afresh. As he 
 goes on fixing imprints and creating form and order, in 
 every such utterance the human being brings into 
 existenee an expression of his individual nature, of his 
 'I.' Whatever residue of such human expressions and 
 imprints is anywise, anywhere, present to ns, that 
 speaks to ns and we can understand it. 
 
 II. -THE HISTORICAL .METHOD. 
 
 §8. 
 The method of historical investigation is determined 
 by the morphological character of its material. The 
 essence of historical method is understanding by means 
 of investigation. 
 
 §9. 
 
 The possibility of this understanding arises from the 
 kinship of our nature with that of the utterances lying 
 
 ^ lj.vri/j.7jv dirdvTOJv /j.ovffofxriTop epydv-qv. — JEschylus, Prometheus. 4*'! I 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 13 
 
 before us as historical material. A further condition 
 of this possibility is the fact that man's nature, at once 
 sensuous and spiritual, speaks forth every one of its 
 inner processes in some form apprehensible by the 
 senses, mirrors these inner processes, indeed, in every 
 utterance. On being perceived, the utterance, by pro- 
 jecting itself into the inner experience of the per- 
 cipient, calls forth the same inner process. Thus, on 
 hearing the cry of anguish we have a sense of the 
 anguish felt by him who cries. Animals, plants and 
 the things of the inorganic world are understood by us 
 only in part, only in a certain way, in certain relations, 
 namely those wherein these things seem to us to corre- 
 spond to categories of our thinking. Those things 
 have for us no individual, at least no personal, exist- 
 ence. Inasmuch as we seize and understand them only 
 in the relations named, we do not scruple to set them at 
 naught as to their individual existences, to dismember 
 and destroy them, to use and consume them. With 
 human beings, on the other hand, with human utter- 
 ances and creations, we have and feel that we have an 
 essential kinship and reciprocity of nature : every k I ' 
 enclosed in itself, yet each in its utterances disclosing 
 itself to every other. 
 
 § 10. 
 The individual utterance is understood as a simple 
 speaking forth of the inner nature, involving possibility 
 of inference backward to that inner nature. This 
 inner nature, offering this utterance in the way of a 
 specimen, is understood as a central force, in itself one 
 and the same, yet declaring its nature in this single 
 voice, as in every one of its external efforts and expres- 
 
14 -MM I ANN GUSTAV DKOYSEN. 
 
 sions. The individual is understood in the total, and 
 the total from the individual. 
 
 The person who understands, because he, like him 
 whom he has to understand, is an L I,' a totality in him- 
 self, fills out for himself the other's totality from the 
 individual utterance and the individual utterance from 
 the other's totality. The process of understanding is 
 as truly synthetic as analytic, as truly inductive as 
 deductive. 
 
 § 11. 
 
 From the logical mechanism of the understanding 
 process there is to be distinguished the act of the 
 faculty of understanding. This act results, under the 
 conditions above explained, as an immediate intuition, 
 wherein soul blends with soul, creatively, after the 
 manner of conception in coition. 
 
 § 12. 
 
 The human being is, in essential nature, a totality in 
 himself, but realizes this character only in understand- 
 ing others and being understood by them, in the moral 
 partnerships of family, people, state, religion, etc. 
 
 The individual is only relatively a totality. He 
 understands and is understood only as a specimen and 
 expression of the partnerships Avhose member he is and 
 in whose essence and development he has part, him- 
 self being but an expression of this essence and 
 development. 
 
 The combined influence of times, peoples, states, 
 religions, etc., is only a sort of an expression of the 
 absolute totality, whose reality we instinctively surmise 
 and believe in because it comes before us in our ' Cogito 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 15 
 
 ergo sum,' that is, as the certainty of our own personal 
 being, and as the most indubitable fact which we can 
 know. 
 
 § 13. 
 The false alternative between the materialistic and 
 the idealistic view of the world reconciles itself in the 
 historical, namely in the view to which the moral world 
 leads us ; for the essence of the moral world resides in 
 the fact that in it at every moment the contrast spoken 
 of reconciles itself in order to its own renewal, renews 
 itself in order to its own reconciliation. 
 
 § 14. 
 According to the objects and according to the nature 
 of human thinking, the three possible scientific methods 
 are : the speculative, philosophically or theologically, 
 the physical, and the historical. Their essence is to 
 find out, to explain, to understand. Hence the old 
 canon of the sciences : Logic, Physics, Ethics, which 
 are not three ways to one goal, but the three sides of a 
 prism, through which the human eye, if it will, may, 
 in colored reflection, catch foregleams of the eternal 
 light whose direct splendor it would not be able to bear. 
 
 § 15. 
 The moral world, ceaselessly moved by many ends, 
 and finally, so we instinctively surmise and believe, by 
 the supreme end, is in a state of restless development 
 and of internal elevation and growth, 'on and on, as 
 man eternalizes himself.' 1 Considered in the successive 
 character of these its movements the moral world pre- 
 
 1 A<1 ora ad ora come L'uom s'etrrna. — Dante, Inferno, XV, 84. 
 
16 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 sents itself to us as History. With every advancing 
 step in this development and growth, the historical 
 understanding becomes wider and deeper. History, 
 that is, is better understood and itself understands 
 better. The knowledge of History is History itself. 
 Restlessly working on, it cannot but deepen its investi- 
 gations and broaden its circle of vision. 
 
 Historical things have their truth in the moral forces, 
 as natural things have theirs in the natural 'laws,' 
 mechanical, physical, chemical, etc. Historical things 
 are the perpetual actualization of these moral forces. 
 To think historically, means to see their truth in the 
 actualities resulting from that moral energy. 
 
 HI. — THE PROBLEM OF THIS "OUTLINE." 
 
 ■/'/;■ or 
 
 § 16. 
 This Historik or discussion of the Principles of 
 History is not an encyclopedia of the historical sciences, 
 or a philosophy or theology of history, or a physics of 
 the historical world. Least of all is it a discipline for 
 the artistic composition of history. It must set its own 
 problem, which is to be an organon of historical thinking 
 and investigation. 
 
 § 17. 
 Canvass the history of this problem from Thucydides 
 and Polybius to Jean Bodin and Lessing. The kernel of 
 the question is in William von Humboldt's Introduction 
 to the Kawi-layxguage. See also Gervinus's ' Principles 
 of History' [Historik'], Comte's 'Positive Philosophy,' 
 Schaffle's 'Structure and Life of the Social Body,' etc. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 17 
 
 § 18. 
 
 '■Historik ' embraces three doctrines : that of method 
 for historical investigation, that of the system belonging 
 to the matter to be historically investigated, and that of 
 the systematic presentation of the historical results. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF METHOD. 
 
 § 19. 
 
 Historical investigation presupposes the reflection 
 that even the content of our k I ' is a mediated content, 
 one that has been developed, that is, is an historical 
 result (§ 12.) The recognized means of this mediation 
 is memory, avdfxvrjcns- Our knowledge is at first a 
 something received, a something which has passed 
 over to us, ours, yet as if not ours. It is a long step to 
 where we feel ourselves free with this knowledge, and 
 have it freely at our command. Out of the totality 
 of that which we thus fully possess, out of our appre- 
 ciation of this k content ' as ours, and our recognition of 
 ourselves in it, there is begotten in us (§ 10) a new idea 
 of this knowledge as a whole, of each part of it and of 
 each particular element in it. This idea arises in us 
 involuntarily. There it is as a matter of fact. But is 
 the truth really as this idea presents it to us? To be 
 convinced touching its validity we must reflect upon 
 the manner in which it had origin in us; we must 
 investigate the combination of means through which 
 we come by it: we must test it. make it clear, prove it. 
 
18 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 I. _ INVENTION. 
 
 §20. 
 
 The point of departure in investigation is historical 
 interrogation. Invention puts us in possession of the 
 materials for historical work. It is the miner's art, that 
 of finding" and bringing to the light, k the underground 
 work.' 1 
 
 § 21. 
 
 Historical material is partly what is still immediately 
 present, hailing from the times which we are seeking to 
 understand (Remains), partly whatever ideas human 
 beings have obtained of those times, and transmitted to 
 be remembered (Sources), partly things wherein both 
 these forms of material are combined (Monuments). 
 
 § 22. 
 
 Amid the abundance of historical Remains may be 
 distinguished : 
 
 (a) Works whose form is due to human agency, — 
 artistic, technical etc., as roads, plats of leveled ground, 
 and the like. 
 
 (5) Conditions constituting what we have spoken 
 of as the 'moral partnerships,' viz., customs and usages, 
 laws, political and ecclesiastical ordinances, and the 
 like. 
 
 (e) Whatever sets forth thoughts, items of knowl- 
 edge, or intellectual processes of any kind, as philoso- 
 phemes, literatures, mythological beliefs, etc., also 
 historical works as products of their time. 
 
 1 Niebuhr. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 19 
 
 (d) Papers relating to business, as correspondence, 
 business bills, archives of all soils, and other things of 
 this nature. 
 
 § 23. 
 
 Remains in the creation of which the purpose of 
 
 • serving the memory cooperated with other aims, such 
 
 as ornaments, practical utility, etc., are Monuments. 
 
 - These include documents to certify to posterity when a 
 
 piece of work was concluded, likewise all kinds of 
 
 works of art, inscriptions, medals, and in a certain 
 
 sense, coins. Finally comes in every kind of marking 
 
 by means of monuments, even the stone landmark, and 
 
 things as insignificant as titles, arms, and names. 
 
 §24. 
 
 Under Sources belong past events as human under- 
 standing has apprehended them, shaped them to itself 
 and passed them over to the service of the memory. 
 
 Every recollection of the past, so long as it is not 
 externally fixed, as in verses, in sacred formulae, or in 
 written composition of some kind, partakes the life 
 and the transformation of the circle of ideas belonging 
 to those who cherish it. Tradition in the Church of 
 Rome illustrates this. The credibility of oral tradition 
 is only quantitatively different from that of written. 
 
 Our Sources may grasp the subject either in a pre- 
 dominantly subjective way, or in the closest possible 
 accord with the facts, 'pragmatically.' To the sub- 
 jective order belong partly such Sources as present a 
 view clouded by a superabundance of phantasy or of 
 feeling, like legends, historical lyrics, etc., partly such 
 as use historical matter of fact only as material for 
 
20 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 considerations and arguments of a different nature, as 
 speeches in court, parliament, etc., documents relating 
 to public law, etc. The Prophets, Dante, Aristophanes, 
 etc., also illustrate Sources of this kind. 
 
 Within the ' pragmatic ' order of Sources we may dis- 
 tinguish those which mostly impart only isolated facts, 
 from those which classify more. In addition to this 
 difference the aim with which the facts were appre- 
 hended will help to determine the meaning of our 
 Sources. The apprehension will obviously vary accord- 
 ing as it was intended to aid the author's own memory, 
 or for others, for one person, or a few, or all, for 
 contemporaries or for posterity, for instruction, for 
 entertainment, or for purposes of business. 
 
 The so-called ' Derived Sources ' are views of other 
 men's views. v 
 
 §25. 
 
 The three species of materials will vary in relative 
 value according to the purpose for which the investiga- 
 tor is to use them. Even the very best give him, so to 
 speak, only polarized light. By the use of what we have 
 termed Remains, he may with entire certainty penetrate 
 to minor data, yes, even to the very minutest. The 
 keener his sight in fathoming these deeps the more will 
 he get out of them. However, data of this class form 
 but accidental and scattered fragments. 
 
 In consequence of the nature of its materials empiri- 
 cal inquiry in history must dispense with the great 
 helps which corresponding study in the physical world 
 possesses in observation and experiment. Still the fact 
 that all sorts of experiments are yet making in the 
 moral world and under the most thorough observation, 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 21 
 
 compensates historical investigation through the clear- 
 ing up of its obscure l x' by means of analogies. 
 
 § 26. 
 Historical Interrogation results in our ascertaining 
 what Remains, Monuments and Sources are to be 
 brought forward for the ' reply.' It is the art of his- 
 torical ' investigation ' to extend and complete the 
 historical material ; and especially : (a) by search and 
 discovery, as of a diviner ; (ft) by combination, which, 
 putting things in their proper places, makes into mate- 
 rial for history that which appears not to be such : 
 witness A. Kirchoff's History of the Greek alphabet ; 
 
 (c) by analogy, which casts light upon the subject 
 through similarities of result under similar conditions ; 
 
 (d) by hypothesis, proof of which is evidence for the 
 event in question. The last would be illustrated by 
 the level ground plats of the ancient German villages 
 as expressions of order in the primitive community. 
 
 § 27. 
 
 'Invention,' like each of the parts of Historical 
 Method yet to be named, presupposes the continual co- 
 operation of the others. For every one of them all 
 historical knowledge and all other related knowledge, 
 whether philological or pertaining to general facts, 
 serves as an auxiliary science. 
 
 IL_CEITICLSM. 
 
 § 28. 
 Criticism does not seek 'the exact historical fact'; 
 for every so-called historical fact, apart from the means 
 
22 .mil ANN GUSTAY DROYSEN. 
 
 leading thereto, and the connections, conditions and 
 purposes which were active at the same time, is a com- 
 plex of acts of will, often many, helping and hinder- 
 ing, and acts of will which, as such, passed away with 
 the time to which they belonged, and lie before us now 
 only either in the remnants of contemporary and 
 related transformations and occurrences, or as made 
 known in the views and recollections of men. 
 
 § 29. 
 
 The task of Criticism is to determine what relation 
 the material still before us bears to the acts of will 
 whereof it testifies. The forms of the criticism are 
 determined by the relation which the material to be 
 investigated bears to those acts of will which gave it 
 
 shape. 
 
 §30. 
 
 (rt) We must inquire whether the material actually 
 is what it is taken to be or pretends to be. Reply 
 to this question is given by ' criticism of its genuine- 
 ness.' Proof of ungenuineness is complete when the 
 time, the origin or the aim of the falsification is proved. 
 The thing so proved ungenuine may serve in some other 
 direction as weighty historical material. 
 
 One application of the criticism of genuineness in 
 reference to a given department is Diplomatics. The 
 business of this branch is the testing of the genuineness 
 of records and other pieces of writing by outward signs, 
 in contrast with the so-called ' higher criticism.' 
 
 § 31. 
 (J) We must also inquire whether the material 
 has maintained its original and pretended character 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 2o 
 
 unchanged, or, if not, what changes are to be recognized 
 as having occurred in it and as therefore to be left out 
 of account. This question is answered in the ' criticism 
 of earlier and later forms,' known as 'diacritical pro- 
 cedure.' This procedure usually results in the pointing- 
 out of a so-called 'development' from the first form 
 to the form before us. In such a demonstration the 
 separated parts are mutually explanatory and confirm- 
 atory [Ferdinand Christian Baurl. 
 
 § 32. 
 
 (c) We must inquire, still further, whether the 
 material, under the circumstances of its origin, did 
 or could involve all that for which it is, or offers itself 
 to be, taken as voucher; or whether, immediately at 
 that time and place, it must not have been, or may not 
 even have proposed to be, correct only partially, 
 relatively and in a certain way. This question finds 
 answer in the ' criticism of correctness or validity.' 
 
 This form of criticism must ask : 
 
 (1) Whether, judged by human experience, the fact 
 stated is in itself possible. 
 
 (2) Whether it is possible considering the alleged 
 conditions and circumstances. 
 
 In both these cases the criticism measures, in reference 
 to the objects or events in question, both the given view 
 itself and also the correctness of this view. 
 
 (3) Whether any beclouding of vision is recognizable 
 in the motives, aims or personal relations of the author 
 of the account. 
 
 (4) Whether incorrectness was unavoidable through 
 insufficiency of the means for observation and forming 
 judgment. 
 
24 JOHANN GUSTAV DBOYSEN. 
 
 Ill each of these cases, (3) and (4), criticism gauges 
 both the view arrived at and its correctness, in the light 
 of the process and of the instrumentality by which the 
 view was arrived at. 
 
 §33. 
 
 The application of the criticism of correctness to 
 Sources is technically called k Source-criticism. ' If this 
 is understood only in the sense of pointing out how one 
 author has used another, it is only an occasional means, 
 one among others, its business being to present or 
 prepare demonstration of correctness or incorrectness. 
 
 The Criticism of Sources distinguishes : 
 
 (1) What a given source-document has grasped, 
 reproduced, and now presents, as events, transactions, 
 original words, earlier sources, etc. 
 
 (2) What general coloring this source-document 
 received from the circle of ideas jitrevalent at the time 
 and place of its origin, for instance the ' demonological ' 
 coloring of the fifteenth century, or the ennui, as of 
 epigoni, characterizing the Alexandrian period. 
 
 (3) What individual complexion the author himself 
 has in virtue of his culture, his character, some special 
 tendency, or the like. 
 
 § 34 
 
 The primitive ' source ' does not consist in the dreary 
 maze of contemporary opinions, accounts, reports. This 
 is only the daily repeated atmospheric process of 
 ascending and self-precipitating vapors from which the 
 true Sources or springs are replenished. 
 
 As a rule the earliest historical composition respecting 
 an event governs all subsequent tradition. That case 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 2o 
 
 is the most fortunate where this composition is contem- 
 porary with the events which it handles; that is, before 
 the effects produced by events have brought any 
 change of view concerning the efficient facts and 
 persons, and before any new, epoch-making event has 
 created a different world of thought. 
 
 § 35. 
 
 (a) We must inquire whether the material as we 
 have it still contains all the points for which the inves- 
 tigation seeks testimony, or in what measure it is 
 incomplete. This question finds answer in the critical 
 arrangement of the verified material. 
 
 Always, or nearly always,, we have before us only 
 single points out of the facts as they originally were ; 
 only individual views of what existed and occurred. 
 Any historical material has gaps in it, and even the 
 most exact investigation is not free from errors. The 
 measure of sharpness wherewith these gaps and possible 
 errors are signalized is the measure of the certainty of 
 our investigation. 
 
 The critical arrangement is not settled merely accord- 
 ing to the point of view of succession in time, as with 
 annals. The more manifold the points of view from 
 which the same materials are arranged, the larger is 
 the number of solid points which the intersecting lines 
 will afford. The registers in the Corpus Inscriptionum 
 Latinarum illustrate this. 
 
 § 36. 
 
 The outcome of criticism is not 'the exact historical 
 fact.' It is the placing of the material in such a con- 
 
26 JOIIANN GTTSTAV DIIOYSEN. 
 
 <lit ion as renders possible a relatively safe and correct 
 view. The conscientiousness which refuses to go 
 beyond the immediate results of criticism, makes the 
 mistake of resigning all further work with these results 
 to fancy, instead of going on to find such rules for this 
 further work as shall assure its correctness. 
 
 III. — INTERPRETATION. 
 § 37. 
 
 Beginnings are neither sought by criticism nor de- 
 manded by interpretation. In the moral Avorld nothing 
 is without medial antecedents. Yet historical investi- 
 gation does not propose to explain, in the sense of 
 deriving, as mere effects and developments, the latter 
 from the earlier, or phenomena from laws. If the 
 logical necessity of the later lay in the earlier, then, 
 instead of the moral world, there would be something 
 analogous to eternal matter and the changes of matter. 
 Were the life of History oidy a reproduction of what 
 is permanently identical with itself, it would be void of 
 freedom and responsibility, without moral content and 
 only of an organic nature. The essence of interpreta- 
 tion lies in seeing realities in past events, realities with 
 that certain plenitude of conditions which they must 
 have had in order that they might become realities. 
 
 § 38. 
 
 As in walking are united (a) the mechanism of the 
 
 moving limbs, (&) the tension of the muscles according 
 
 to the evenness or unevenness, smoothness, hardness, 
 
 etc., of the ground, (c) the will which moves the body. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 27 
 
 and (f?) the purpose which leads the person who wills 
 to walk, so criticism completes itself from four points 
 of view. The exaltation of any one of these as by 
 itself essentially or exclusively determinative of va- 
 lidity, is the source of many theoretical and practical 
 errors. It is doctrinaire (§ 92). 
 
