D'ROYSENS ^. 
 INCIPLES OF HISTORY 
 
 ANDREWS
 
 O XJ T X. IIS^ E 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF IILSTOIIY 
 
 (GRUNDRLS.S DER ULSTOKIK) 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHANISr GUSTAV DROYSEN", 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE 
 I'NIVERSITY OF IIERLIX. 
 
 WITH A BIOfiRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS, 
 
 fUHilDEXt OF BBOWN UNIVEBSITT. 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 GINN & COMPANY. 
 1 S 9 7.
 
 
 Copyright, 1893, 
 By E. benjamin ANDREWS. 
 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
 (Binn &. Company 
 
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 JSoston
 
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 (OXTKXTS. 
 
 TlJAXSI.ATOIt's I'lilvK ACK . 
 
 AiTiioii's I'kkkack 
 
 .Vl Tllolt's I'UKFACE TO Till; 'J'mi;l> KlUTKtN 
 
 IJKtiiKAriiK Ai. Ski:i( II or Dkovskx 
 
 Oi Ti-iNK or tin: ri!iN(iri.i:s of Ilisronv 3 
 
 InTI{OI»I(TION : 
 
 I. IIlSTOKV 9 
 
 II. TlIK IIlSTOIiKAL MkTIIOI) 12 
 
 III. 'I'm; I'i;oI!i.i;m of this ••Oiii.im;"" 16 
 
 Tin: I)(jc'ti;ixe of Mkthod 17 
 
 I. Isvkntiox 18 
 
 II. ClMTK ISM 21 
 
 III. iNTEItrRETATIOX 26 
 
 The DofTinxE of System 32 
 
 I. Till-; Woi:k ok IIistouv i\ IJki.aiton to its Kinks of 
 
 Mattek 35 
 
 11. Tin; Work of Histoky ix Kei.atiox to its Foij.ms 30 
 
 III. The AVoi:k of Histoky in Ufi.atiox to the A\'oi;ki;hs.. . 43 
 
 IV. The Wokk of Histoky ix Keeatiox to its Ends 4(! 
 The Doctijixe of Systematic Pisesextatiox 4!J 
 
 Ai'i'EXDix T. i'liK Ei.evaitox of Histoky to tiii: J! vnk of 
 
 A Science (il 
 
 Ai'PEXDix II. Xatike axi) History. iH) 
 
 Ari'EXDix III. Art axd Method lO.j 
 
 IXDEX 121 
 
 1703320
 
 TRAXSLATOirS IMIEFACE. 
 
 1 IJKCAMK iiiteiestud 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 Kanke. This view I have not changed. To assist 
 myself in comprehending his very deep thoughts I soon 
 began a translation of the Historik. At fii-st 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 appeai-s upon a precedip.g page. 
 I expected to linish the work in a few months from 
 the date of this letter, but more pressing laboi-s came 
 and l)ecame permanent, so connnanding 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 Ls completed, and I give 
 it to the public, appendices and all. These greatly 
 elucidate the - Outline " proper, and may very appro- 
 priately Ixj read fii-st. Those who know Droysen's cum- 
 brous yet nervous and abl)reviated style of writing will 
 not estimate the extent of my toil by the numl)er of 
 pages in this book. 
 
 Such was my reverence f(»r Droysen that, after his 
 death in 1884, I cherished the hope of preparing a
 
 Vi TEANSLATOll S PREFACE. 
 
 brief biography of him. 1 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 
 Miiller\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 Avas 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 leflection upon our times that such a man 
 as Droysen should so soon even seem to be forgotten. 
 I say tliis notwithstanding certain reasons for apathy 
 toward him sfrounded in the nature and habits of the 
 man. Owing to his intense application, and also to his 
 sim])le honesty, forbidding in him those arts by which 
 some German professors are popular, Droysen founded,
 
 TiiANSLAToi; s i'i;i:fa('K. vii 
 
 properly speakiiio-, no school, tliougli several of tin; 
 German historians wlio earned fame during his last 
 years and after his death wciv liis j)upils, inspired by 
 liis s[)irit and ini})r('ssino- npon their works the stamj) of 
 his manner. Amon^- these may he mentioned Griin- 
 hagen, of Breslau, who has written so well on the first 
 two Silesian AVars ; 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 Bcamtenthumn. Of 
 these Koser is perhaps the ablest, though (iriinhagen 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 
 so much as approaches the master in that wonderful 
 wealth and control of materials exhibited by him in his 
 Creschichte 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 
 amplitication, 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 discoui-se, 
 English has in most cases been substituted, the origi- 
 nal l)eing 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 Hisfon'k the Aveightiest book of 
 its size composed in our century, weightier than any
 
 Vlll TRANSLATOR S PEEFACE. 
 
 other, small ov great, save certain treatises ])y 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 histoiy 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. ANDEEWS. 
 Brown University, 
 September 6, 1892.
 