 §39. 
 
 (a) ' Pragmatic ' interpretation takes up the body of 
 criticised facts according to the causal nexus naturally 
 binding together the original events in their course, in 
 order to re-construct this course of events as it once 
 actually was. By ' body of criticised facts ' is meant 
 those remains and those views of the once actual course 
 of events which have been verified and arranged in the 
 work of criticism. In case of plentiful material the 
 simple demonstrative procedure is sufficient. If the 
 material is defective, the nature of the thing as made 
 known to us from similar cases leads us to apply 
 analogy, viz., a comparison between the known quantity 
 and the ' x ' in question. The analogy between the 
 two k x's ' so far as they are mutually supplementary, 
 yields the ' comparative procedure.' The supposition 
 of a connection in which the matter possessed by us 
 only in fragments displays itself as fitting into the 
 ' curve ' of the assumed connection, thus confirming' 
 itself visibly, as it were, is ' hypothesis.' 
 
 § 40. 
 (6) The l interpretation of the conditions ' proceeds 
 upon the truth that we must think the conditions which 
 made the original fact possible and possible so and so, 
 
28 -IOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 as a part of the fact itself, and hence as certain to 
 enter, however fragmentarily, into all views and rem- 
 nants of the fact. Thus the position, in itself not 
 beautiful, of the Borghese gladiator reveals the line of 
 the pediment for which the statue was intended. 
 
 The conditions relating to space, omitting innumer- 
 able insignificant ones, receive elucidation from details 
 like the geography of a theatre of war and of a, battle- 
 field, the position of a country's natural boundaries, 
 the valley formation of Egypt, the marshes upon the 
 North Sea, and many more. 
 
 The conditions of time comprise that already present 
 state of things into which the event in question made 
 its entry, and the contemporary events which had a 
 more or less determinative effect upon it. 
 
 A third order of conditions is found in the means, 
 material and moral, by which the course of things was 
 rendered possible and actual. The material means in- 
 clude the manifold sorts of substances and instruments, 
 and along with these an immeasurable held of "techno- 
 logical interpretation,' which thus far remains almost 
 untouched. The moral means include the passions of 
 men, the moods of the masses, the prejudices or views 
 governing them, etc. The general, the statesman, the 
 artist, who wishes to operate upon the masses and 
 through them, has his character in that same measure 
 determined by them. 
 
 § 41. 
 
 (6-) "Psychological interpretation' seeks in the 
 given fact, the acts of will which produced it. Such 
 interpretation may take cognizance of the subject who 
 willed, and of the energy of his volition so far as this 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 29 
 
 influenced the course of events under survey, and of 
 his intellectual force so far as this determined his will. 
 But neither did the subject of the volition fully ex- 
 haust himself in this one turn of things, nor did that 
 which came to pass come to pass merely through the 
 strength of this one man's will or intelligence. It is 
 neither the pure nor the entire expression of his per- 
 sonality- 
 Personality as such does not find in History the tests 
 of its value, in what it undertakes, does or suffers 
 there. To it is reserved a circle of its own, wherein, 
 however poor or rich in gifts it may be, significant or 
 insignificant in respect to effects or results, it lias to do 
 with itself and its God, a circle of its own, wherein is 
 the truest source of its willing and existence, where 
 that takes place which justifies or condemns it before 
 itself and before God. His conscience QG-eicisseri) is the 
 most certain (gewisseste) thing which the individual 
 possesses ; it is the truth of his existence. Into this 
 sanctuary the ken of investigation does not press. 
 
 Human being understands human being, but only 
 in an external way; each perceives the other's act, 
 speech, mien, yet always only this one deed or 
 feature, tins single element. Prove that I under- 
 stand my fellow lightly or entirely I cannot. It is 
 another thing for a friend to believe in his friend ; or, 
 in a case of love, for the one party to hold fast to the 
 other's imasfe as that other's true self : ' Thou must 
 be so for so I understand thee.' That sort of confi- 
 dence is the secret of all education. 
 
 The poets, as Shakspere, develop the course of events 
 which they present, from the characters of certain 
 
30 .JOIIANN GTJSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 persons. They poetize, on to each event a psychological 
 interpretation. But in actual facts effects come 
 through other elements than personalities. Things 
 take their course in spite of the will, good or bad, of 
 those through whom they come to pass. The con- 
 tinuity of History, its work and its advance, lies in the 
 moral potencies (§ 15). In these potencies all have 
 part, each in his place. Through them, mediately, 
 even the meanest and poorest participates in the life of 
 History. But even the most highly endowed man, 
 strongest of will and most exalted in power, is only an 
 element in this movement o"f the moral potencies, 
 though always, in his place, specially characteristic and 
 efficient. In this role and in this only does historical 
 investigation view any man, not for his person's sake 
 but on account of his position or work in this or that 
 one among the moral potencies, on account of the idea 
 whose bearer he was. 
 
 §42. 
 
 (jT) The k interpretation of ideas ' fills up the gap 
 which psychological interpretation leaves. For the 
 individual builds a world for himself in that measure 
 in which he has part in the moral potencies. And the 
 more diligently and successfully he builds, in his place 
 and for the brief space of his life, the more has he 
 furthered those partnerships in which he lived and 
 which lived in him; and the more has he on his part 
 served the moral potencies which survive him. With- 
 out them man were not man; but they develop, grow 
 and rise only in the united work of men, of peoples, of 
 times, only in the progressive history whose develop- 
 ment and growth is their 1111101(11112:. 
 

 PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 31 
 
 The ethical ' system ' of any period is only the grasp- 
 ing and bringing together of the ethical life thus far 
 unfolded; only an attempt to sum it up and speak it 
 out according to its theoretical content. 
 r Every period is a complex of the outworkings of all 
 the moral potencies, however developed or rudimentary 
 their unfolding may be, however much the higher may 
 still be veiled in the lower, as when the State existed in 
 the form of the family. 
 
 § 43. 
 
 In the great diversity of the moral spheres wherein 
 human life takes root and moves, investigation finds 
 the list of questions with which it approaches any 
 given historical material in order to interpret it as to 
 its ethical content. 
 
 We can proceed in either of two ways. 
 
 (a) We may take a statical view, observing in the 
 materials before us the state of the moral formations as 
 they existed at the time in question and up to that 
 time. In this way we get the ' ethical horizon ' within 
 which stood everything that was and was done at this 
 period among this people. We thus secure the measure 
 for every individual process within this period among 
 this people. 
 
 (5) Or, dynamically, we may seek and seize the 
 progressive elements in the given state of moral forma- 
 tions, and by putting these into relation with that 
 state to which they have led in acting themselves out, 
 catch sight of the movement at that period and among 
 that people, the striving and struggling of men, their 
 victories and defeats. 
 
32 JOHANN GUST AY DROYKEN. 
 
 §44. 
 
 In such movement it is now this, now that, among 
 the moral potencies, which takes the lead, and it often 
 seems as if this leading potency were alone involved, 
 eveiything else being subordinate to it. As the 
 thought of this time, this people, this man, it inflames 
 men's minds and leads, dominates and impels society to 
 take a step essentially forward. 
 
 The thought or the complex of thoughts which 
 interpretation points out in any course of events, is to 
 us the truth of that course of events. The course of 
 events is to us the effect, the phenomenal form, of this 
 thought. 
 
 Our methodical reproduction of the facts must by its 
 correctness enable the thought to make good its char- 
 acter as underlying the course of events, and the course 
 of events to justify the thought. For that thought is 
 to us true to which an existence corresponds, and that 
 existence true which corresponds to a thought. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF SYSTEM. 
 
 § 45. 
 The realm of historical method is the cosmos of the 
 moral world. The moral world as it sweeps restlessly 
 on from past to future every moment forms an endless 
 maze of affairs, circumstances, interests, and conflicts. 
 There are manifold points of view, technical, legal, 
 religious, political, and the like, from which this moral 
 scene can be considered and scientifically handled. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 33 
 
 What goes on daily in this moral world is never done 
 or purposed by any sensible person as history. It is 
 only subsequently that a peculiar way of surveying the 
 finished and the past makes history out of common 
 doings {Greschi elite out of Gesehdfte). To apprehend 
 the moral world historically means to apprehend it 
 according to its development and growth, according to 
 the causal succession of its movement (§ 15). 
 
 § 46. 
 The secret of all movement or motion is its end 
 (to o6ev rj Kivrjais). Inasmuch as historical investigation 
 is directed to the advancing movement of the moral 
 world, takes account of its direction, sees end after end 
 unveil and fulfil itself, it infers and concludes (§12) 
 to a supreme end wherein the movement completes 
 itself, wherein what makes this world of men keep 
 moving, circling and ceaselessly hastening on is seen to 
 be rest, consummation, an eternal present. 
 
 §47. 
 
 The human being during his space of life in the 
 finite has, in virtue of his likeness to God, to be an 
 infinite subject, a totality in himself, his own measure 
 and end ; but not being like the Godhead also a causa 
 sui, he has not to become, unaided, what he ought to 
 be. Into his character as a human being he develops 
 only in the moral partnerships. The moral potencies 
 form him (§ 12). They live in him and he lives in 
 them. Born into an already existent moral world — 
 for the first child had father and mother — thus born 
 to be conscious, free and responsible, each man for 
 
34 J OH ANN GUST A V DROYSEN. 
 
 himself (§ 4"2) in these moral partnerships and using 
 them as helps, builds his little world, the bee-cell of 
 his 'I.' Each of these cells is conditioned and sup- 
 ported by its neighbor, and in turn conditions and 
 supports. All together they form a restlessly growing 
 building, conditioned and supported by the existence 
 of its minute, yes, of its minutest parts. 
 
 § 48. 
 
 By this building and forming process in its individu- 
 als, developing as it works, humanity creates the cosmos 
 of the moral world. Without the restless growth and 
 development of its moral partnerships, that is, without 
 History, its work would be like a mountain of infusoria 
 shells. Without the consciousness of continuity, viz., 
 without History, its work would be as barren as a plain 
 of sand, the sport of the winds. Without the conscious- 
 ness of ends and of the highest end, without the 
 Theodicy of History, its continuity would be a mere 
 motion in a circle, repeating itself. 
 
 §49. 
 
 The moral world is to be considered historically : 
 
 I. In relation to the Matter wherein it creates forms. 
 
 II. In relation to the Forms into which it shapes 
 itself. 
 
 III. In relation to the Workers through whom it 
 builds itself up. 
 
 IV. In relation to the Ends which realize themselves 
 in its movement. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 35 
 
 I.— THE WORK OF HISTORY IN RELATION 
 TO ITS KINDS OF MATTER. 
 
 § 50. 
 
 The Matter for the work of History comprises what 
 nature originally gave and what History itself has 
 evolved. Both these are at once the condition and the 
 means of this work, at once its business and its limit- 
 ation. The ceaseless enlargement of the matter for 
 the work is the measure of the enlargement of the 
 work itself. 
 
 §51. 
 
 (a) As man studies and comprehends nature, rules 
 and transforms nature to serve human ends, the work 
 of History lifts nature up into the moral sphere, and 
 spreads abroad over the circle of the earth the signs, 
 the aerugo nobilis of human will and power. Such 
 signs are discoveries, inventions, improvements, agri- 
 culture, mining, the training and breeding of animals, 
 changes produced in countries and landscapes by the 
 transmigration of plants and animals, the circle of the 
 sciences, and many others parallel to each of those 
 named. 
 
 §52. 
 
 (5) The work of History causes the mere creature 
 man, by discovering in the sweat of his brow what he 
 is designed to be, to realize this design and to discover 
 it by realizing it. Out of the mere genus homo it thus 
 makes the historical man, which means the moral man. 
 Amplification of this would involve Anthropology, 
 
36 JOHANN GUST A V DROYSEN. 
 
 Ethnography, the question of races and of the crossing 
 of races, the propagation of the human race, and so on. 
 
 §53. 
 (c) Those human formations which have come to be, 
 resulting from the work and circumstances of History, 
 are constantly becoming in their turn norm to that 
 work, as well as impulse and means to new work. 
 Hence the value of statistics. Hence the historian 
 must study poverty, commerce, etc., and all that com- 
 prises the so-called history of civilization. 
 
 §54. 
 (<7) Out of the purposes of men and the ardor or 
 passion with which they surrender to these, History 
 forms her incentives and impelling forces, and produces 
 her massive effects. National spirit, particularism, 
 fanaticism, rivalries and so on illustrate this. 
 
 II. — THE WORK OF HISTORY IX RELATION 
 TO ITS FORMS. 
 
 § 55. 
 The Forms in which the work of History moves on 
 are the moral partnerships, whose types, as moral poten- 
 cies, are in the heart and conscience of human beings. 
 ' He who cannot enter into community or who on 
 account of his self-sufficiency needs nothing, is either a 
 brute or a God." 1 In the moral potencies lies the 
 
 1 '0 Se nr) dvva.fj.evos Koivwveiv 77 firiSev 8e6fievos 5t avrapKeiav . . . ?; d-qptov 
 97 8e6s i<TTL. — Aristotle. Politics I. "1, 12. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 37 
 
 educating might of History, and every one has part 
 in the life of History in the measure in which he has 
 part in them (§ 41). Human relations are moral in 
 the measure in which they educate; and they educate 
 in the measure in which the moral element in them 
 is mighty. 
 
 Each of these moral potencies creates its sphere, its 
 world for itself, shut up in itself, and yet making the 
 demand on every man to come forward with it and 
 labor on its behalf, at the same time setting in activity 
 and working out in it his own moral worth. 
 
 The individual is not an atom of humanity, one of the 
 molecules which laid together in infinite number would 
 produce humanity. He belongs to his family, people, 
 state, etc., is a living member only through them, 'as 
 the hand separate from the body is no longer a hand.' 
 
 The doctrine of native human rights goes beyond its 
 own premises. It forgets that there is no right without 
 duty, and that a thousand kinds of obligations are 
 fulfilled toward every individual before he himself lias 
 been able to acquire a right. 
 
 §56. 
 
 The partnerships, in accordance with the nature of 
 the human being, spring either from a natural need, or 
 from an ideal one, or partly from each. As moral 
 potencies they have a development and a history as well 
 in themselves as in relation to other potencies and to 
 everything else. 
 
 §57. 
 
 A. In the 'natural partnerships' that which is 
 natural lias to be made moral by means of a primary 
 
38 .milANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 process of will, by means of love, fidelity, duty etc. 
 The fact that among- men a partnership of soul issues 
 from a natural need, and from mere impulse a life of 
 volition and obligation and a permanent bond, dis- 
 tinguishes the human being from the lower creatures. 
 
 § 58. 
 (a) The Family. — Here, in the narrowest space, 
 in the forms lowest down towards the creature, are 
 found the strongest moral ties, the deepest social sub- 
 structures. Under this rubric consider, with much 
 else, the gradations of marriage up to monogamy, 
 paternal authority, the family hearth, so-called patri- 
 archal government, and blood-vengeance. 
 
 § 59. 
 (6) The Neighborhood. — Here come, into view 
 the first developments of friction in the spatial colloca- 
 tion of men, involving the foundation of the village 
 community as a great family. Consider the elders, 
 the constituency of the community, the various plots 
 of land. 
 
 §60. 
 
 (c) The Tribe. — Here we have a relationship 
 not 'by nature but by convention,' l 'by an appetency 
 for the union,' 2 as Dicaearchus says. Notice the tribal 
 
 1 ' Not (pvaei but 64<rei. ' 
 
 2 tt66ui rrjs <xvv65ov. Partly owning to the misspelling, in Droysen's 
 text, of one of them, these Greek words caused the translator much 
 perplexity, for the dissipation of which he is not a little indebted to 
 the accomplished Hellenist, Arnold Green, Esq., of Providence. They 
 are from a fragment of Dicsearchus handed down by Stephanus of 
 Byzantium, and are given by Carolus Mullerus, Fragmenta Tlistnri- 
 carum Groecarum, vol. ii, p. 238, left hand column. §0, as follows: 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 39 
 
 hero, the gentilieia sacra, racial and clan formations, 
 cognationes et propinquitates, battles and cleavages. 
 
 §61. 
 
 (</) The People. — We have here to study com- 
 monwealths and religions as instituted by nature, the 
 k ethnic ' age of the world, the fixedness and the mo- 
 bility of peoples' types, in fact the whole subject of 
 the so-called comparative psychology of peoples, and of 
 'Demology,' including the principle of nationality. 
 
 § 62. 
 
 B. In the 'ideal partnerships ' it is the task of the 
 spiritual nature to find expression for itself and to pass 
 over into the sphere of actual things, that thus it 
 may be capable of being perceived and understood, 
 becoming a bond between spirits, a common treasure. 
 
 § 63. 
 (a) Speech and the Languages. — All thinking- 
 is speaking, moving in forms which language has 
 evolved even when carrying these further. Vocal 
 imitation is not mere mimicry of sound, but a trans- 
 lation of perceptions into vocal expression. Trace the 
 successive stages of linguistic evolution, in multiplicity 
 of forms, complexity of syntax, growth of specific 
 
 djcrre irpdrepov irbdop rijs avvodov yevo/m^vris d5e\0cus crvv d5e\</>£ ; or, as 
 Miiller prefers to read : yore irodq ttjs avvodov rrjs irporepov yevop.tvris. 
 He is talking about the transference of a woman from one phratria to 
 another, and says: "so that formerly, owing to the desire of coition 
 of sisters with a brother, a different community of sacra was estab- 
 lished." Miiller prefers to make the formerly refer to the desire for 
 coition rather than to the time of the establishment of the different 
 community of sacred rites. — Tr. 
 
40 ' -IOI1ANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 meanings to words. Accordingly, by no means does 
 'the life of language cease where the life of History 
 begins' (Schleicher). Study sound and writing, also 
 the differences of thought-activity in languages, with 
 phonetic writing and pictorial or ophthalmic languages. 
 
 §64. 
 
 (/*) The Beautiful and the Arts. — Artistic 
 imitation is no mere copying, mirroring, or echo, but 
 the reproduction of an impression made upon the soul, 
 sometimes even to the mistaking of one sense for an- 
 other, as the danseuse dances the spring. Mark the 
 ideal, and also the agreeableness of the imitation of it 
 (Kumohr). The technical and the musical also fall 
 here. 
 
 § 65. 
 
 (c) The True and the Sciences. — Canvass sci- 
 entific truth, the bearing of methods, the nature of 
 skepticism, of doctrine, of hypothesis, of Nominalism 
 and Realism. 
 
 §66. 
 
 (oT) The Sacred and Religions. — Every relig- 
 ion is an expression of the need and helplessness of 
 finite being, and of the need it has to know itself at 
 the same time as enclosed in and with an infinite Being. 
 It is an attempted expression of our feeling after God, 
 of our confidence of sanctification and salvation through 
 him, of our certainty of the Eternal, Perfect, and Abso- 
 lute. Hence faith and worship, religion and theology, 
 and the sacred history involved in every religion. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 41 
 
 §67. 
 
 C. In the ' practical partnerships ' move those inter- 
 ests which are contending and debatable, always at the 
 same time bound together and driven on by men's 
 natural needs, always called to and always pressing 
 towards ideal ends or results, though never coming 
 to any but a finitely perfect condition or a finitely 
 satisfied rest. 
 
 §68. 
 
 (a) The Sphere of Society. — Society assumes to 
 offer to every man that position in which the moral 
 partnerships shall best supplement him and ho them. 
 Here come up for review distinctions between classes, 
 differences of blood and of culture, tradition and 
 custom, the conservative elements of society, parties, 
 public opinion, and so on; in fine, all that goes to 
 constitute the social republic. 
 
 §69. 
 
 (5) The Sphere of Property. — Economic organ- 
 ization assumes to embrace and to determine all the 
 economic conditions and means necessarily pertaining 
 to the moral partnerships : acquisition and competition, 
 capital and labor, wealth and poverty, barter and money- 
 exchange, the variation of values and the development 
 of credit. Consider the State as a form of communism. 
 
 §70. 
 (<?) The Sphere of Justice. — The system of 
 justice assumes to give foundation to and to regulate all 
 the jural forms in which the moral partnerships proceed. 
 
4li .loll ANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 Gauge here the reach of the sphere of justice. k Justice 
 must remain justice,' but also must wish to be nothing 
 else. The modes of establishing inputting it into 
 operation and extending its scope are to be dwelt upon, 
 as also the conception of the State as just an organ for 
 securing justice (Rechtsstani ). 
 
 §71. 
 
 (d) The Sphere of Authority. — The State as- 
 sumes to be the sum, the united organism, of all the 
 moral partnerships, their common home and harbor, and 
 so far their end. 
 
 The State is the public power, offensive and defensive, 
 both at home and abroad. In the life of the State and 
 of States, authority is thus the essential tiling, in the 
 same way as love is in the sphere of the family, faith 
 in the sphere of the church, the beautiful in the sphere 
 of art, etc. The law of authority is valid in the 
 political world like that of gravity in the world of 
 matter. l A ship a span long is no ship at all." 
 
 Only the State has the duty or the right to be the 
 authority in this sense. Wherever justice, property, 
 society, wherever even the church, the people or the 
 community come into the position of authority, the 
 nature of the State is either not yet discovered or lost 
 in degeneracy. Public authority is highest where the 
 fullest labor, health and freedom of all the moral 
 spheres feed it. The State is not related to the other 
 moral spheres merely as they to one another, but em- 
 braces them all within its own scope. Under its pro- 
 tection and laws, under its guardianship and responsi- 
 bility they all move forward to its salvation or ruin. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 4o 
 
 The State is not the sum of the individuals whom it 
 comprehends, nor does it arise from their will, nor does 
 it exist on account of their will. 
 
 The more rough the form of the State the more does 
 force take in it the place of authority ; so much the 
 poorer is it in freedom. 
 
 Out of the chaos of mere peoples State upon State 
 crystallizes itself. Their relation to one another moves 
 on from the adversus hostem eeterna auctoritas esto, 1 to 
 treaty and peaceful commerce and to international law. 
 The Federal State, the confederation of States, the 
 system of States, the world-system of States, — these 
 are the ever further reaching wave-circles of this move- 
 ment. 
 
 Ill THE WORK OF HISTORY IN RELATION 
 TO THE WORKERS. 
 
 §72. 
 All changes and formations in the moral world are 
 wrought hy acts of will, as in the organic world every- 
 thing is formed from cells. Acts of will are the 
 efficients even where we say that the State, the people, 
 the church, etc., do this and that. 
 
 § 73. 
 Every human being is a moral subject ; only thus is 
 he a human being. He has to build for himself his 
 moral world (§ 47). In every individual, as a per- 
 sonality in part already developed and in part still the 
 
 1 'As against a foreigner your title shall be eternal.' Roman Law 
 of the Twelve Tables. 
 
•44 .loll ANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 subject of development, we feel an infinite interest. 
 Witness how insatiably poetry and romance follow out 
 and realize this interest. 
 
 Even the narrow, the very narrowest of human 
 relations, strivings, activities, etc., have a process, a 
 history, and are for the persons involved, historical. 
 So family histories, local histories, special histories. 
 But over all these and such histories is History. 
 
 §74. 
 As this marriage, this work of art, this State, stands 
 related to the idea of the family, of the beautiful, of 
 authority, so does the empirical, ephemeral ' I ' (§ 55) 
 stand related to that ' I ' in which the philosopher 
 thinks, the artist creates, the jndge judges, the historian 
 investigates. The Universal, this ' I ' of humanity, is 
 the subject of History. History is the yvdOi vavTov l of 
 Humanity, its consciousness. 
 
 § 75. 
 The life pulse of historical movement is freedom. 
 The word 'freedom 1 has been understood differently 
 at different times. Primarily it has only a negative 
 meaning. The real meaning of freedom is unhindered 
 participation in the life and work of each one of the 
 moral spheres, not being disturbed or hampered in one 
 of them by another, and not being excluded from any. 
 Every one of them claims the whole of every man, not 
 seldom to the total exclusion of the others. In the 
 collision of duties, in the constantly painful perform- 
 ance of these, and in the often crushing result, finite 
 human nature sinks beneath the postulate of freedom. 
 1 ' Know Thyself. ' 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 45 
 
 §76. 
 
 The problem of the life of History is not to he 
 sought in the false alternative between freedom and 
 necessity. Necessity is the opposite of arbitrariness, 
 accident, aimlessness ; morality is the '■ought' — lying 
 in the realm of the good, and is not subject to compul- 
 sion. Being free is the opposite of suffering compul- 
 sion, of being dead of will, destitute of ' I ' ; the moral 
 is the willing of the good and is not subject to 
 compulsion. 
 
 The highest freedom is to live for the highest good. 
 for the end supreme (§ 4(5), toward which the move- 
 ment of all movements, the science of which is His- 
 tory, is directed. Hence 'the full royal freedom of 
 the moral man' (Fichte); hence the consecrating word, 
 'wherefore I do crown and mitre thee over thyself." 1 
 
 § 77. 
 All movement in the historical world goes on in this 
 way: Thought, which is the ideal counterpart of things 
 as they really exist, develops itself as things ought to 
 be; and characters, filled with the thought, bring the 
 things to its standard. The condition of being thus 
 filled with a thought is passion (7ra$os), which comes 
 under obligation and responsibility in and through 
 action, according to the old proverb, ' act much, suffer 
 much.' 2 
 
 § 78. 
 Thoughts constitute the criticism of that which is 
 and yet is not as it should be. Inasmuch as they may 
 
 1 Perch? io te sopra te corono e mitrio. — Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 
 142. 2 dpd<rc.i>Ti iraOelv. — JEschylus, Choephori, 313. 
 
46 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 bring conditions to their level, then broaden out and 
 harden themselves into accord with custom, conserva- 
 tism and obstinacy, new criticism is demanded, and 
 thus on and on. 
 
 The continuity of this censorship of thought, — 
 'those who hold the torch passing it from one to 
 another 11 — is what Hegel in his Philosophy of His- 
 tory calls 'the Dialectic of History.' 
 
 § 79. 
 That out of the already given conditions new 
 thoughts arise and out of the thoughts new conditions, 
 
 — this is the work of men. The many, indeed, living 
 only for their own interests and the business of the 
 present, devoted to petty, ephemeral aims, following 
 habit, the general stream, the nearest suggestions — 
 these work for History without choice or will, in the 
 bulk, unfreely. They are the noisy thyrsus-bearers in 
 the festal train of the god, 'but feAV are the genuine 
 Bacchanals' [/3a/<x o i Se re iravpoi^. 2 
 
 To anticipate the new thoughts in the movement of 
 the moral world, to express them, to realize them, that 
 is historical greatness, 'giving name to rolling time.' 
 
 IV.— THE WORK OF HISTORY IK RELATION 
 TO ITS ENDS. 
 
 § 80. 
 All development and growth is movement toward an 
 end, which is to be fulfilled by the movement, thus 
 
 1 XafXTrdoa '4x ovres 5ia5iocrovcrLv a\\r)\ois. 
 
 2 For the Greek, and the entire reference, see Plato, Phaedo, 69 C. 
 
 — Tr. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 47 
 
 coming to its realization. In the moral world end 
 links itself to end in an infinite chain. Every one of 
 these ends has primarily its own way to go and its own 
 development to further, but at the same time each is a 
 condition for the others and is conditioned by them. 
 Often enough they repress, interrupt and contradict 
 one another. Often appear here and there temporary 
 and partial steps backwards; but always only that 
 presently, with so much stronger advance and with 
 exalted elasticity, work may he pushed forward at some 
 new spot or in some new form, each form impelling the 
 rest and impelled by them. 
 
 § 81. 
 
 The highest end, which conditions without being 
 conditioned, moving them all, embracing them all, ex- 
 plaining them all, that is, the supreme end (§ 15), is 
 not to be discovered by empirical investigation. 
 
 Out of the self-consciousness of our 'I' (§ 12), out 
 of the pressure of our moral will and our sense of 
 obligation (§ 76), out of that longing after the one 
 complete, eternal Being in whom our needy, ephemeral 
 and fragmentary existence first feels its lack supplied, 
 there reveals itself to us, in addition to the other 
 ' proofs ' of the existence of God, the one which is for 
 us most demonstrative. 
 
 Evil cleaves to the finite spirit ; it is the shadow of 
 its fmiteness when it is turned to the light. It belongs 
 in the economy of the historical movement, but only 
 ' as what vanishes in the process of things, destined for 
 destruction.' 
 
48 JollANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 §82. 
 
 What their genus is to animals and plants — for the 
 genus exists ' in order that they may participate in the 
 timeless and the divine ' 1 — that History is to human 
 beings. 
 
 Ethics is the doctrine of the moral potencies and not 
 
 merely that of the relations of persons to them and in 
 
 them. Ethics and History are co-ordinates, as it were ; 
 
 for History furnishes the genesis of the 'postulate of 
 
 the practical reason,' which postulate w pure reason' 
 
 could not discover. 
 
 §83. 
 
 History is humanity becoming and being conscious 
 
 concerning itself. The epochs of History are not the 
 
 life periods of this ' I ' of Humanity — empirically we 
 
 do not know whether this race 'I' is growing old or 
 
 renewing its youth, only that it does not continue to 
 
 be what it was or is, — but they are stages in that ego's 
 
 self-knowledge, its knowledge of the world and of 
 
 God. 
 
 § 84. 
 
 According to the number of these traversed stages, 
 
 grows the expression which man is able to form of the 
 
 Supreme End, of his longing after it, and of the way 
 
 to it. The fact that this expression broadens, enlarges 
 
 and deepens itself with every stage, is the only thing 
 
 which can wish to pass for the advancement of 
 
 humanity. 
 
 §85. 
 
 To the finite eye beginning and end are veiled, but 
 
 the direction of the streaming movement it can by in- 
 
 1 tva rod ari kclI tov Belov fi€T^x wfflv - 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 49 
 
 vestigation detect. Condemned to the narrow limit of 
 the here and the now, it yet dimly espies the whence 
 and the whither. It sees what it sees by being filled 
 with a light in which and from which everything is, 
 even its seeing being a remote reflection of that light 
 itself. The direct glory of that light our eye conld 
 not bear, but practicing, clarifying, inflaming its vision 
 in the illuminated spheres which do disclose themselves 
 to it, it catches gleams of ever greater reaches, ever 
 more comprehensive empyreans. Among the circles 
 thus formed the human world with its history is one. 
 The historically great is only a mote in the sun-mist of 
 this manifestation of God. 
 
 § 86. 
 History is Humanity's knowledge of itself, its cer- 
 tainty about itself. Ifc-k not 'the light and the truth,' 
 but a search therefor, a sermon thereupon, a consecra- 
 tion thereto. It is like John the Baptist, c not that Light 
 but sent to bear witness of that Light.' ] 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF SYSTEMATIC 
 PRESENTATION. 
 
 .§87. 
 
 As everything which moves the mind calls for a 
 
 corresponding expression wherein the mind may shape 
 
 lit, so also the results of historical investigation need 
 
 their forms of expression — 'an exposition of history,' 
 
 1 Ovk 9jv to rp&s dXK tin /xapTvprjcrri trepl rod <pwr6<i. — John, i : 8. 
 
50 JOHANN GTTSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 as Herodotus 1 has it — in order that the investigation 
 may, as it were, give an account of what it has purposed 
 and attained. 
 
 §88. 
 
 The forms of presentation here are not determined 
 after the analogy of epic, lyric, or dramatic composi- 
 tion,' 2 or hy the 'distribution of time and space applied 
 to the acts of human freedom in the State,' 3 or follow- 
 ing the accidental medley of chronicles, remarkable 
 events, pictures from antiquity, narratives ' of exploits 
 in which the narrator personally took part ; ' 4 but they are 
 iixed by the double nature of the matter investigated. 
 
 The investigation which knows how, from the present 
 and from certain elements given in the present and 
 used by it as historical material, to produce ideas of 
 processes and circumstances pertaining to past events, — 
 such investigation has a double nature ; it is two tilings 
 at once. It is the enrichment and deepening of the 
 present by clearing up past events pertaining to it, and 
 it is a clearing up of these past events by unlocking and 
 unfolding certain remnants of them, remnants of facts 
 which were relatively obscure and perhaps exceedingly 
 so, even when present. 
 
 Still, in every case, however fruitful the investigation 
 may have been, ideas arrived at by its aid are far from 
 reaching the fullness of content, movement, manifold- 
 ness of forms and of real energy which the orginal things 
 had when they constituted ' the present.' Always, 
 moreover, whatever form may be chosen for the exposi- 
 tion of the results which investigation has brought 
 
 1 iaroplrjs d7r65a£ts. 2 Gervinns. 3 Wachsmuth. 
 
 4 Aulas Gellius : quibus rcl»i* agendis inierfuerit is qui narret. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 51 
 
 forth, this exposition will and can correspond only par- 
 tially, in a certain way and from certain points of view, 
 to the existence of things as they appeared when pres- 
 ent, in the eyes of men then living and active. In this 
 it is analogous to representations by graphic methods. 
 
 §89. 
 
 For a long time historical presentation satisfied itself 
 with taking up views contained in oral and written 
 sources, re-shaping them more or less, and recounting 
 them afresh ; and the facts regarded through this illu- 
 sion as i transmitted,' passed for valid History, much as 
 if the history of Alexander the ( rreat's successors should 
 pass as nothing but a succession of wars, because for- 
 sooth our sources for that period speak of scarcely any- 
 thing else but wars. Only since we have begun to 
 recognize Monuments and Remains as included in his- 
 torical material and to avail ourselves of them method- 
 ically, has the investigation of past events gone deeper 
 and planted itself on a firmer foundation. And with 
 the discovery of the immeasurable gaps in our historical 
 knowledge, which investigation has not yet filled up 
 and perhaps now never can fill up, investigation espies 
 ever wider breadths to the domains with which it has 
 to do, and anticipates one day filling them with life. 
 The presentation of the results of investigation will be 
 more correct the more its consciousness of its ignorance 
 equals that of its knowledge (§ 35). 
 
 §90. 
 
 (a) ' Interrogative exposition,' to set forth the result 
 at which investigation has arrived, uses the form of in- 
 
52 ,K>II ANN GUSTAV DK0Y8EN. 
 
 vestigation itself. This species of exposition is not a re- 
 port or minute register of the actual investigation, includ 
 ing its false steps, errors and resultless measures, but it 
 proceeds as if what has at last been discovered in the 
 investigation were now first to be discovered or sought. 
 It is a general imitation of preceding search or discovery. 
 It may adopt the form of starting out from assumed 
 ignorance with a question or a dilemma and seeking the 
 true answer, as the advocate at the bar proceeds when 
 he has to prove the so-called subjective fact from the 
 objective ; or the form of taking some certain datum, 
 following up its signs and traces and finding further 
 data at every step until at last the total result stands 
 before us connected and complete. This course cor- 
 responds to that of the judge, who, in conducting an 
 inquiry, has to infer the subjective fact from the ob- 
 jective. The former of these methods is the more con- 
 vincing and demonstrative ; the latter is the more 
 dramatic and commands the attention better. For both 
 it is essential to avoid what is so natural, introducing a 
 chaos of irrelevant topics, casting less light upon the 
 subject than upon the learned idleness of the author. 
 
 §91. 
 
 (5) ' Recitative exposition ' sets forth the results of 
 investigation as a course of events in imitation of its 
 actual development. It takes those results and shapes 
 from them an image of the genesis of the historical 
 facts upon which investigation has been at work. It is 
 only in appearance that the k facts ' in such a case 
 speak for themselves, alone, exclusively, ' objectively.' 
 Without the narrator to make them speak, they would 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 53 
 
 be dumb. It is not objectivity that is the historian's 
 best glory. His justness consists in seeking to under- 
 stand. 
 
 Recitative exposition is possible in either of four forms: 
 
 (1) The 'pragmatic* shows how an event that was 
 premeditated or foreordained by fate, could occur, did 
 occur, and was forced to occur so and so, through the 
 movement of things converging upon that point. 
 
 (2) The ' monographic ' shows how in its develop- 
 ment and growth an historical formation grounded and 
 deepened itself and wrought itself out, brought forth 
 its genius, as it were. 
 
 \ (3) The "biographical' shows how the genius of an 
 historical personality determined from the beginning 
 the action and suffering of that personality, and also 
 manifested and attested itself in the same. 
 
 (4) The ' catastrophic ' shows various forms, tenden- 
 cies, interests, parties, etc., each with some right on its 
 .side, engaged in a battle, wherein the higher thought, 
 whose elements or sides display themselves in the 
 parties contending in the struggle, justifies and fulfils 
 itself by vanquishing and reconciling them. This 
 species of exposition shows how out of the wars of the 
 Titans a new world and the new gods came into being. 
 
 §92. 
 (c) ' Didactic exposition ' seizes the matter that has 
 been investigated, under the thought of its great his- 
 torical continuity, in order to bring out its significance 
 as instruction for the present. History is not instructive 
 in consequence of affording patterns for imitation or 
 rules for new application, but through the fact that we 
 
54 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 mentally live it over again and live according to it. ' It 
 is a repertory of ideas furnishing matter which judg- 
 ment must needs put into the crucible in order to 
 purify it." 1 
 
 Finished intellectual training is culture. This is 
 military, legal, theological, if intended for these callings, 
 or general culture if it has the aim of exercising and 
 developing in us not tins or that individual or technical 
 ability, but the human qualities in general. It may 
 then be well termed ' Humanity,' for ' precisely the 
 course whereby the human race arrived at its perfection, 
 every individual human being must have passed over ' 
 ( Lessing). 
 
 In the conception of this author's ' Education of 
 the Human Race,' culture — apart from special and 
 technical — derives its matter as well as its forms (§ 6) 
 from History. And indeed the fact that the great 
 movements of History complete themselves in a small 
 circle of typical formations, the greatest in a still 
 smaller circle, makes it possible valuably to apply His- 
 tory in a didactic way not only to the higher and 
 even the highest needs, but also to the elementary. 
 
 Are there forms of historical presentation for this 
 purpose? Are Herder's presentations of Universal 
 History, or Schlozer's, Johannes von Miiller's, Leo's, 
 or von Ranke's, patterns for this kind of historical 
 composition ? 
 
 No one will measure the worth of the sermon in the 
 Evangelical Church by printed sermons, still less desire 
 
 1 Frederic the Great, (Euvres, IV, p. xvii : Cest un repertoire 
 <Vid6es qui fournit de la matiere que le jugement doit passer an creuset 
 pour IVpurer. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 55 
 
 the enforcement of a canon securing for every Sunday 
 a sermon according to a prescribed pattern. Rather 
 should every sermon be a new witness to the living 
 evangelical spirit in our Church ; and so far as the 
 congregation is edified by them they are so. 
 
 The correct form of didactic exposition is the his- 
 torical instruction of youth. Particularly is this so 
 where it is in the hands of a teacher who moves in the 
 fields of History as master, with the highest possible 
 freedom and independence as an investigator, and by 
 communicating his instruction in ever new shapes and 
 turns bears witness to the spirit that fills and bears on 
 the life of History. 
 
 § 93. 
 
 (d) ' Discussive exposition ' takes the total result of 
 the investigation, gathers all its rays as in a concave 
 mirror, and turns them upon some definite point of 
 present interest, throwing light upon it thus in order 
 to ' set it clear.' It may be some question to be decided, 
 some pair of alternatives which is to yield a choice, or 
 some new phenomenon the understanding of which is 
 to be mastered. To everything new, not only political 
 facts, but also fresh discoveries, recent efforts in art and 
 science, etc., historical elucidation and comparison has 
 to assign its place in the progressive course and sweep 
 of human endeavor. We here refer to criticism, scien- 
 tific, aesthetic, of the publicist, etc. 
 