 AlTlIOirs PUKFACE. 
 
 Lectures upon the Eiu-yclopfMlia and Metluxlology 
 of IIist(U-y which 1 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, lirst in 
 1858 and tlien again in 1802, 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 pid>lic. 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 ri[)e. 
 
 To the tii-st impression, in order to give a general 
 idea of the questions discussed in the body of the 
 work, I had i)refixed 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," /y 
 was occasioned by the appearance of Buckle's well- 
 known wOrk, and printed in von Syljel's " Zeitschrift " 
 for 1852. The second, on ''Nature and History ," w;i8 AZ 
 evoked bv a discussion in which all the advantagfes 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 PKEFACE. 
 
 succession of aphoristic remarks, intended to Ining to 
 memory the partly forgotten limits between dilletantism 
 and science. Some of them have already found place 
 in an academic lecture. See the 3Ionatsberifhte 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.
 
 PKEFACE TO THE TIIIIU) EIlITION. 
 
 Ix tliis new impression of the ''Outline" the armnu^e- 
 ment has been in some })oints altered, into a form whieh 
 repeated delivery of the lectures indicated iis better 
 answcriuo- my purpose. In the somewhat numerous 
 para^iajjhs which have double figures,^ those in brackets 
 refer to the order in the editions of 18()7 and 1875. 
 
 The " ( )utline " 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 /y 
 
 which has opened so splendid a career to natural 
 
 science. 
 
 JOH. GUST. DKOYSKX. 
 Bi:i!r.iN, July is, ISSI. 
 
 1 Not repi'oduced in this translation. — Tr.
 
 BTOGRArHirAL SKETCH.
 
 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 l>v L)k. .IIei;ma.\.v Ki:lm;ek. 
 
 Ox the morning of June 10, 1884, in the ViUa at 
 Seliiineheig, near Berlin, Avliither he had removed upon 
 medical advice, died Johann Gustav Droysen, in whom 
 Germany lost one of its he.st men and one of its greatest 
 historians. To the author of these lines, a grateful 
 pu})il of his, it is no less a necessity of the heart than 
 a duty of piety to lay a crown of honor u[)on tliis man's 
 grave. 
 
 Let us hegin l)y briefly sketching the outward course 
 of Droysen's life. 
 
 Bom on the 6th of July, 1808, at Treptow, on the 
 Rega, as son of a minister, and early left an orphan, 
 he ol)tained his preparation for the univei-sity at the 
 Marienatift-G-ymnamim in Stettin. He then studied 
 philology in Berlin, and o])tained there his first position 
 as teacher, in the (lymnasium of the Gray Cloister. In 
 1833, having already published some studies in the 
 domain of (Ireek histor y, he habilitated as privat-docent /( 
 at the Berlin Univei"sity, where he delivered philological 
 and liistorical lectures with great acceptance, and also 
 advanced very soon to the position of professor extra- 
 ordinary. In 1840 he accepted a call to l^ecome 
 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 BIOGEAPHIC^VL SKETCH. 
 
 in the agitations to which dnring the forties the popula- 
 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 b}^ 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 with a success Avhich was great and which 
 continued to the last. His lectures were among the 
 most frequented at the university. Particularlj^ 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 Inilliant in the scientific world. 
 
 To his first Berlin period belongs the translation of 
 ^schylus that appeared in 1832, which Droysen,^ 
 as a young philologist, also as an enthusiast for 
 the most powerful among tlie Greek dramatists, — 
 undertook at first in tlie interest of a friend not 
 adequately acquainted with the Greek, and only subse- 
 quently gave to the press. His appreciation of the
 
 JOHANN UUSTAV DKOYSKN. xvii 
 
 Greek nature, his poetic endowment, and liis unusual 
 mastery of the speech, begot by their union a traiLshition 
 wliich stands forth masterful in its kind and has not 
 IxHMi sur[)assed even to this day. To be sure, tlie 
 phih)h)g'ists of *• strict ol)servance ' most violently attacketl 
 this free poetic imitation, which is tiuc rather to the 
 spirit and thoughts of the writer than to the letter. 
 But Droysen was not drawn astray. Convinced that 
 he who will bring a Greek poet like yEschylus or 
 Aristophanes pleasurably to the undei-standing of a 
 German reader must utterly renounce the litei-al mode 
 of rendering, he immediately followed Avith his trans- 
 lation of Aristophanes. This, like that of ^schylus, 
 speedily found the favor of the public and has kept 
 it even to our own days. 
 