 The points to be established in any given discussion 
 lie partly within the subject discussed, as that this 
 nation, this power, this church, etc., has had, in virtue 
 of its historical antecedents, such or such a character. 
 For instance, the old i sint ut sunt aut non sint\ But 
 
56 .lolIANX GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 also in outside matters simply conditioning and deter- 
 mining the subject, and in fact in the whole congeries 
 of events prevailing at any moment, the elements which 
 give broad determination to its historical connection 
 are to be found, interpreted and applied. 
 
 The essence of theory is that it gathers from the 
 shaping and elaborating process of investigation its net 
 results, and imparts to them the form of a principle, a 
 lawgiving conclusion, with, indeed, a legitimate claim 
 to this character. The more the theory lias failed to 
 sum up all the elements, the more one-sidedly it brings 
 into prominence what lies nearest or is least active, 
 the more doctrinaire it is. This appears in that the 
 determinative element, which at any given time led to 
 the further step, was, with its favoring nature, present 
 and operative only for that case, under those circum- 
 stances, for that end. 
 
 Every State has its own politics, domestic as well as 
 foreign. Discussion, even in the press, in the council 
 of state, and in parliament, is reliable in proportion as 
 it is historical ; ruinous in the degree in which it bases 
 itself upon mere doctrines, or upon idols of the theater, 
 forum, den and tribe. 
 
 The practical significance of historical studies lies in 
 the fact that they, and they alone, hold up before the 
 State, or people, or army, its own picture. Especially is 
 historical study the basis for political improvement and 
 culture. The statesman is the historian in practice, 
 ' able to see into realities, and to do the things that are 
 to be done.' 1 The State is, however, but the most 
 complex among the organisms belonging to the moral 
 
 1 QewprjTiKbs tQv 6vtuv ko! TrpaKTinos tQv dedvrwv. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 57 
 
 potencies. Every formation of the kind requires similar 
 self-control through discussion. We may specify ec- 
 clesiastical government, the conduct of industrial under- 
 takings, the arrangement of a scientific expedition, and 
 such things. 
 
 § 94. 
 
 With the last named form of exposition our science 
 indeed enters wide realms ; but it cannot forbear to 
 affirm its authority also in these, in the same way as 
 the natural sciences have no hesitation in proceeding to 
 demonstrate their value wherever their methods show 
 themselves applicable. Even the investigations and 
 results of the natural sciences are not the work of 
 abstract observation and experiment, as if they uttered 
 no voice save that of the facts which have been observed 
 and interrogated. It is the mighty total of repeated 
 yet enlarging life-experiences displaying itself in the 
 continuity of History ; it is this which first gives to the 
 minds investigating in this field the elevation and 
 compass of views and thoughts enabling them thus to 
 observe and get things ready to be questioned, thus to 
 combine and conclude. The same is true of the specu- 
 lative sciences. For all growth in men's thinking and 
 invention, in their creative activity, determination and 
 efficiency, proceeds in respect to forms exclusively, and 
 to a great extent in respect to materials, from these 
 laboriously gotten results and repeated life experiences, 
 to investigate whose continuity is the task of History. 
 
 §95. 
 
 Our science does not pretend that its method of 
 investigation is the only scientific one (§ 14). It con- 
 
58 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 tents itself with being able in its expositions of results, 
 to give only so much as its province and investigation 
 enable it to get, only so much as its methods put within 
 its powers. And the more questions there are in its 
 various departments which it is conscious of being no 
 longer or not yet able satisfactorily to answer, the more 
 careful it will be about pretending that its result is 
 greater than it legitimately is or can be. The aim of 
 the historical expositor thus is to afford an idea elabor- 
 ated in the most certain measure possible and developed 
 in the closest possible accord with facts, of things which 
 were present and actual, whether in recent, distant or 
 most ancient times, though they now live and have a 
 contemporary character only in the knowledge of men. 
 
APPENDICES. 
 
 59 
 
I. — The Elevation of History to the Eank of 
 a Science. 
 
 BEING A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 IN ENGLAND, 1 BY II. T. BUCKLE. 
 
 Our age is fond of boasting that no preceding one 
 equals it in the freedom and boldness with which it 
 works or in the magnitude or the practical character of 
 its results. True, and we must, without envy, give the 
 prize to the natural sciences for what they accomplish 
 toward this result, and for the way in which they 
 accomplish it. 
 
 The energy of these branches of learning comes from 
 their having a completely clear consciousness of their 
 problems, their means, their methods, and from the fact 
 that they consider the things which they draw into the 
 compass of their investigations under those points of 
 view, and those only, upon which their method is based. 
 
 A French investigator strikingly characterizes this 
 field of studies in the following often cited words : 
 ' Whenever we can transfer one of the vital phenomena 
 to the class of the physical, we have made a new con- 
 quest in the sciences, whose realm is thereby so much 
 enlarged. In such a case, facts take the place of words, 
 analysis of hypothesis ; the laws of organic bodies fall 
 together with those of inorganic, and like them become 
 susceptible of explanation and simplification.' 
 
 !Vol. I, ed. 2, London, 1858. Vol. II, 1861. 
 
 61 
 
62 APPENDICES. 
 
 But this judgment here appears in a universal form, 
 whose legitimacy is more than questionable. Is it, 
 indeed, true that a new conquest is made in science 
 only when vital phenomena are transferred to the class 
 of physical? Would that be, in fact, a correct defini- 
 tion of the essence and scope of science? Should the 
 other realms of human discovery be obliged to recognize 
 themselves as of a scientific nature only in so far as 
 they are in a condition to transfer vital phenomena to 
 the class of physical phenomena? 
 
 It is not alone the astonishing performance and 
 results of work in natural science which spreads abroad 
 the conviction that its method is in a preeminent meas- 
 ure scientific, the only scientific one. The deeper' 
 ground of popularity attaching to that way of looking 
 at things whose counterpart is in the world of quanti- 
 tative phenomena, lies in the mode of culture prevalent 
 in our age, and in that stage of development at which 
 we have arrived socially and politically. 
 
 Buckle is not the first who has attempted to treat 
 the unscientific character of History, the ' methodless 
 matter,' 1 as an ancient writer names it, by the method 
 of exhibiting vital phenomena under points of view 
 analogous to those which are the starting-point of the 
 exact sciences. But a notion which others have inci- 
 dentally broached under some formula about ' natural 
 growth,' or carried out in the very inadequate and 
 merely figurative idea of the inorganic ; what still 
 others, as Comte in his attractive '-Pkilosophie Posi- 
 tive^ 1 have developed speculatively, Buckle undertakes 
 to ground in a comprehensive historical exposition. 
 
 1 d^6oSos v\r). See page 107. 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 63 
 
 He speaks with sharp expressions of the 'guild of 
 historians ' and their doings hitherto, of the poverty of 
 thought under which they have labored, and the absence 
 of principles in their investigations. He thinks that, 
 working in their way, ' every bootmaker is fitted for a 
 writer of history.' ' If, through indolence of thought 
 or natural limitation he is not capable of handling the 
 highest branches of knowledge, he needs only to apply 
 a few years to the reading of a certain number of books, 
 and he may write the history of a great people and 
 attain consideration in his profession.' Mr. Buckle finds 
 that 'as regards all higher tendencies of human think- 
 ing, History still lies in deplorable incompleteness and 
 presents so confused and anarchical an appearance as 
 were to be expected only in case of a subject with 
 unknown laws or destitute as yet even of a foundation.' 
 
 He purposes to raise History to a science by showing 
 how to demonstrate historical facts out of general laws. 
 He paves the way for this by setting forth that the 
 earliest and rudest conceptions touching the course of 
 human destiny were those indicated by the ideas of 
 chance and necessity, that ' in all probability ' out of 
 these grew later the ' dogmas ' of free will and pre- 
 destination, that both are in great degree ' mistakes,' or 
 that, as he adds, ' we at least have no adequate proof of 
 their truth.' He finds that all the changes of which 
 History is full, all the vicissitudes which have come upon 
 the human race, its advance and its decline, its happi- 
 ness and its misery, must be the fruit of a double agency, 
 the working of outer phenomena upon our nature and 
 the working of our nature upon outer phenomena.' 
 He has confidence that he has discovered the ' laws ' of 
 
04 APPENDICES. 
 
 this double influence, and that he has therefore elevated 
 the History of mankind to a science. 
 
 Buckle sees the peculiar historical content of Hu- 
 manity's life in that which he calls Civilization. He 
 has traced the history of civilization among the English, 
 French, Spanish, and Scotch, that he may illustrate by 
 these examples the application of his method and the 
 justification of the laws discovered by him. He arrives 
 at these laws, as he says, in the two only possible ways, 
 deduction and induction. He proceeds deductively in 
 •showing how the historical development of civilization 
 is explained by these laws, and inductively in that he 
 gathers out of the multitudinous facts which he has 
 collected in his studies the standard and important ones, 
 and finds the higher expression that unites them. 
 
 I will not attempt to criticise his induction and de- 
 duction from the point of view of the historical material 
 brought forward in substantiation of them. There 
 might be in his manner of employing sources, in the 
 choice of his statements, in the fitness of his combina- 
 tions, a large and constant intermixture of error, caprice 
 and inadequacy — as is actually the case — without 
 lessening the scientific importance of the problem 
 which he introduces to our science or of the method 
 which he recommends for its solution. Buckle the his- 
 torian would only have retired behind Buckle the 
 philosopher, and it would remain for professional his- 
 torians to exemplify and test the great discovery pre- 
 sented by him better than the gifted dilettant in our 
 studies could do. 
 
 Von Sybel's Zeitschrift contained some time ago a few 
 instructive essays upon Historical Method and the mode 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 65 
 
 and reach of historical knowledge, showing also how 
 guardedly History should deal with those questions 
 which, never of a purely historical nature, must yet he 
 treated and in her way solved by our science, unless she 
 is willing to run the risk of having problems offered 
 her, paths prescribed for her and definitions of science 
 thrust upon her from a foreign source, to which she 
 cannot agree without self-renunciation, without giving 
 over that calling in the field of human knowledge which 
 she and she alone can fulfil. 
 
 The recognition will not he denied to historical stud- 
 ies that even they have some part in the intellectual 
 movement of our age, that they are active in discovering 
 the new, in investigating anew what has been transmit- 
 ted, and in presenting results in appropriate forms. But 
 when asked their scientific justification and their rela- 
 tion to the other circles of human knowledge, when 
 asked what is the foundation of their procedure, what 
 the connection of their means and their problems, they 
 are up to date in no condition to give satisfactory in- 
 formation. However earnestly and thoroughly individ- 
 ual members of our 'guild' may have thought through 
 these questions, our science has not yet set its theory 
 and system on a firm footing. Meantime we console 
 ourselves with the thought that it is not only a science 
 but also an art, and perhaps — at least according to the 
 judgment of the public — an art more than a science. 
 
 We in Germany have slight ground to ignore the 
 high importance of advanced technique in our studies, 
 of our increasing practice and certitude in historical 
 criticism, or of the results which have been reached 
 through these means. The quest which concerns us 
 
66 APPENDICES. 
 
 here is another. A work like Buckle's is well adapted 
 to remind us how very unclear, contradictory and beset 
 with arbitrary opinions the foundations of our science 
 are. And the deep impression which the work has 
 made not 011I3* upon the numerous lovers of each newest 
 paradox, be it table-rapping, phalanstery, or the olive 
 leaf of the friends of peace, but also on many younger 
 adherents of historical studies, may well be a warning 
 to us at last to seek after the foundation of our science 
 too, in certitude about which the natural sciences since 
 Bacon — unless he is for other reasons undeserving of 
 place at the head of the development — are in advance 
 of us. 
 
 Now is it Buckle's merit to have achieved his pur- 
 pose ? Can he have developed the true meaning and 
 idea of the historical branches of learning or fixed the 
 extent of their application? Is he the Bacon of the 
 historical sciences and his work the Organon to teach 
 us to think historically? Has the method which he 
 propounds power to remove from the realms of histori- 
 cal knowledge the idols of the den, forum, theatre, and 
 so on, which even to-day obscure our sight in the form 
 of the l errors ', as he calls them, of free-will and divine 
 providence, the over-valuation of the moral principle in 
 relation to the intellectual, and the like ? And if he is 
 really right in appealing for the most interesting of his 
 fundamental propositions, that touching free-will, to our 
 Kant, who, like Buckle himself, as Buckle thinks, 
 regarded 'the reality of free-will in the world of phe- 
 nomena as an untenable assumption,' can he claim pri- 
 ority in the discovery just made in Germany with such 
 lively acclaim, that Kant's teaching is precisely the re- 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 67 
 
 verse of what has hitherto been supposed, and that the 
 result of Kant's two Critiques is that both are false? 
 
 Buckle's translator adverts to the fact that up to the 
 present time the Kantian philosophy has been the ex- 
 treme limit to which English thinkers have ventured. 
 He calls Buckle's philosophy -incomplete thinking, in 
 which crude criticism passes as philosophy,' and charges 
 upon his author, in spite of the Vedas and of Cousin 
 and Kant, the only non-English authorities he quotes, 
 ' a truly antique consciousness touching all proper 
 thought.' When, however, he greets the laws found by 
 Buckle k as a splendid and entirely truthful program of 
 the progress of the human mind,' and speaks of the 
 reformer's role which the work is to play even in Ger- 
 many, the utterances badly embarrass us. Must we, an 
 ' antistrophe ' as it were to our former statement, admit 
 that a large element of error, inadequacy and antique- 
 ness runs right through Buckle's philosophical buttress- 
 ing of his theory, yet does not lessen the reformatory 
 significance of his work, this being injured as little by 
 the philosophical as by the historical dilettantism of 
 the author? 
 
 Perhaps, free from the scholastic ' anticipations ' of 
 both these two departments, and so able to canvass the 
 more impartially the question of the nature and laws 
 of History, Buckle can point out the way, so clear 
 to every sound human understanding, by which History 
 is to be raised to the rank of a science. He repeatedly 
 confesses that he wishes to observe and argue entirely 
 and only as an empiricist. At least the great and simple 
 outlines of the empirical procedure, provided vision 
 is not obscured by prepossessions, appear plain to the 
 
68 APPENDICES. 
 
 so-called sound human understanding without explana- 
 tion. Such an understanding is precisely what the 
 English mean when they dub ' philosophical ' those 
 natural sciences whose laurels do not permit our inves- 
 tigators to rest. Buckle hopes, he says, 'to accomplish 
 for the History of mankind that or something similar 
 to that which other investigators have achieved in the 
 natural sciences, where occurrences apparently the most 
 irregular and contradictory have been explained and 
 proved to accord with certain unchangeable and general 
 laws. If we subject the processes of the human world 
 to a similar treatment, we certainly have every prospect 
 of a similar result.' 
 
 It is of interest to notice the quid pro quo from which 
 Buckle starts out. Can any one ' who believes in the 
 possibility of a science of History,' as he himself does 
 and as he is certain that by applying the method of 
 natural science he has established the propriety of 
 doing, fail to notice that this method does not so much 
 raise History to a science by itself as it places it among 
 the natural sciences ? Other sciences, too, such as 
 theology and philosophy, at the times when their 
 methods passed for the only scientific ones, believed 
 that they were entitled to take History and nature 
 under their jurisdiction, but neither the knowledge of 
 Nature nor that of History was thereby advanced in the 
 measure intended by those interested in orthodoxy or 
 speculation. Is there, then, never more than one way, 
 one method of knowledge ? Do not its methods in- 
 cessantly vary according to their objects, like the organs 
 of sense with the different forms of sensuous perception, 
 and like organs in general with their diverse functions? 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 69 
 
 • Whoever believes in the possibility of a science of 
 History,' thinking logically and according to the nature 
 of the matter in hand, as we do in Germany, would 
 certainly never undertake to show us the justness of 
 this belief by pretending that one can smell with the 
 hands as well as touch, digest with the feet, see tones 
 and hear colors. To be sure, the vibrations of a string 
 which the ear perceives as a deep tone can also be seen 
 by the eye ; but the property of these vibrations en- 
 abling them to be perceived as tone does not exist for 
 the eye. It is a fact solely for the ear and for its 
 peculiar method of perception. It is true that in the 
 departments with which the 'science of History' has to 
 do, there is much which is level and accessible to natural- 
 scientific method also, as well as to various other forms 
 of scientific knowledge. But since phenomena, how- 
 ever many or few, since points of view and relations 
 remain which are accessible to none of the other kinds 
 of knowledge, it is clear that there must be for them 
 another method, special and particular. If there is to 
 be a 'science of History,' in which we too believe, this 
 means that there exists a circle of phenomena for which 
 neither the theological, the philosophical, the mathe- 
 matical nor the physical manner of consideration is 
 adapted, that there are questions to which speculation 
 gives no answer, whether, theologically, it have the 
 absolute for its point of departure, or, philosophically, 
 take it for its goal ; which are equally unanswered by 
 that empiricism which apprehends the world of phe- 
 nomena by its quantitative procedure, and by any disci- 
 pline pertaining to the practical departments of the 
 moral world. 
 
70 APPENDICES. 
 
 Our founder of the science of History approaches his 
 task with enviable naivete. He considers it unnecessary 
 to investigate the ideas with which he intends to work, 
 or to limit off the department in which his laws find 
 their application. What science is lie thinks every one 
 knows, and the same of History. Not quite, after all, 
 for he takes particular pains to state what it is not. 
 He cites with hearty assent Comte, Philosophie Positive, 
 V. p. 18, who remarks with displeasure that 'it is 
 entirely inappropriate to characterize as History the 
 piling- up of disconnected facts.' How memorable is 
 this sentence of the French thinker, and how instructive 
 it is that the Englishman appropriates it to himself ! 
 We of course designate as ' History ' that infinite suc- 
 cession of objective facts in which we see the life of 
 men, of nations, of humanity going on, just as we em- 
 brace the totality of another kind of phenomena under 
 the name of ' Nature.' But pray has anyone ever 
 thought that a. collection of dried plants constituted 
 Botany, or a lot of stuffed or unstuffed animal skins 
 Zoology ? Did anyone ever suppose it even possible to 
 collect and pile together, whether in an orderly or in a 
 disorderly way, purely objective facts, such as battles, 
 revolutions, business crises, foundings of cities, and the 
 like ? Has ; the guild of historians ' actually not yet 
 made the observation that objective facts are a different 
 thing from the manner in which we know them ? 
 
 If Buckle really wished to kindle a light for us his- 
 torians groping in the dark, he should first of all have 
 made it clear to himself and to us how and with what 
 right k History ' has been able to fix itself as name for 
 a definite series of phenomena, as L Nature ' lias sue- 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 71 
 
 ceecled in making itself the name of another definite 
 series of manifestations. He should have shown what 
 it means that the wonderful abridger, the human spirit, 
 apprehends spatial manifestations as Nature and tempo- 
 ral occurrences as History ; not because they are so and 
 so distinguished objectively, but in order to be able to 
 grasp and think them. He would then have known 
 the nature of the material with which a 'science of 
 History ' can have to do. If he had been aware what 
 it means to have been an empiricist, he would not have 
 omitted to investigate, as the nature of all empiricism 
 demands, the manner in which these materials of histor- 
 ical investigation lie before us and our sense-perception 
 at the present time. Then surely he would have had 
 to recognize that not past events, not the infinite confu- 
 sion of ' facts ' which constituted them, now lie before us 
 as materials for investigation ; that instead these facts 
 vanished forever with the moment to which they be- 
 longed, and that, as human, we possess only the present, 
 the here and now, with the impulse and ability, of 
 course, by learning, insight, and will, to develop im- 
 measurably this ephemeral point. He would have seen 
 that among the processes peculiar to the realm of the 
 spirit, one of the most remarkable is that which makes 
 it possible for us again to awaken to present reality 
 events which are forever past and now lie behind us, 
 and to make them live in our minds, that is, to all 
 human intents and purposes, make them eternal. 
 
 If Buckle had wished to raise us and himself above 
 his thoughtless use of the word ' History,' with the 
 anticipations which arise out of this and dim our vision, 
 he would have had to take us on into a second line of 
 
72 APPENDICES. 
 
 considerations. In occasional intimations of liis we 
 ascertain that History has to do with the ' actions of 
 men,' that it is connected ' with the unsatisfied desire 
 for knowledge which characterizes our fellowmen'; 
 but he omits to tell us in what manner these actions of 
 men are of an historical nature, and leaves us in the 
 dark touching the character of the questions for which 
 the curiosity displayed by our fellowmen seeks answer. 
 
 It does not require deep penetration to see that the 
 human acts which are now historical, at the moment 
 when they happened and in the minds of those through 
 whom and for whom they happened, had only in the 
 rarest instances the purpose or determination to be 
 historical deeds. The general who gives battle, the 
 statesman who negotiates a treaty, has quite enough to 
 do to attain the practical end which concerns him at 
 the moment. So on down to the minute and even the 
 minutest ' acts of men ' : they all fulfil themselves in 
 that illimitably manifold interplay of interests, conflicts, 
 businesses, of motives, passions, forces and restrictions, 
 the sum of which has been well named the moral world. 
 We may consider these under very various points of 
 view, practical, technical, legal, social, etc. One of the 
 ways in which the moral world may be surveyed is 
 the historical. 
 
 I decline to set forth the full bearing of these 
 observations. The attentive reader will see that, were 
 this done, it would become clear how History (6re- 
 sehiehte) emerges, so to speak, out of men's doings 
 (Geseliaften). We should also thus learn of what 
 sort and nature that knowledge is which is based 
 on such materials and applicable in such a realm ; 
 
THE ELEVATION OE HISTOBY. 73 
 
 what it can and cannot do ; what kind of certainty 
 it is in condition to give, and what kind of truth it 
 is calculated to ascertain. 
 
 Buckle has the goodness to recognize that belief in 
 the value of History is widely extended, and that his- 
 torical material has been collected which on the whole 
 enjoys and commands profound attention and respect. 
 He depicts in broad outlines what a mass of investiga- 
 tions and discoveries has been already made in the field 
 of History. But, he adds, w if we were to tell how 
 little this material has been utilized, we should have to 
 sketch quite another picture.' How little it has been 
 utilized ! Must everything therein be explored before 
 any body of facts is a science ? Is the astonishing 
 depth of mathematical knowledge scientific only because 
 the surveyor or the mechanician can use one or two 
 propositions from it? When the prophets, to warn and 
 punish the Israelites, held before them the image of 
 themselves, how different was the result from what 
 followed when they pointed out how the God of their 
 fathers had testified to them k all the way from Egypt.' 
 When Thucydides wrote his History with its ' perpetual 
 value ' (KTrnxa eis dei), ought he to have meant by this 
 proud phrase the artistic form in which he wrote and 
 not the historical drama of which he wrote ? Buckle's 
 reproachful question forgets that the work of the 
 centuries is the entail of each new generation. In 
 what else does the civilization so highly extolled by 
 himself consist but in the summed up work of those 
 who were before us? All past events, the whole of 
 ' History,' is ideally contained in the present and in 
 that which the present possesses. And when we bring 
 
74 APPENDICES. 
 
 to our consciousness this ideal content of History ; when 
 we represent to ourselves in a kind of narrative form 
 how that which is has come to pass, what else do we 
 thus do but employ History in understanding that which 
 is, the elements in which we move as thinking, volitional 
 and active beings ? This is the way, or at least one of 
 the ways, immeasurably to extend, enrich and elevate 
 the needy and lonesome Here and Now of our ephemeral 
 existence. In proportion as we, — I mean the working 
 races of men — ascend higher, the horizon which we 
 survey is extended, and with every new point of view 
 each particular element thereof displays itself to us in 
 new perspectives, in new and wider relations. The 
 width of our horizon is almost exactly the measure of 
 the height reached by us ; and in the same measure has 
 the circle of the resources, conditions, and tasks of our 
 existence extended. History gives us the consciousness 
 of what we are and have. 
 
 Here is a connection of thought, it is worth while 
 to notice, whence one may see what culture is and 
 what it means to us. Goethe says : ' What thou 
 hast inherited from thy ancestors, earn in order to 
 possess it.' We rind here the justification of this 
 obscure utterance. However high may be the position 
 of the age or of the nation into which we individuals 
 are born, however great or full the inheritance accruing 
 to our advantage without our cooperation, so long as 
 we have not gained it through our own efforts and have 
 not recognized it as that which it is, the result of in- 
 cessant toil on the part of those who were before us, 
 we hold it as if we had it not. Now culture means 
 that we have lived and toiled through over again, as a 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 75 
 
 continuation, that which has, in the History of times, 
 peoples and humanity, been wrought out in men's spirit 
 in the way of thought. Civilization is satisfied only 
 with the results of culture. Amid utmost fullness of 
 mere wealth, it is poor, blase with opulence of enjoyment. 
 
 After Buckle has complained how little the rich and 
 ever-growing ' mass of facts ' has hitherto been utilized, 
 he assigns as a reason explaining this phenomenon a 
 ' peculiarly unfortunate circumstance.' ' In all the 
 other great departments of investigation,' he says, 'the 
 necessity of generalization is admitted by every one, 
 and we meet with noble exertions, based on specific 
 facts, to reveal the laws under whose rule the facts 
 stand. Historians on the contrary are so far from 
 making this procedure their own as to be dominated by 
 the strange thought that their business is solely to 
 recount transactions, enlivening these at the utmost 
 with appropriate moral and political remarks.' 
 
 A certain patience is necessary to follow these repe- 
 titious trivialities and this confusion of ideas which 
 chase each other around in a circle. Generalizations 
 then are the laws which Buckle seeks. He thinks it 
 possible in the way of generalization to find the laws 
 which shall reveal, that is, determine with necessity, 
 the phenomena of the moral world. Then are the rules 
 of a language linguistic laws ? To be sure, induction 
 sums up particulars into the general fact ; not, however, 
 simply by arriving at a generality hap-hazard, but 
 by combining particulars in that which is really 
 common to them. But to proceed from the rule to the 
 law, to find the ground for the general phenomenon, 
 there is need of analytical procedure. Buckle does 
 
76 APPENDICES. 
 
 not consider it necessary to give himself and ns any 
 account of the logic of his investigation. He satisfies 
 himself with setting aside a ' preliminary hindrance " 
 which seems to block his way. ' It is supposed,' says 
 he, 'that there is in human things something provi- 
 dential and mysterious, which makes them impervious 
 to our investigation and will conceal from ns forever 
 their future course.' He meets this difficulty with the 
 ' simple ' alternative : ' Are the acts of men and 
 hence also of society subject to definite laws, or are 
 they the result either of accident or of supernatural 
 influence ? ' Certainly : if this cloud is not a camel, 
 it is either a weasel or a whale. 
 
 We have already remarked that if there is to be a 
 science of History, this must have its own method of dis- 
 covery and relate to its own department of knowledge. 
 If in other fields induction or deduction has rendered 
 excellent results, it does not follow that the science of 
 History must employ exclusively the one or.the other of 
 those methods. Fortunately there are between heaven 
 and earth things related as irrationally to deduction as 
 to induction ; which demand deduction and synthesis 
 along with induction and analytical treatment ; which 
 are grasped by being subjected alternately to both 
 procedures ; which even then are not entirely compre- 
 hended, but more and more, not exhaustively but ap- 
 proximately and in a certain way ; things which demand 
 not to be 'developed' or 'explained' but understood. 
 
 The 'desire for knowledge which characterizes our 
 fellow men ' is ' insatiable ' because whatever it brings 
 to us is rationally comprehensible, and because with our 
 growing understanding of man and of what exists and 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 77 
 
 develops in ;i human fashion, that which is most truly 
 our own becomes wider, deeper, freer, indeed only then 
 becomes ours. Certain as it is that Ave human beings 
 also weave our lives into the general mutation of matter, 
 and correct as it may be that every individual tempora- 
 rily comprises and has for his form of existence only 
 just such and such atoms out of 'eternal matter,' 
 equally and in fact iniinitely more certain is it that by 
 means of these ' fleeting formations ' and their forces, 
 so vital after all, something quite unique and incompar- 
 able has sprung up and is still springing up, a second 
 creation, not of new materials but of forms, of thoughts, 
 of societies with their virtues and duties, in a word, the 
 Moral World. 
 
 In this realm of the moral world everything is acces- 
 sible to our understanding, from the most insignificant 
 love-story to great state transactions, from the solitary 
 mental work of the poet or the thinker to the im- 
 measurable combinations of the world's commerce, or 
 poverty's struggle so beset with temptation. What- 
 ever exists we may understand, inasmuch as we can 
 apprehend it as something that has developed from 
 beginnings. 
 
 It has already been mentioned that Buckle does not 
 so much leave the freedom of the will, in connection 
 with divine providence, out of view, but rather declares 
 it an illusion and throws it overboard. Within the pre- 
 cincts of philosophy also something similar has recently 
 been taught. A thinker whom I regard with personal 
 esteem says : ' If we call all that an individual man is, 
 has and performs A, then this A arises out of a -\- x, 
 a embracing all that comes to the man from his outer 
 
78 APPENDICES. 
 
 circumstances : from his country, people, age, etc., while 
 the vanishingly little x is his own contribution, the 
 work of his free will.' However vanishingly small this 
 :/• may he, it is of infinite value. Morally and humanly 
 considered it alone has value. The colors, the brush, 
 the canvas which Raphael used were of materials which 
 he had not created. He had learned from one and 
 another master to apply these materials in drawing and 
 painting. The idea of the Holy Virgin and of the 
 saints and angels, he met with in church tradition. 
 Various cloisters ordered pictures from him at given 
 prices. That this incitement alone, these material and 
 technical conditions and such traditions and contem- 
 plations, should 'explain' the Sistine Madonna, would 
 be, in the formula A = a + x, the service of the vanish- 
 ingly little x. Similarly everywhere. Let statistics go 
 on showing that in a certain country so and so many 
 illegitimate births occur. Suppose that in the formula 
 A = a + x this a includes all the elements which ' ex- 
 plain ' the fact that among a thousand mothers twenty, 
 thirty, or whatever the number is, are unmarried; each 
 individual case of the kind has its history, how often a 
 touching and affecting one. Of those twenty or thirty 
 who have fallen is there a single one who will be con- 
 soled by knowing that the statistical law ' explains ' 
 her case ? Amid the tortures of conscience through 
 nights of weeping, many a one of them will be profoundly 
 convinced that in the formula .1 = a -j- x the vanishingly 
 little x is of immeasurable weight, that in fact it em- 
 braces the entire moral worth of the human being, his 
 total and exclusive value. 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 79 
 
 No intelligent man will think of denying that the 
 statistical method of considering human affairs has its 
 great worth; but we must not forget how little, rela- 
 tively, it can accomplish and is meant to accomplish. 
 Many and perhaps all human relations have a legal 
 side; yet no one will on that account hid us seek for 
 the understanding of the Eroica 1 or of Faust among 
 jurists' definitions concerning intellectual property. 
 
 I will- not follow Buckle in his further discussions 
 touching the 'laws of nature,' 'mental laws,' the 
 superiority of the intellectual over the moral forces, 
 and so on. The essence of his views in the first part 
 he sums up at the beginning of the second, in the 
 following four 'generic thoughts,' which pass accord- 
 ing to him for the foundations of a History of Civiliza- 
 tion. '1. The progress of the human race depends 
 upon the effect with which the laws of phenomena are 
 investigated and the extent to which the results of 
 these investigations are made known. 2. Before such 
 an investigation can begin, a spirit of scepticism must 
 be awakened, which then in turn furthers investigation 
 and is furthered by it. 3. The discoveries made in 
 this manner strengthen the influence of intellectual 
 truths and weaken relatively, though not absolutely, 
 the influence of moral truths, the latter being in conse- 
 quence less subject to growth and development than 
 the intellectual truths. 4. The chief enemy of this 
 movement and hence the chief enemy of civilization is 
 the paternal or guardianship spirit, the idea, namely, 
 that human society can not prosper unless its affairs 
 
 1 The Sinfonia Eroica, of Beethoven. See Grove, Beethoven's Nine 
 Symphonies. — TV. 
 
80 APPENDICES. 
 
 are watched over and protected at every step by State 
 and Church, the State teaching men what to do, the 
 ( Ihurch what to believe.' 
 
 If these are the laws in which 'the study of the 
 History of humanity' is to attain scientific elevation, 
 then the happy discoverer is truly an object of envy in 
 the naivete with which he succeeds in deceiving him- 
 self even for a single moment as to their extraordinary 
 shallowness. Laws of this sort could be discovered 
 daily by the dozen, in the self-same way of generaliza- 
 tion, laws none of which would in depth and fruitful- 
 ness be inferior to the well known saying that the 
 measure of a people's civilization is its consumption 
 of soap. 
 
 Bacon somewhere says that ' truth emerges more 
 readily from error than from confusion.' 1 The con- 
 fusion of which Buckle is guilty is obvious. Because 
 he neglected to examine and sound the nature of the 
 subjects with which he undertook to deal, he proceeds 
 Avith them as if they did not have any nature or char- 
 acter of their own at all and so did not need a method 
 of their own; and the method which he does apply in 
 this department so foreign to it, avenges itself by 
 making him put up with commonplaces instead of the 
 calculable formulas in which it elsewhere expresses its 
 laws : commonplaces which may have a certain pro- 
 priety for to-day and yesterday, but which, in face 
 of History's milleniums, in face of the great social 
 formations of the middle age, of beginning Chris- 
 tianity, and of the Greek and Roman world, appear 
 entirely unmeaning. 
 
 1 ('Wins, emergit Veritas ex errore quam ex confusione. 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 81 
 
 If Buckle recognizes the great work of the human 
 race in History, how could he help asking himself the 
 nature of this work, out of what material and for what 
 ends it has originated, and how the workers are related 
 to it ? Had he done this he would — for it is worth 
 while to pause a moment over these questions — have 
 recognized that historical work embraces, in respect to 
 its material, both natural data and historical growths, 
 and that each constitutes for it at once a means and a 
 limitation, at once condition and impulse. He would 
 have noticed that in this department the method of 
 quantitative phenomena has of course a certain appli- 
 cability, and that where we have to do with the great 
 factors of bodily existence, of natural conditions, of 
 statistical results, our branch of learning will accompany 
 the labors of exact science with the greatest interest 
 and accept its splendid products with pleasure and 
 gratitude. But if Buckle had been mindful of the 
 further questions referred to, he would have saved him- 
 self from thinking that the conclusions arrived at in 
 that department — the laws ascertained, as he thinks, 
 in the way of generalization — are the sum of History 
 and ' raise History to the rank of a science ' by ' ex- 
 plaining ' its phenomena. This explains them as little 
 as the beautiful statue of The Praying Boy J is explained 
 by the bronze out of which it was poured, the clay 
 which formed the model of it, or the fire which melted 
 the metal. The idea of the image that was to be 
 (to ti" rjv etvat) was necessary, as ' the master of those 
 who know' long ago taught, and this was in the 
 
 1 In the Old Museum, Berlin. It is believed to be from an original 
 of the time of Lysippus. Frederic the Great purchased it for 10.000 
 Thaler [$7,500]. — Tr. 
 
82 APPENDICES. 
 
 artist's soul before the work in which it was to be 
 realized existed. There was need also of the purpose 
 which the statue should fulfil, perhaps a vow to the 
 rescuing god whose temple it was to adorn. The skilful 
 hand, too, was required, to put together the motive, 
 the thought-image and the material into the completed 
 work. Doubtless the bronze as well was necessary in 
 order to the origination of The Praying Boy ; yet it 
 would take a mean civilization to appraise this wonder- 
 ful work of art only at the value of the metal in it, as 
 Buckle does Avith History. 
 
 Buckle proceeds not a whit less one-sidedly than 
 those people — how severely he censures them ! — who 
 explain History solely from the motive which theology, 
 for instance, ascribes to it, or the religious spirit sur- 
 mises as dominant in it ; or those who see and observe 
 in respect to any work only the deft [gescJdckt~\ agents 
 which perform it, just as if the fates [ Greschicke] did 
 not take their course in spite of the good or evil will 
 of the people through whom they are put in execution ; 1 
 or those who, always on hand with their ready-made 
 static ideas and doctrines about things which are con- 
 tinually developing and thus criticising themselves, 
 always just know and know better than any one else 
 how the State, the Church, the social order, etc., ought 
 to have been obliged to exist and develop. Each of 
 these ways of viewing things is in itself partial, untrue, 
 destructive, even though each is in a sense justified 
 and necessary. ' Everything,' teaches the ancient 
 philosopher just referred to, ' everything which subsists 
 
 1 The author intended a play upon the two words in the brackets, 
 but in using them confuses rather than clarifies his meaning. — Tr. 
 
THE ELEVATION OP HISTORY. 83 
 
 by the agency of a cause, and is not, like the divinity, 
 self-subsistent,' contains those four elements, 1 no one 
 of which alone and by itself can explain the whole. 
 More precisely, it is according to those four elements 
 that we mentally analyze anything for ourselves, for 
 our contemplation, conscious that in the reality which 
 we wish to consider they are at the same time com- 
 pletely one with and permeated by each other. We 
 thus separate and distinguish, although aware that the 
 process is only an aid to our re-constructive under- 
 standing, while certain other activities of our soul give 
 and receive totalities instantly and immediately. 
 
 Pardon these very elementary observations. In view 
 of Buckle's confused procedure they could not have 
 been avoided if the questions involved were to be 
 gotten onto a safer track. 
 
 We see that in History the material upon which it 
 works is not the only thing to be considered. Close to 
 the material comes the form. In its varying forms 
 History has a ceaseless and ever progressive life. These 
 forms are the moral partnerships in which we become 
 bodily and spiritually what we are, and by virtue of 
 which we raise ourselves above the miserable desolation 
 and indigence of our atomic egoism, giving and receiv- 
 ing in order thus to become the richer the more we 
 bind and obligate ourselves. These are departments in 
 which laws of an entirely different nature and energy 
 from those which the new science seeks, have their 
 place and exercise their power. These moral forces, 
 
 1 Referred to on pages 81, 82, viz., the material, the form, the 
 moving cause, and the end or final cause. The thought is from 
 Aristotle. — Tr. ' 
 
8 1 APPENDICES. 
 
 as they have been finely termed, are to a great degree 
 at once factors and products of the historical life. 
 Ceaselessly developing, they, by what they have at 
 any time come to be, determine who shall be there- 
 after the bearers of their completed products, and 
 raise them above themselves. In the community of 
 the family, the State, the nation, etc., the individual 
 has lifted himself above the narrow boundary of his 
 ephemeral ego, in order, if I may so speak, to think 
 and act as prompted by the ego of the family, the 
 nation, and the State. In this elevation and undis- 
 turbed participation in the activity of the moral forces, 
 according to each man's character and duty, not in the 
 unlimited and boundless independence of the indi- 
 vidual, lies the true essence of freedom. Without the 
 moral forces it is nothing ; it is immoral, a mere power 
 of movement. 
 
 Of these moral forces Buckle certainly holds a very 
 low opinion. In Church and State he sees nothing but 
 guardianship and" encroachments. To him right and 
 law are only barriers and impediments. The con- 
 sequence of his manner of view would be not so much 
 to refer the child to the care and love of its parents and 
 the discipline and guidance of its teachers, as rather 
 to consider it by and for itself a manifestation of sover- 
 eign liberty. 
 
 Buckle arrives at Such an extraordinarily crude idea 
 of liberty because he neglects proper attention to the 
 agents engaged in working out History's task ; because 
 he thinks only of the massed capital known as civili- 
 zation, not of the ever new acquisition which forms the 
 essence of culture. Moreover, he does not or will not 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 85 
 
 see that in that vanishingly little x lies the whole and 
 the only worth of personality, a worth which is not 
 measured 1 >y the circumference of the sphere in which it 
 works, or by splendor of results, but by the fidelity with 
 which a man administers the interests intrusted to him. 
 
 In these departments, again, there are laws having 
 an entirely different power and inexorableness from that 
 of those gotten at by generalization. Here validity 
 attaches to duty, virtue, choice in the tragic conflicts 
 of the moral forces, in those collisions of duties which 
 are solved only through the power of free-will, and in 
 which sometimes freedom can be saved only by death. 
 Or are these things, too, set aside when 'the dogma of 
 free-will' is explained as an illusion? 
 
 Buckle does not, to be sure, go so far as to reject 
 that dogma of free-will because of any assumption of 
 its resting on the proposition that there is such a thing 
 as spirit or soul, and that this is a petitio principii. He 
 does not conclude with those who explain all these 
 imponderables, like understanding, conscience, will, etc., 
 as involuntary functions of the brain, as secretions of 
 I know not what gray or white matter. Before we 
 believe this the great minds who thus teach must dis- 
 arm the suspicion that these doctrines of theirs are in 
 fact the secretions of their brains, and morbid secretions 
 at that. But while Buckle's argument against the 
 presence in us of free-will is based mainly upon our 
 'uncertainty regarding the existence of self-conscious- 
 ness,' he must either permit us to consider his own 
 argument, founded upon such uncertainty, as uncertain, 
 or else prove that he can argue without the existence 
 of self-consciousness, that is, of a thinking ego, and 
 
SO APPENDICES. 
 
 that he has as a thought-automaton, destitute of self- 
 consciousness, composed the work by which he intends 
 to elevate History to the rank of a science. Nay, not 
 'intended,' for he denies the will along with its free- 
 dom. But some being or other must have thrown into 
 this thinking-mill a lot of facts piled together in some 
 way or other. The mill ground the grist, and the 
 result, ' a swindling, tricky, subtle sophism entire,' ! 
 thus ground out, became the new science of History. 
 
 In spite of all this Buckle recognizes the ' progress ' 
 in History, and is unwearied in describing it as what is 
 most truly characteristic in the life of man. This is 
 certainly very thankworthy, but it does not accord with 
 the main trend of his views, nor is the thought con- 
 sistently carried out. If there is progress, the direction 
 of the movement must be observed, and make itself 
 visible to him for whose sake it exists. The method 
 of study belonging to natural science is in a different 
 position from this in respect to the point of view under 
 which it apprehends phenomena. The changes which 
 it observes it traces up to the equivalents of forces, and 
 it sees in them only the permutations of equals and 
 constants. Vital phenomena interest it only in so far 
 as they repeat themselves, either periodically or mor- 
 phologically. In the individual being it sees and seeks 
 only the idea of the species or the medium of material 
 change. Since according to its method it excludes 
 the idea of progress, — Darwin's theory of development 
 is the strongest proof of this, — progress not in its 
 
 1 o-6<pi<r/j.a, Kvp/xa, TpLfifxa, TranrdX-qti 6\ov. The quotation is from 
 Aristophanes, Birds, 430, 431, where these epithets are applied to a 
 person. — TV. 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 87 
 
 knowledge, but as an element in that which it wishes 
 to know, it has neither place nor expression for the 
 idea of purpose, but leaves it out of account, partly 
 degrading it to utility, thus leaving open Lessing's old 
 question, ' what then is the utility of utility ? ' and 
 partly waiving it, under forms such as the eternity of 
 matter, evolution, etc., as a problem for other methods. 
 In adducing the idea of progress as a fact of the his- 
 torical world, Buckle falls into a paralogism of a very 
 striking kind. He might confess that historical in- 
 vestigation has not brought him to the primum mobile, 
 that by the nature of empirical methods it is unattain- 
 able in this way, and that it cannot even be adequately 
 expressed by the speech of science with its conceptions 
 and way of thinking; but does this justify the con- 
 clusion that a primum mobile does not exist save as a 
 piece of our error? Are there not various other forms 
 of knowledge, other methods, competent, perhaps, in 
 virtue of their nature to treat precisely the realities 
 which the forms and methods of natural science decline 
 and decline as a logical consequence of their point of 
 view, and which the historical also either decline or 
 treat inadequately? To illustrate, would there be no 
 such thing as an aesthetic judgment because no such 
 could be arrived at by jurists' procedure, or no legal 
 proposition because such was sought in vain aestheti- 
 cally? One who maintains that progress marks the 
 historical world may lament that only a part of this 
 movement peculiar to humanity is open to our view, 
 and that we cannot descry the cause or the goal thereof, 
 but only the fact. But will he be satisfied, and can he 
 satisfy that deepest need of the spirit to perceive and 
 
88 APPEJSTDICES. 
 
 know itself as a totality, by the circumstance that one 
 form of empiricism shows him a riddle which anotker 
 does not solve? After recognizing that a problem, a 
 riddle, exists, will he declare it non-existent because he 
 cannot solve it, and cannot solve it because while the 
 enigma, resides in the sense of it he wishes to see it 
 solved as a charade, as a word-catch, or as a syllable or 
 letter riddle? Because from the one standpoint of 
 scientific knowledge a certain side of the total being 
 and the universal life, namely, the metaphysical side, 
 is invisible, being situated, by the old play upon the 
 word, ' behind ' the physical ; and because from the 
 standpoint of a knowledge differing from this the e} r e 
 just grazes metaphysics a little as in perspective, must 
 Ave conclude that this third side has no existence 
 except as an illusion of ours? If we cannot take hold 
 of light with the hands, or hear it with the ears, does 
 it therefore not exist ? Is not the fact rather that the 
 eye is made sensitive to the sun's rays in order that by 
 apprehending the light it may make perceptible to us 
 what we can not seize with the hands or hear with the 
 ears? 
 
 I pursue these questions no further, since they lie 
 beyond the circle of thoughts in which Buckle's effort 
 to found a scientific doctrine of History moves. The 
 hints given will suffice to show that he has not ap- 
 proached the task which he proposed in the way that 
 was necessary in order to advance it, that he appreciates 
 neither its compass nor its dignity. And yet his task has, 
 as it seems to me, outside of its particular significance 
 for our studies, another which is more general, and on 
 that account begins to engage the attention of the 
 
THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 89 
 
 scientific world. This problem appears destined to 
 become the middle point of the great discussion which 
 will mark the next important turn in the entire life of 
 the sciences. No one can consider the growing estrange- 
 
 o o o 
 
 ment between the exact and the speculative disciplines, 
 the dissidence between the materialistic and the super- 
 natural view of the world which gapes wider day by 
 day, to be normal and true. These opposing contentions 
 demand reconciliation, and this must be worked out in 
 connection with Buckle's task. For the ethical world, 
 the world of History, which is the problem of that task, 
 takes part in both spheres, and it shows by every phase 
 of human existence and action that that contrast is no 
 absolute one. It is the peculiar grace of human nature, 
 so happily incomplete, that its ethical doings must be 
 at once spiritual and corporeal. Nothing human but 
 has place in this dissension, but lives this double life. 
 The opposition is reconciled each moment in order to 
 its renewal, renewed in order to its reconciliation. To 
 wish to understand the ethical or historical world is to 
 recognize first of all that it is not an apparition and 
 does not consist of a mere mutation in matter. Scien- 
 tifically to transcend the false alternative between moral 
 and material, to reconcile the dualism of those methods 
 and those views of the world, each of which insists 
 upon ruling or denying the other, to reconcile them in 
 that method which applies to the ethical and historical 
 world, to develop them into the view of the world 
 which has its basis in the truth of human existence and 
 in the cosmos of the moral forces — that, it seems to 
 me, is the kernel of the problem with whose solution 
 we are concerned. 
 
90 APPENDICES. 
 
 II.— NATUKE AND HISTORY. 
 
 It is a traditional habit to apply the expression 
 ' History ' also to nature. We speak of ' Natural His- 
 tory,' of the 'History' of development in organic 
 existences, of the 'History' of the globe, and so on. 
 What else was the Okenian theory, what else is the 
 Darwinian theory, but emphasizing the historical ele- 
 ment, if we please so to call it, in the realm of organic 
 nature ? 
 
 Efforts are not wanting to treat History according to 
 the laws which have been ascertained for nature, or at 
 least according to the method built up for the natural 
 sciences, and to establish even for the historical world 
 the doctrine that to refer vital phenomena to physical 
 laws is nothing less than a new conquest for science. 
 Forms and movement in the sphere of the historical life 
 have been characterized as 'organic developments/ and 
 their laws given basis by means of statistical calculation. 
 It has become customary to speak of ' natural growth ' 
 in connection with these departments, the phrase being 
 even deemed a very special improvement. 
 
 To our science as to every other belongs the duty 
 and the right to investigate and settle the conceptions 
 with which it has to do. If it were to borrow these 
 from the results of other sciences, it would be obliged 
 to accommodate and subordinate itself to modes of view 
 over which it has no control, perhaps to those by which 
 it sees its own independence and right to exist called 
 in question. It would thence perhaps receive defi- 
 nitions of the word ' science,' to which it would be 
 
NATURE AND HISTORY. 91 
 
 obliged to object. The circle of conceptions belonging 
 to it our science Avill have to seek for itself, in its own, 
 that is, in an empirical manner. It will be permitted 
 to attempt this because its method is the method of 
 understanding. It proposes to understand terms which 
 language and usage in language daily employ and offer 
 for it to practice upon. 
 
 We find in our language the words 'nature' and 
 'history.' What is meant by 'history?' Every one 
 will agree that the idea of a course of time, of the 
 temporal, instantly connects itself with the word when- 
 ever heard. Of eternal, that is of timeless things, so 
 far as we can grasp ideas of this kind, there is no 
 history. They appear to us as historical only so far as 
 they enter into the temporal, be it through revelation, 
 or in their effects, or in the belief which finite minds, 
 minds standing under the conditions of the temporal, 
 have respecting them. 
 
 These minds exist 'after the image of God.' They 
 are spirit set amid the conditions of finitude. They 
 are countless in point of space and in ceaseless develop- 
 ment in point of time. The present which belongs to 
 them and to which they belong, is an analogue of 
 eternity, for eternity, which we do not know from 
 experience but infer from the self-consciousness of our 
 spiritual being, is the present as we have it, yet thought 
 without the limitation in which we have it, without the 
 change of coming and going and without the dimness 
 of future and past. Human existence is Mind under 
 the ban of finitude, spiritual and sensuous at once and 
 in an inseparable manner, a contrast which is reconciled 
 every moment in order to its renewal, renewed in order 
 
92 APPENDICES. 
 
 to its reconciliation. Our being, so long as it is itself, 
 healthy and awake, can at no moment be merely sen- 
 suous or merely spiritual. 
 
 Another peculiarity of our spiritual nature is its 
 power of self-vision, the ability to look into its own 
 depths and to initiate movement within and from itself 
 as if its outward connections were not. In thinking, 
 believing and observing, the mind fills itself with a 
 content that in a certain sense lies beyond the limits of 
 finitu.de. Even then, though it now touches the earth 
 witli but the tips of its toes, it remains still under the 
 ban of fmitude, in the forms of conception which it has 
 won and developed therefrom. 
 
 What occurs, now, if the spirit, in the same entirety 
 and power, turns to the outer side of its double-formed 
 nature? By this expression I do not refer to man's 
 practical will and action, but to a phenomenon of his 
 intelligence. His theoretical procedure, his investi- 
 gation and discovery in practical directions, will be 
 conditioned by his sense-life. The sensuous side of 
 his existence does not bring to him merely as to a 
 motionless and untroubled mirror, diversified impulses 
 from the separate objects perceptible by sense ; but, 
 with and through this side of his nature, as he stands 
 in the midst of the finite objects that surround and 
 submerge him, he is conditioned and moved by them 
 and driven about with them, so that, in the restless dust- 
 whirl of these restlessly changing Unites, he resembles in 
 all but a single particular the atoms which accompany 
 him in this tumult. But the difference is after all 
 infinite, for by virtue of his spiritual essence man has 
 the ability to be like a fixed point in this confusion, or 
 
NATURE AND HISTORY. 93 
 
 at least in his soul to feel, apprehend and know himself 
 as such ; the ability by thinking and willing, by con- 
 sciousness and self-determination, always to keep mov- 
 ing, in no matter how narrow a road ; the ability by 
 observing, estimating, and comprehending them, to 
 become master of things outside himself. 
 
 That the little and indigent being of man possesses 
 and uses this power of lordship, has always been the 
 riddle of contemplation. With naive depth of view 
 Genesis says that when God had created all kinds of 
 beasts of the field and all kinds of birds of the heavens, 
 'he brought them unto the man to see what he would 
 call them : and whatsoever the man called every living 
 creature, that was the name thereof.' 1 Naming was the 
 beginning of man's mastery over things. With the 
 name a sign, a spiritual counterpart was provided for 
 every creature or being. They were then no longer 
 merely in the world of outer existence ; they were 
 transferred to that of thought, into the mental life of 
 the human creature living in the midst of them. Each 
 one kept the name given it, even though the form of 
 the manifestation corresponding to the name once im- 
 posed might by nutrition or exhaustion, or by repetition 
 in propagation, representing itself variously in various 
 vicissitudes, change never so much. The name was, as 
 it were, the permanent defining essence of the perpet- 
 ually changing manifestations. It laid hold of that 
 which was constant amid the change, and held it fast 
 as the essential thing. 
 
 In the objective, or, more correctly, the actual or ex- 
 ternal world, groups of phenomena under permanent 
 1 Genesis ii: 19. 
 
04 APPENDICES. 
 
 names are before us in infinite variableness, manifold- 
 ness, and differences of kind ; but the mind masters tins 
 desolate multifariousness by taking that which is, in a 
 way, viz., essentially and mentally, the same, and combin- 
 ing it in this sameness. As to their objective or rather 
 their external phasis, things are simply numberless indi- 
 viduals in numberless combinations and separations and 
 in ceaseless change ; but as represented in the human 
 mind they stand forth fixed and classified according to 
 their similarities, affinities and relations. They are the 
 orderly signs and counterparts of the finite things chaoti- 
 cally flowing about us, of the confused multitude of 
 changing and hovering phenomena. This world of 
 names and ideas is to the mind the counterpart of the 
 world without. For us it is the truth of that world. 
 
 Thus simplifying, separating and combining, regu- 
 lating and subordinating, thus creating in itself a cosmos 
 of representations and conceptions over against the 
 confused world of finite realities, the human mind 
 makes itself by speech and thought theoretically master 
 of those finites amid which and the changes of which 
 its temporal being stands. Every human being goes 
 through this anew ; every one is a new beginning, a 
 fresh ego-creation. 
 
 Each becomes this by learning to feel and apprehend 
 himself as a totality within himself, by seeing, thinking, 
 and, so far as in him is, shaping everything that is re- 
 lated to him and to which he is related, however narrow 
 or wide this realm may be, as a closed circle about him- 
 self as its middle point. He can do this by that gift of 
 combining particulars according to their nature, that 
 restlessly working gift of simplifying and generalizing, 
 
NATURE AND HISTORY. 95 
 
 of separation and combination, by virtue of which he is 
 continually embracing wider stretches, taking them up 
 into his representation and, as it were, building them 
 into his mind. The rose, one word for countless par- 
 ticular attributes, he distinguishes from the pink, but, 
 fixing upon what is similar in the two, he calls both 
 flowers. He makes plants of them both, as he does of 
 the bushes and the grasses. Plants he sees to be quite 
 different from animals, yet plants and animals arise, 
 grow, and die in a similar manner. This life of theirs 
 distinguishes for him the organic world in contrast with 
 stone, sea, flame, and so on. He thus develops and 
 applies more and more comprehensive forms, more and 
 more general ideas. 
 
 The last and most universal of these classifications 
 among things perceptible by the senses, are Nature and 
 History. They comprehend the world of phenomena 
 under the two most inclusive representations ever ap- 
 applied, representations which have, perhaps wrongly, 
 been complimented by the title of intuitions a priori 
 We are certain to embrace the totality of phenomena if 
 we think of them as arranged for us in space and time, 
 or in other words if we say Nature and History. 
 
 Obviously, whatever is in space is also in time, and 
 vice versa. The things of the empirical world exist 
 neither spatially nor temporally ; but we apprehend them 
 so according as the one or the other element appears 
 to us to preponderate, or according as we see occasion 
 to exalt the one or the other as the more weighty or 
 essential characteristic. 
 
 Of course not much is said when we have thus defined 
 the word ' history ' and its conception, unless we are in 
 
96 APPENDICES. 
 
 condition to search the notion more deeply. Space and 
 time are the widest, that is the most empty representa- 
 tions of our mind. They obtain a content only in the 
 measure in which we determine them lengthwise and 
 crosswise, as to both succession and propinquity. This 
 means distinguishing the particulars within them : not 
 merely saying that they are, but what they are. 
 
 That these phenomena which we summarily embrace 
 as History and Nature, in themselves possess other de- 
 terminations and predicates than just being or being 
 distinguished in time and space, we know by the fact 
 that we ourselves, as to our sensuous existence, stand in 
 the midst of them, are determined by them and are re- 
 lated in one way and another to them. That is, we have 
 empirical knowledge. Without this, space and time 
 would be to us an empty .r, and the world of phenomena 
 would remain to us a chaos. Only as we, while stand- 
 ing in the midst of them, separate them from ourselves, 
 relate ourselves to them with the different sides and 
 susceptibilities of our sensuous existence affected by 
 now these now those exponents, and according to these 
 exponents distinguish and compare them with each 
 other; only thus, in our ego, through our cognition, in 
 our knowledge, does what exists in space and time re- 
 ceive wider denominations and determinations. Only 
 thus do the empty generalities of space and time, the 
 empty catch-alls of Nature and History develop them- 
 selves for us into a discrete content, into definite series 
 of ideas, into particular beings existing in synthesis and 
 succession. 
 
 Space and time are related like repose and. restless- 
 ness, indolence and haste, bondage and freedom. They 
 
XATl'KE AND HISTORY. 97 
 
 are contrasted yet always bound together, inseparable 
 yet always wrestling with each other. For everything 
 is in motion. The consciousness of our life, of our 
 mental and sensuous existence, which, though polarized 
 thus in itself, is neither purely sensuous nor purely 
 mental nor shifting between the two, but is the living 
 unity of the two sides, gives us the idea of movement 
 and of its elements, space and time. If it were destitute 
 of motion the world of phenomena would be incompre- 
 hensible to us. Were we without motion in ourselves 
 we should not be in condition to grasp that world. By 
 being in motion, as ourselves are within, the world 
 without us permits us to understand it under the anal- 
 ogy of that which is going on in ourselves. 
 
 While space and time are ever united in motion, 
 time strives as it were to overcome indolent space in 
 ever new motion, and motion is all the time trying to 
 sink back again out of the impatience of time into the 
 repose of being, broadening its area by lowering its rate. 
 How comes it then that human observation construes 
 certain series of phenomena in the restless movement 
 of things more according to their temporal side, and 
 others more according to their spatial, taking the one 
 set as Nature, the other as History ? 
 
 We certainly see constant motion and constant change 
 all about us ; but we separate off certain phenomena in 
 which the temporal element recedes, in which it appears 
 only transitorily, as it were, in order to sink back into 
 itself : phenomena which in essence repeat themselves, 
 in which the endless succession of time is broken up 
 into recurring cycles or periods of equal length. A 
 formation results which is fc characterized by unity, not 
 
98 APPENDICES. 
 
 numerically but in nature or kind.' In such phe- 
 nomena the mind lays hold of the constant, that which 
 abides in the midst of change, that to which motion 
 relates : the rule, the law, the substance, that which 
 fills space, etc. For it is the forms that repeat them- 
 selves here, and the immaterial character of their peri- 
 odical return lowers the temporal element in their 
 motion to a secondary place, not indeed in relation to 
 their being but as regards our apprehension and under- 
 standing. This is the way in which we win for the 
 general notion of space its discrete content, and it is 
 this content which is embraced by us in the designation 
 1 Nature." 
 
 In other phenomena our mind emphasizes the change 
 in that which abides the same. It notices that here 
 motion results in ever new forms, formations so new 
 and so determinative that the material substrate on 
 which they appear seems like a secondary element, 
 while every new form is individually different from the 
 others, so different indeed that each, as it assumes its 
 place after its predecessor, is conditioned by it, grows 
 out of it, ideally takes it up into itself, yet when grown 
 out of it contains and maintains it ideally in itself. It 
 is a continuity, in which everything that precedes trans- 
 plants itself into what is later, rilling it out and extending 
 it as ' a contribution to itself ;' * while the latter pre- 
 sents itself as a result, fulfilment, and enlargement of 
 the earlier. It is not the continuity of a circle that 
 returns into itself, of a period repeating itself, but that 
 of an endless succession, and this in such wise that in 
 every new a further new has its germ and the assurance 
 1 iirlSocris els avr6. See page 10. 
 
NATURE AND HISTORY. 99 
 
 of working itself out. For in every new the entire 
 series of past forms is ideally summed up, and every 
 one of them appears as element and temporary ex- 
 pression in the growing sum. In this restless succession, 
 in this continuity advancing upon itself, the general 
 notion of time wins its discrete content, which we 
 designate by the expression ' History.' 
 
 Even those phenomena which we gather under the 
 expression ' Nature ' exist in individual forms, separate 
 from each other, that is if we apprehend them also as 
 homogeneous and similar. Out of every wheat-kernel, 
 if it is not withdrawn from its periodic life by a different 
 application, as germination, stalk-growth, flower, ripen- 
 ing of the fruit, there grows an individually different 
 stalk, a new generation of kernels. The oaks in the 
 same wood, though sprung each like its neighbor out of 
 the acorns perhaps of the same maternal oak, are indi- 
 vidually different not only in space but also in age, size, 
 ramification, grouping of the masses of foliage, etc. 
 We indeed perceive the differences, but they appear to 
 us as not essential. Scientifically as practically, their 
 individuality is immaterial to us. Among existences 
 of this kind our mind has no special category for indi- 
 viduals. For this kind of individuals we have no other 
 name than that of their species. We of course notice 
 that they change, but in the simply periodical return of 
 their changes they have for us no history. We indeed 
 distinguish the individuals, but their differences show us 
 no succession of formations advancing one upon another. 
 We apprehend them according to space, material, the 
 permanent in change, the indifference of self-repeating 
 variety ; for only in these relations has our mind catego- 
 
100 APPENDICES. 
 
 lies for them, and only according' to these categories can 
 we grasp and understand them, or relate ourselves to 
 them practically or theoretically. And according to these 
 our modes of apprehension we use and consume them, 
 taking them for that which they are to us. We sow 
 these wheat-kernels and care for these oaks, in order in 
 their time to kill them and consume them as what they 
 are to us, combustible material or farinaceous fruit. 
 We rear these animals, in order daily to rob them of 
 the milk provided for their young, and finally to slay 
 them. And so on. We unweariedly observe and in- 
 vestigate in order to know Nature according to its 
 materials, forces and laws, that we may apply it to our 
 ends according to the categories under which we appre- 
 hend and comprehend it. It is for us nothing hut 
 material. In its individual manifestations we find it 
 sealed, incomprehensible, indifferent. 
 
 And when, in grafting fruit trees, rearing animals, 
 and crossing breeds, in order to produce nobler results, 
 we play as it were the part of Providence, it is our cun- 
 ning and calculation, not any understanding on the part 
 of those creatures, that brings us such results. When 
 we analyze or compound bodies chemically, or treat 
 them physically so or so to isolate certain of their func- 
 tions in order to observe these or to make them produce 
 effects, we do not seek or find what is individually 
 characteristic of this stone, this flame, this vibrating 
 chord, but what is characteristic of genus or species. 
 And when we appropriate and apply, aesthetically, for 
 instance, the temporary forms which the animal or the 
 plant world or the landscape offers us, we well know 
 that it is not the individuality of this piece of the 
 
NATURE AND HISTORY. 101 
 
 earth's surface, of this tree or animal, which we wish 
 understood and represented thereby ; but that we put 
 something into them which is not in them, something 
 quite remote from them, in fact, so that these items of 
 nature serve us only as expressions of our feeling or 
 thought, we, so to speak, anthropomorphising them ; as 
 in Dante's Purgatory the loathsome picture of lust be- 
 comes under the passionate glance of the man surveying 
 it in desire, a woman blooming in beauty. 
 
 Also in the moral world, in the realm of those reali- 
 ties which we call History, there are elements which 
 can be measured, weighed and calculated. But these 
 material conditions by no means exhaust the life of the 
 moral world, or suffice to explain it ; and whoever 
 thinks that he can explain it in this manner overlooks 
 or denies that which is here essential. The sexual im- 
 pulse does not exhaust or explain the moral might of 
 marriage. Common remembrance of common experi- 
 ences, possession of common hopes and cares, losses and 
 successes, renew again even for couples who are growing- 
 old, the warmth of their first bliss. For them their mar- 
 riage has a history. In this history its moral might was 
 founded for them, and it is justified and fulfilled in and 
 by the same. 
 
 In the moral universe there is certainly nothing 
 which may not be subject directly or indirectly to mate- 
 rial conditions, though the material conditions are not 
 the only ones operative or determinative in this realm. 
 The nobility of our moral being consists in the fact that 
 it does not in any way deny or falsely estimate its envi- 
 ronment, but rather in fact illuminates and spiritualizes 
 this. It is thus that the contact of minds in their work 
 
102 APPENDICES. 
 
 upon and with one another, in their restless impulse to 
 shape things and to understand and be understood, de- 
 velops this marvellous stratum of spiritual being which 
 en swathes our globe, forever touching the natural world 
 and yet free from it. Its elements are representations, 
 thoughts, passions, mistakes, guilt and the like. 
 
 It does not imply too light an estimate of the moral 
 world to lay it down that this restlessly flowing and 
 swelling stratum of spiritual existence is the habitat and 
 ground of its formations, the plastic mass, so to speak, 
 where they originate. Such formations are certainly 
 none the less realities, or of less power objectively, 
 because they essentially live only in the souls, hearts, 
 knowledge, and consciences of human beings, and em- 
 ploy the body and things of a bodily kind merely as 
 their expressions, bearing their impress. True, they 
 can be perceived, understood, and investigated only in 
 these expressions and impressions ; but they do not 
 exist merely that the historical method may be applied 
 to them. They can be scientifically surveyed from still 
 other points of view than the historical. They are 
 open to this, for what they are they have become, and 
 to make out the development of tilings from their de- 
 veloped forms, and their developed forms from their 
 development is the nature of the historical method. 
 
 We offer, in conclusion, one more remark to parry 
 objections. No one thinks of contesting the application 
 to physics of the name of science, or of doubting the 
 scientific results of physical research, although the 
 science is not nature, but only a manner of observing 
 nature. No one objects to mathematics on the ground 
 that its whole proud structure stands only within the 
 
* 
 
 NATURE AND HISTORY. 103 
 
 knowing mind. Our shrewd mother tongue forms from 
 the participle of the word 'to know' (wisseni) its 
 descriptive for that which is certain (jgewiss). It does 
 not name the outer and so-called objective being of 
 things ' certain,' but beings and occurrences considered 
 as 'known.' Not what addresses us as sensuously 
 perceptible is ' true,' according to our language. No 
 material thing presents itself to us as 'true,' but we 
 ' take it true ' : and make it certain by means of our 
 knowledge. 
 
 'Our perception,' 'our knowledge' : here would lurk 
 the most dubious subjectivism, were the human world 
 composed of atoms, each filling its span of space and 
 time, and without any connection from beginning to end ; 
 or of atomic men as exemplified by the old philosopher's 
 plucked cock, and by the view of man which modern 
 radicalism takes as the starting point of its human 
 rights, and modern materialism and nihilism for the 
 basis of their 'sociology.' The individual as such 
 could not even bejborn, to say nothing of being cared 
 for, brought up, and developed into a human adult. 
 From the moment of his birth, and even of his con- 
 ception, he has place in the moral partnerships, this 
 family, this nation, State, faith or unfaith, etc., and it 
 is from and through them that he originally receives 
 whatever he is and has, whether of bodily or of spiritual 
 fortune. 
 
 It is clear that the scepticism of these views does not 
 go to controvert the reality of the natural world, still 
 
 1 Wahmehmen, literally 'to take as true' (wahr, 'true. 1 and 
 nehmen, 'take,') is in German psychology the technical word denot- 
 ing ' to perceive. * — 7 V. 
 
104 APPENDICES. 
 
 less the actuality of the historical or moral formations. 
 To us nature is not a '•phantom of the brain.' Even 
 less is the moral world the threadbare ' affirmation of 
 the will to live.' Practically we live and act in the 
 confident self-feeling of our ego-hood, and also in the 
 direct apprehension of the outer totality in the midst 
 of which we stand. These are the two elements which 
 result from the character of our being, spiritual and 
 sensuous at once. 
 
 On this immediate certainty with which we cognize 
 ourselves and the world, on this belief, however high or 
 low the expression we have arrived at for its ultimate 
 ground or its highest end, is based our human existence 
 and activity. This immediate reality we possess, and 
 we q:o on to search for and work out the truth beneath 
 it, which grows and deepens as we search and work. 
 In the poverty of our ego-hood and ego-development — 
 and this is present and irrepressible with our first spoken 
 word — lies the pressure upon us to bring to our 
 consciousness what is perceived and ^believed, to com- 
 prehend it, to free it as it were from the umbilical cord 
 which attaches it to the immediate realities, and arrange 
 it in order among the categories of our thinking. 
 These categories are related to the totality of the actual 
 things which we immediately perceive, including our 
 ego-hood, as the polygon is to the circle. Never so 
 many-sided and similar to a circle, the polygon remains 
 angular and bounded by straight lines, circle and poly- 
 gon never ceasing to be mutally incommensurable. 
 
 It is the mistaken pride of the human mind to bolster 
 the circles of what it directly apprehends upon its own 
 angular constructions as their norm or confirmation, 
 
ART AND METHOD. 105 
 
 while in fact these constructions are only effort upon 
 effort gradually to trace a line outside those circles. 
 We deny the spherical lines of faith because our thought 
 can not exhaust them with its right-lined figures, any 
 more than that boy of Augustine's, eagerly as he might 
 bail with his shell, could dry the hole which lie had dug 
 on the shore, when the sea was always ready to pour 
 over into it. 
 
 III. — ART AND METHOD. 
 
 Poetry was composed before poetics arose, as people 
 talked before there were grammar and rhetoric. Prac- 
 tical needs had taught men to mix and analyze materials 
 and to apply the powers of nature to human purposes, 
 before chemistry and physics had methodically investi- 
 gated nature and expressed its law r s in scientific form. 
 
 Recollections also belong to humanity's deepest 
 nature and needs. However narrow or wide the circles 
 which they may embrace, they are never in any wise 
 wanting to men. In the highest degree personal as 
 they at first appear, they yet form a bond between the 
 souls which meet in them. No human community is 
 without them. Each possesses in its previous life and 
 history the image of its being, a common possession of 
 all participants, which makes their relationship so much 
 the firmer and more intimate. 
 
 We can believe that the memories of highly gifted 
 peoples are embellished in their sagas, and become types 
 for the expression of the ideals to which the spirit of 
 the people is directed. We can suppose also that their 
 faith gets for them its basis in the form of sacred stories, 
 
106 APPENDICES. 
 
 which present the contents of it to the eye as actual 
 occurrences, and that such myths grow along with the 
 sagas. But when this restlessly living fusion, finally 
 satiated, comes to an end in the form of great epics, 
 myths will no longer belong to the na'ive faith alone. 
 
 The earliest history, that of the Greeks, began with 
 the collection and sifting of such myths and sagas. 
 Theirs were the earliest efforts to bring into this pri- 
 meval forest of traditions order, connection, agreement, 
 a chronological system, the first attempts at real investi- 
 gation. From the Greeks dates the continuity of the 
 sciences. Almost all of these which busy men's minds 
 to-day had their beginnings in Greece. Particularly 
 the field which has been well designated as that of the 
 moral sciences was tilled by them with predilection. 
 But they have no treatise on the Principles of History, 
 no 'histories,' to accompany their ethics, politics, eco- 
 nomics, etc. 
 
 After geniuses had historically described the age of 
 Marathon and the age of Pericles, Thucydides being 
 the last member of the galaxy, it was left to Isokrates 
 and not to Aristotle to found an historical school. This 
 fact drew history into paths from which Polybius vainly 
 exerted himself to bring it back. It became, and with 
 the Romans it remained, so far as philology did not get 
 possession of it, a part of rhetoric or belles lettres. 
 Between the two, philology and rhetoric, historical 
 sketches for practical purposes, including encyclopedias 
 and school books, gradually sank to the most miserable 
 dryness. 
 
 We come to the middle age. Its historical work is 
 even less likely to betray any new impulses toward 
 
ART AND METHOD. 107 
 
 scientific thought than is that of declining antiquity, 
 unless we except the sense for theological construction 
 which the middle age here and there exhibits. This 
 judgment is true, in spite of the fact that an occasional 
 historian in the times of the Carolingians and the Ottos 
 sought his model of style among the ancients and 
 tricked out his heroes with their rhetorical flourishes. 
 
 As the middle age drew to a close, the renewed strife 
 against the papacy and the hierarchy seized upon his- 
 torical investigation as a weapon, and the researches in 
 regard to the alleged donation of Constantine were fol- 
 lowed stroke after stroke by historico-critical attacks 
 upon the false traditions, the anti-scriptural institutions, 
 and the canonical assumptions of the Church. Even 
 then, however, in these important scientific onsets, rhet- 
 oric again and speedily got the upper hand of history. 
 This occurred first in Germany. The last magnificent 
 attempt on the German side, that of Sebastian Franck, 
 scientifically to collate the knowledge and practice which 
 had been won, was drowned by the din of the brawl, so 
 soon grown dogmatic, between the creeds. 
 
 Only after the natural sciences, sure and conscious of 
 their way, had established their method and thereby 
 made a new beginning in scientific thought, did the 
 notion emerge of finding a methodical side even for the 
 ' methodless matter ' 1 of History. To the time of Gal- 
 ileo and Bacon belongs Jean Bodin ; to that of Huygens 
 and Newton, Pufendorff and also Leibnitz, the thinker, 
 who broke paths in all directions at once. Then the 
 English Illumination, if it is permitted thus to name the 
 period of the so-called deists, took up this question. To 
 
 1 dfif '6080$ v\r^. See page 62. 
 
108 APPENDICES. 
 
 its representations was due the first effort to divide our 
 science according to its problems or departments. They 
 spoke of the History of the World, the History of Hu- 
 manity, Universal History, the History of States, of peo- 
 ples, and so on. Voltaire, the pupil and continuator of 
 this English tendency, contributed to it the unclear de- 
 signation ' philosophie de V MstoireJ The Gottingen his- 
 torical school developed a kind of system among the 
 newly created sciences and associate sciences in their 
 field, and began to infuse its spirit even into branches 
 but remotely connected with History. More than one of 
 the great poets and thinkers of our nation went deep into 
 the theoretical question of historical certitude ; and 
 there developed in historical labor and investigation 
 itself a habit of sharp and certain criticism, which pro- 
 duced entirely new and surprising results in every 
 realm of History where it was applied. In this historical 
 criticism the German nation has ever since Niebuhr out- 
 stripped all others ; and the style or technique of inves- 
 tigation maintained in the splendid labors of German 
 savans seemed to need only expression in general and 
 theoretical propositions in order to constitute the his- 
 torical method. 
 
 To be sure, the great public was not at once served 
 by this application of our historical toil. It wished to 
 read, not to study, and complained that we set before 
 it the process of preparing food instead of the food 
 itself. It called the German method in history pedantic, 
 exclusive, unenjoyable. How much more agreeable to 
 read were Macaulay's Essays than these learned and 
 tiresome investigations ! How the accounts of the 
 French Revolution in Thiers's splendid delineation 
 
ART AND METHOD. 109 
 
 took ! In this way it came to pass that not only Ger- 
 man historical taste but German historical judgment, 
 and consequently in no slight degree also German 
 political judgment, being all formed and guided for 
 three or four centuries by the foreign style of making 
 History, were dominated by the rhetorical superiority of 
 other nations. 
 
 This is not all. While such rhetorical art takes 
 weighty and tremendous events, with the difficult en- 
 tanglements in which they are usually wrought out or 
 at least prepared for, and sadly metamorphoses them, as 
 it depicts the horror of men's unchained passions and 
 fanatic persecutions, the false representation, though 
 discordant enough artistically, yet has a thrilling and 
 dramatic effect when read. Composition is certain to 
 be so much the more comprehensible and persuasive for 
 being of that kind. It is able to make even the less 
 intelligent reader acquainted with things which in their 
 actual course demanded from the contemporary who 
 wished to understand them in never so moderate a 
 degree, a thousand points of previous knowledge, be- 
 sides much experience and a calm and collected judg- 
 ment. Historical art knows how in the most felicitous 
 manner to avoid all this, so that the attentive reader, 
 when he has perused his Thiers or Macaulay to the 
 end, is permitted to believe himself the richer by the 
 great experiences of the revolutions, party-wars, and 
 constitutional developments of which they treat. k Ex- 
 periences,' forsooth ! when they lack the best of what 
 makes experiences fruitful, the earnestness of actual 
 men hard at work, responsibility for irrevocable de- 
 cisions, the sacrifice which even victory demands, the 
 
110 APPENDICES. 
 
 failure which treads under foot the most righteous 
 cause ! The art of the historian lifts the reader above 
 thought of any such side issues. It fills his fancy 
 with representations and views which embrace but the 
 splendidly illuminated tips of the broad, hard, tediously 
 slow reality. It persuades him that these sum up all 
 the particular events and constitute the truth of the 
 realities not dwelt upon. It helps in its way the limit- 
 less influence of public opinion, leading people to 
 measure the reality according to their ideas and to call 
 upon reality to form or transform itself accordingly. 
 Readers demand this the more impatiently the easier 
 custom has made it for them to think of such a reversal 
 of things. We Germans too already boast an historical 
 literature answering the popular need. Among us as 
 elsewhere the insight is attained or the confession made 
 that ' History is at once art and science.' At the same 
 time the question of method, which is what we are 
 concerned with here, is falling into obscurity anew. 
 
 What then, in works of an historical kind, is the 
 mutual relation between art and science ? For instance, 
 is the fact that History is marked by ' criticism and 
 learning' enough to give it a scientific character? Is 
 that incumbent on art which the historian ought in any 
 event to do? Should the historian's studies actually 
 have no other aim than that he may write a few books ? 
 Should they have no application but to entertain by 
 instructing and to instruct by entertaining ? 
 
 History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous 
 fortune of being required to be at the same time an 
 art. a fortune which, in spite of Platonic dialogues, 
 not even philosophy shares with it. It would not be 
 
ART AND METHOD. Ill 
 
 without interest to inquire the reason for this peculiarity 
 of History. 
 
 We, however, pass to another side of the question. 
 In artistic Labors, according to an old manner of expres- 
 sion, technique and Muses' work go hand in hand. It 
 belongs to the nature of art that its productions make 
 you forget the defects which inhere in its means of ex- 
 pression. Art can do this in proportion as the idea 
 which it wishes to bring out in given forms, upon such 
 and such materials, and with this technique, vivifies and 
 illumines all these. What is created in such a manner 
 is a totality, a world in itself. Muses' work has the 
 power to make the observer or hearer fully and exclu- 
 sively receive and feel in a given expression what that 
 work was meant to express. 
 
 It is different with the sciences. Particularly the 
 empirical ones have no more imperative duty than to 
 make clear the gaps which are based in the objects of 
 their search; to control the errors which arise out of 
 their technique ; to inquire the scope of their methods, 
 recognizing that they can give right results only within 
 the limits essentially pertaining to them. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest service of the critical school in 
 History, at least the one most important in respect to 
 method, is to have given rise to the insight that the 
 groundwork of our studies is the examination of the 
 ' sources ' from which we draw. In this way the re- 
 lation of History to past events is placed at the point 
 which yields a scientific rule. This critical view that 
 past events lie before us no longer directly, but only in 
 a mediate manner, that we can not restore them ' ob- 
 jectively,' but can only frame out of the 'sources' a 
 
112 APPENDICES. 
 
 more or less subjective apprehension, view, or copy of 
 them, that the apprehensions and views thus attainable 
 and won are all that it is possible for us to know of the 
 past, that thus ' History ' exists not outwardly and as 
 a reality, but only as thus mediated, studied out, and 
 known, — this, so it seems, must be our point of de- 
 parture if we will cease to ' naturalize ' in history. 
 
 What is before us for investigation is not past events 
 as such, but partly remnants of them, partly ideas of 
 them. The remnants are such only for historical con- 
 sideration. They stand as wholes and on their own 
 account in the midst of this present, many of them, 
 fragmentary and widowed as they are, instantly remind- 
 ing us that they were once different, more alive and 
 important than now ; others transformed and still in 
 living and practical application ; others changed almost 
 beyond recognition and fused in the being and life of 
 the present. The present itself is nothing else but the 
 sum of all the remnants and products of the past. 
 Furthermore, views of what was and happened are not 
 always from contemporaries, those acquainted with the 
 facts, or impartial witnesses, but often views of views, 
 at third or fourth hand. And even when contemporaries 
 tell what happened in their time, how much did they 
 personally see and hear of what they relate ? One's 
 own eye-sight and hearing embrace after all but a part, 
 a side, a tendency of the occurrences. And so on. 
 
 In point of method the character of these two kinds 
 of materials is so extraordinarily different that one does 
 well to keep them separate even in technical nomencla- 
 ture ; and it behooves such as wish their writings to be 
 sources to name their sources even when in most respects 
 
ART AND METHOD. 113 
 
 they are like the other remnants, being literary remains 
 of the time in which they arose. 
 
 The now usual method or technique of historical in- 
 vestigation was developed from the study of times which 
 have transmitted, at least for political history, nothing 
 or little but the sort of views above characterized, from 
 more or less contemporary narrators. Much for which 
 we should like to seek and inquire, these accounts do 
 not touch at all. To the question how our emperors 
 when they crossed the Alps on their journeys to Rome 
 cared for thousands of men and horses, to the question 
 in what form the commerce of the Mediterranean was 
 carried on after the revolution which Alexander the 
 Great effected over all Asia, the sources give us no 
 information. 
 
 How superficial, how unreliable our knowledge of 
 earlier times is, how necessarily fragmentary and limited 
 to particular points the view which Ave can now gather 
 therefrom, we become conscious even when we study 
 times from which the archives offer us something 
 more than the k original documents ' of closed public 
 law cases ; giving us diplomatic reports, reports of 
 administrative authorities and state papers of all 
 kinds. And further, how vividly prominent in such 
 study is the difference between the ' views ' of the 
 foreign ambassadors or of the domestic authorities, 
 and the remains that survive of the actual course of 
 diplomacy, the deliberations back and forth, the proto- 
 cols of the negotiations, and so on. Certainly these 
 state documents do not as a rule, like those narrations, 
 lay before us an already formed idea of the case, a 
 preliminary historical picture of what had just happened. 
 
1 1 4 APPENDICES. 
 
 They are remnants of that which happened ; they are 
 pieces of the transaction and of the course it pursued, 
 which still lie directly before our eyes. And if I 
 may give the expression so wide an application, it is as 
 a 'transaction,' in the broad maze of the present, con- 
 ditioned and conditioning in a thousand ways, that those 
 events come to pass which we afterwards apprehend 
 successively as History. We thus look at them in a 
 quite different way from that in which they occurred, 
 and which they had in the wishes and deeds of those 
 who enacted them. So it is not a paradox to ask 
 how History (^Greschichte) comes out of transactions 
 (Greschciften), and what it is which with this transfer 
 into another medium, as it were, is added or lost. 
 
 I may be permitted to offer a single remark in con- 
 clusion. I have in another place sought to refute the 
 contention made against our science by those who view 
 the method of natural science as the only scientific one, 
 and who think that History must be raised to the rank of 
 a science through the application of that method. Just 
 as if in the realm of the historical, that is, of the moral 
 life, only analogy were worthy of regard and not also 
 anomaly, the individual, free-will, responsibility, genius. 
 As if it were not a scientific task to seek ways of in- 
 vestigation, of verification, of understanding for the 
 movements and effects of human freedom and of per- 
 sonal peculiarities, however high or low the estimate 
 which may be placed upon them. 
 
 We certainly possess immediately and in subjec- 
 tive certainty, an understanding of human things, of 
 every expression and impression of man's creation 
 or behavior which is perceptible to us, so far as it 
 
ART AND METHOD. 115 
 
 is perceptible. What we have to do is to find 
 methods, in order to secure objective' rules and control 
 for this immediate and subjective grasp of events, 
 especially as we now have before us, to represent the 
 past, only the views of others or fragments of that which 
 once existed. We need to ground, sound and justify 
 our subjective knowledge. Only this seems able to 
 assert itself as the sense of the historical objectivity so 
 often named. 
 
 We are to discover methods. There is need of differ- 
 ent ones for different problems, and often a combination 
 of several is required for the solution of one problem. 
 So long as History was believed to be essentially politi- 
 cal history, and the task of the historian was just to 
 recount in new presentation and connection what had 
 been transmitted about revolutions, wars, state events, 
 etc., it might suffice to take for use from the best 
 sources, which had perhaps been critically authenticated 
 as the best, the material to be wrought into a book, 
 a lecture, or the like. But since the insight has been 
 awakened that also the arts, jural formations, every- 
 thing of human creation, all the formations character- 
 izing the moral world, can and must be investigated in 
 order to deduce that which is from that which was, 
 demands of a very different kind are made upon our 
 science. It has to investigate formations according to 
 their historical connection, formations of which perhaps 
 only individual remnants are preserved, to open fields 
 hitherto not considered or treated as historical, least of 
 all by those who lived in the midst of them. Thus 
 questions are pressing upon History from all sides, 
 questions touching things for the most part incompa- 
 
116 APPENDICES. 
 
 rably weightier than the often very superficial and 
 accidental accounts which have hitherto passed for 
 History. Is investigation to lay down its arms here? 
 
 When we enter a collection of Egyptian antiquities, 
 we have at once the subjective view of their wonderful 
 ancientness, and the accompanying strange impression ; 
 but at least in certain directions we can by investigation 
 come to more positive results. Here are these syenites, 
 hewn and polished. Here are these colors, these woven 
 fabrics. What tools, what metals were required to work 
 such hard stone? What mechanical contrivances were 
 needed to raise such masses out of the quarry and put 
 them aboard ship? How were these colors prepared 
 chemically? Out of what materials are these fabrics 
 made and whence did they come ? In the way of such 
 technological interpretation of remains, facts are made 
 out which in numerous and important directions fill up 
 our meagre tradition concerning ancient Egypt ; and 
 these facts possess a certainty so much the greater for 
 the indirectness of the manner in which they were 
 deduced. 
 
 Many think it the part of criticism, touching, for in- 
 stance, the constitution of ancient Rome or Athens 
 before the Persian wars, to allow only that to pass as 
 good history which is explicitly transmitted and attested. 
 The reader's fancy will not fail to combine these scanty 
 notices and thus to fill them out into a picture ; only, 
 this filling out is commonly a play of the fancy, and the 
 picture more or less artificial. Is it not possible to find 
 methods which will regulate the process of such filling 
 out, and give it a foundation ? In the pragmatic nature 
 exhibited by things of this kind — and writers should 
 
ART AND METHOD. 117 
 
 leave off misapprehending Polybius's expression 'prag- 
 matic ' — lie elements, conditions, necessities, traces of 
 which, provided we look more sharply, may perhaps be 
 re-recognized in what still lies before us. The hypo- 
 thetical line which enabled us to trace that pragmatic 
 nature of things then confirms itself, since this or that 
 fragment exactly fits into it. 
 
 When it was necessary to work out the history of 
 art during the times of Raphael and Diirer, not much 
 advance could be made with the ' sources ' and the criti- 
 cism of sources, although in Vasari and others, at least 
 for the Italian masters, was found just the external 
 information that was desired. In their works and those 
 of their German contemporaries, however, was found 
 something entirely different, exactly the material for 
 investigation, though confessedly of a nature which 
 required in the investigator who was to derive exact 
 results from it, an outfit of an especial kind. He was 
 obliged to know the technique of painting, in order to 
 distinguish that of the different artists, the tint of each 
 one's tone, his chiaroscuro, his brush-stroke. He was 
 obliged to be sure how Albrecht Diirer's eye envisaged 
 the human form, else he could not show whether a 
 given crucifix was from his hand. In order finally to 
 decide whether this or that important portrait head was 
 by Leonardo da Vinci or Holbein, he had to bring to 
 his work, so to speak, a learned apparatus of etchings, 
 hand sketches, etc. He must be familiar with the 
 mode of looking at things in that age, the range of its 
 general knowledge, its common convictions, ecclesi- 
 astical and profane, its local and daily history, that he 
 might be able rightly to interpret what was presented 
 
118 APPENDICES. 
 
 in the works of art or in things related thereto. He 
 was called upon not only aesthetically to feel but per- 
 suasively to point out the artist's deeper or more super- 
 ficial view or intention. 
 
 The same in all other departments. Only the deep 
 and many sided technical and special knowledge, ac- 
 cording as it is art, law, commerce, agriculture, or the 
 State and politics that is to be historically investigated, 
 will put the investigator in condition to ascertain the 
 methods demanded for the given case, and to work 
 with them. Just so new methods are continually 
 found out in the natural sciences to unlock dumb 
 nature's mysteries. 
 
 All such methods which come into play in the realm 
 of historical studies move within the same periphery 
 and have the same determining centre. To unite them 
 in their common thought, to develop their system and 
 their theory, and so to establish, not the laws of objec- 
 tive History but the laws of historical investigation and 
 knowledge, — this is the task of HistoriJc. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 iEschylus, Droysen's Translation 
 of, xv; quoted 12, 313. 
 
 Alexander the Great, Droysen's 
 History of, xvii. 
 
 Appendices, 01 and fol.; charac- 
 ter of, ix, x. 
 
 Arndt, E. M., in Frankfort As- 
 sembly of 1848, xxix. 
 
 Aristophanes, Droysen's Transla- 
 tion of, xvi; quoted 80. 
 
 Aristotle, Droysen a connoisseur 
 of, xxxii; quoted 10, 36, 83. 
 
 Art and Method, 105 and fol. 
 
 Arts, the, and the Beautiful, 40. 
 
 Authority, the Sphere of, 42. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bacon, F., quoted 80. 
 
 Baur, F. C, 23. 
 
 Beautiful, the, and the Arts, 40. 
 
 Biographical Exposition, 5:'.. 
 
 Biography, Droysen's, Sketch of, 
 xiv and fol. 
 
 Bodin, Jean, 16, 107. 
 
 Buckle, H. T., History of Civili- 
 zation reviewed, 61 and fol. 
 
 C. 
 
 Catastrophic Exposition, 53. 
 Comte, A., 16, 70. 
 Criticism, in History, 21 and fol. ; 
 — of genuineness, 22; — of 
 
 earlier and later forms, 23; 
 
 — of correctness or validity, 
 23; — of the sources, 24; 
 
 — outcome of, what, 25, 26. 
 
 D. 
 
 Dahlman, in Frankfort Assembly 
 of 1848, xxix. 
 
 Dante, quoted 15, 45. 
 
 Da Vinci, 117. 
 
 Diacritical procedure, 23. 
 
 Dicsearchus, quoted 38. 
 
 Didactic Exposition, 53 and fol. 
 
 Diplomatics, 22. 
 
 Discussive Exposition, 55 and fol. 
 
 Droysen, G. , son of J. G. , vi. 
 
 Droysen, J. G., rank as historian, 
 v, vii, xiv and fol. ; biographies, 
 vi; pupils, vi; style, v; his pref- 
 ace to the "Outline," ix; do. 
 to 3rd Ed., xi; education, xiv; 
 early teaching and works, xv, 
 xvi; transition to history, xvi; 
 History of Hellenism, xvii; its 
 faults, xvii; transition to mod. 
 hist., xviii; removal to Jena, 
 xix; faith in a German Empire, 
 xix; History of Prussian Policy, 
 xix and fol. ; Droysen as a 
 teacher, xxi and fol.; his per- 
 sonality, xxiii; his Christianity, 
 xxiv; manliness, xxvii; political 
 activity, xxviii and fol. ; briefer 
 works, xxxii; relations with 
 
 119 
 
120 
 
 INDIA. 
 
 Eanke, xxxiii ; illness and 
 
 death, xxxiv. 
 Duncker, Max, biog. sketches of 
 
 Droysen, vi. 
 Diirer, Albrecht, 117. 
 
 E. 
 
 Elevation, the, of History to rank 
 of a Science, 01 and fol. 
 
 Encyclopedia and Methodology 
 of History, Droysen's lectures 
 on, ix, xxiv, 8. 
 
 Ends in History, 46 and fol. 
 
 End, the highest, 47 and fol. 
 
 Eroica, the, of Beethoven, 79. 
 
 Exposition, interrogative, 51, 52; 
 — recitative, 52, 53; — didactic, 
 53, 54; — discussive, 55 and fol. 
 
 F. 
 
 Family, the, 38. 
 Franck, Sebastian, 107. 
 Frankfort, National Assembly at, 
 
 in 1848, xxix. 
 Frederic the Great, quoted 54. 
 Freedom, meaning of, 44, 45. 
 Forms, the, in which History 
 
 works, 36 and fol. 
 
 G. 
 
 Gellius, Aulus, quoted 50. 
 
 Genesis, quoted 93. 
 
 Gervinus, 16, 50. 
 
 Gottingen, historical School of 
 
 in 18th Century, 4. 
 yvusdi txavrbv, 44. 
 Gray Cloister, Gymnasium of, 
 
 Droysen teaches at, xiv, xxi. 
 Green, Arnold, Esq., learned 
 
 Hellenist, 38. 
 Grunhagen, Prof., of Breslau. vii. 
 
 Hegel, 46. 
 
 Hegelianism, Droysen's, xvii, 
 xx. 
 
 Hellenism, Droysen's History of, 
 xvii. 
 
 Herder, 54. 
 
 Herodotus, quoted 50. 
 
 Historical Method, the, 12 and 
 fol. 
 
 Historical Studies, present condi- 
 tion and views of, 3, 61 and fol. 
 
 Historical Writing, present ten- 
 dency of, viii; ancient and 
 mediaeval, 106 and fol. 
 
 Historik, the, or Outline of the 
 Principles of History. Charac- 
 ter of, vii, 16, 17. 
 
 History, various views of its na- 
 ture, 3 and fol. ; nature, 9, 90 
 and fol. ; involves idea of time, 
 10; correlative of 'moral 
 world,' 10; relation of past and 
 present in, 11; deals only with 
 what is human, 12. 
 
 Holbein, 117. 
 
 Holstein, and Schleswig, xxviii. 
 
 Humboldt, Win. von, importance 
 of for History, 7 and fol., 16. 
 
 I. 
 
 Ideal partnerships, the, of Society, 
 39 and fol. 
 
 Illumination, the English, 107. 
 
 Interpretation, in History, 26 and 
 fol.; pragmatic, 27; of condi- 
 tions, 27; psychological, 28; 
 of ideas, 30; its questions, 31 
 and fol. 
 
 Interrogation, in History, 21. 
 
 Interrogative Exposition, 51, 52. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 121 
 
 Invention, in History, 18 and fol. 
 Isaacssohn, Prof., vii. 
 
 J. 
 
 John, Gospel of, quoted, xxiv, 49. 
 Justice, the Sphere of, 41. 
 
 K. 
 
 Kant, GO, 07. 
 
 "Kiel Address," the, xxviii. 
 Kirchoff, A., Greek Alphabet, 21. 
 Koser, R., Prof., of Berlin, vii. 
 Krliger, Dr. H., Biography of 
 Droysen, vi, xiv and fol. 
 
 L. 
 
 Languages, the, and Speech, 39. 
 Leibnitz, 107. 
 Leo, xvii, 54. 
 Leasing, 10, 54, 87. 
 
 M. 
 Macaulay, Essays, 108. 
 Materials, historical, 18 and fol. 
 Matter for the work of History, 
 
 35, 36. 
 Maurenbrecher, Prof. , compares 
 
 Droysen with Ranke, xxxiii. 
 Method, and Art, 105 and fol.; 
 
 the doctrine of, 17 and fol.; 
 
 the historical, 12. 
 Methods, scientific, 15. 
 Monographic Exposition, 53. 
 Monuments, historical, defined, 
 
 19. 
 Midler, Johannes von, 54. 
 
 N. 
 
 Natural partnerships, the, of So- 
 ciety, 37 and fol. 
 Nature, and History, 90 and fol. 
 
 Neighborhood, the, 38 
 Niebuhr, quoted 18. 
 
 Partnerships, the natural, of So- 
 ciety, 37 and fol. ; the ideal, 39 
 and fol. ; the practical,41 and fol. 
 People, the, 39. 
 Plato, quoted, 46. 
 Polybius, 10, 117; use of the term 
 
 'pragmatic,' 19, 20, 107. 
 Practical partnerships, the, 41 
 
 and fol. 
 Pragmatic sources, 20; interpre- 
 tation, 27; exposition, 55. 
 Comp., 19, 20, 107. 
 Praying Boy, the, (statue) 81. 
 Presentation, systematic, the doc- 
 trine of, 49 and fol. 
 Principles of History (Historik), 
 
 Outline of, 3 and fol. 
 Prize of 1000 Thalers, ree'd by 
 
 Droysen, xxi. 
 Problem, the, of this Outline, 10. 
 Property, the Sphere of, 41. 
 Prussian Policy, Droysen's His- 
 tory of, xix. 
 Prutz, Hans, mistaken view of 
 
 touching Droysen, xxiv. 
 Pufendorff, 107. 
 
 R. 
 
 and Droysen, v, 
 
 Ranke, 54; 
 
 xxxiii. 
 Raphael, 78, 117. 
 Rechtsstaat, the, 42. 
 Recitative Exposition, 52, :>;;. 
 Religions, the, and the Sacred, 40. 
 Remains, historical, kinds, 18, 19. 
 Roeskild, assembly of Estates at 
 
 in 1844, xxviii. 
 
122 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Roman Law, of Twelve Tables, 
 quoted 43. 
 
 Sacred, the, and Religions, 40. 
 Schaeffle, 16. 
 
 Schleicher, quoted 40. 
 Schleswig, and Holstein, xxviii. 
 Sciences, the, and the True, 40. 
 Society, the Sphere of, 41. 
 Sources, historical, defined, ID; 
 
 derived, defined, 20. 
 Space, correlative to Nature, as 
 
 Time to History, 07. 
 Speech and the Languages, 39. 
 State, the, 42, 43-, 
 Sybel, von, xxxviii, <H. [fol. 
 
 System, the doctrine of, 32 and 
 
 Tables, Twelve, of Roman Law, 
 
 quoted 43. 
 Thiers, French Revolution, 108. 
 Thucydides, 10, 73. 
 
 Time, a correlative of History, 
 08 and fol. 
 
 Translation, the present, charac- 
 ter of, vii. 
 
 Translator, Preface of, v. 
 
 Tribe, the, 38. 
 
 True, the, and the Sciences, 40. 
 
 V. 
 Voltaire, 108. 
 
 W. 
 
 Wachsmuth, 50. 
 
 Wahrnehmen, significance of its 
 etymology, 103. 
 
 Wars for Freedom, Droysen's 
 History of, xviii. 
 
 Work, the, of History, 43 and fol. 
 
 Workers, the, of History, 4:'. and 
 fol. 
 
 Y. 
 
 York of Wartenburg, Field Mar- 
 shal, Droysen's Biography of, 
 
.