 I>t)th ti'anslations, 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 Lei[)zig, he listened to the exposition 
 of the Knights of Aristophanes by Ritschl, and more 
 than once heaid that eminent critic express his 
 admiring approval of Droysen's vei"sion. 
 
 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 Iltdlenic things, he saw in the thorough 
 investigation of (Jrecian antiquity the principal tiusk of 
 his scientific callincr. A fruit of these Hellenic studies
 
 XVlll 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 epi<jo7ii., 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 jDoints of \new 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 CJLSTAV DIMJYSEN. xix 
 
 Here in Kiel, Avlieic Dioysen completed his remark- 
 able work, the lliatory ot" Hellenism, he completed also //, 
 his transition from ancient to modern history . In 1846 ilf/J^ 
 he ])nl>lislu'd his lectni-es on the Histor y of the Wai-s //, 
 for Freedom. In an ingenious manner, with an almost 
 perfect art of luminous construction and rich coloring 
 in liis 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 tlitterence between 
 the born and schooled historian and the dilettante^ should 
 compare this Histor y of the Wans for Freedom, which for //^ 
 a long time has not in our judgment been sulhciently 
 api)reciated, with lieitskes much lauded work upon 
 the same period. Although in many parts left l)ehind 
 by more recent investigations, this work of Droj-sen's 
 still presents such a fullness of spirited remaiks and 
 incisive historical observations, that the perusal of it 
 even affords genuine enjoyment. 
 
 A second work which Droysen begun at Kiel but 
 finished later in Jena, was the famous Iiiogra])liy 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 Avas 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 i)ersonality like York, 
 energetic, yet ruled hy 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 Ijlossoms. Droysen 
 understood this general despair but did not sliare it. It 
 was his irrefraofable conviction that althouo-h 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 Histor y 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
 
 • lolIANN (iUSTAV DKoYSKN. xxi 
 
 fliniciilties, with labor iiiost inluusc and eit'uils often in 
 vain, in ever new, energetic onsets, toiled its way up, 
 furtliered and utilized all the powei"s necessary for the 
 subsistence and i)rosperity of the modern state, so as at 
 last to enter, a German state witli full credi'iitials, into 
 the rank of Europe's great powers. A prodigious plen- 
 itude of material from the ai-chives was for the iirst time 
 wrought into form and puhlished in this work. In eon- 
 sequence, many views previously accepted as certiiin 
 have l)een given up, some facts place<l in new lights, 
 and much else brought to the day as absolutely new. 
 
 However, this e[)och-making work, which we i)eruse 
 now in thirteen thick volumes, will hardly prove 
 l)opular in the sense in which Mommsen's Roman ## 
 Hist ory, for instance, or Ranke's Histo ry of the Hefor- '• 
 mation, has become so. Such a result is prevented not 
 only by the great compass of the treatise but more than 
 all l)v the circumstance that it does not piesent a history 
 of the Prussian state, cmbi-acing and unfolding in richly 
 colored view the entire breadth and manifoldness of 
 the state's life, but simply, ji.s 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 
 liistorian often wearying. 
 
 We may regret that Dro3'sen 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 halnt 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
 
 XXU BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 same domain, will be permittetl with impunity to slight 
 Droysen's laboi-s. That the author was awarded for it 
 b}' the scientific commission appointed to make the 
 awai'd, 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 encLs, 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- 
 nino- of the Seven Years' War.^ 
 
 Droysen has been not only an historical investigator 
 especiall}' 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 iniblislied, and reaches to the opening of the 
 Seven Years' "War. — Tr.
 
 ,I<»1IANN (irSTAV DKOVSKN, xxiii 
 
 Masterly was Dioysen's knack of grouping liis liis- 
 torieal material in his lectures so as to render it visible 
 clearly and visil)le 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 l)y historical olisei-vations. 
 In his portrayal of given epochs, in his characterization 
 of towering personalities, in his delinite 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 hrilliant manner, Droysen 
 invariably refused. 'Whether any one has yellow hair 
 and blue eyes,' he once said derisively, " is a (question 
 on Avliich nothing depends ; in devoting attention to 
 that sort of thing an historian descends to miniature 
 painting.' It would certainly have been welcome to 
 many of his hearei"s and readei>5 if he had not so 
 completely renounced this means of concrete represen- 
 tation. 
 
 Droysen held 3'ou spell-bound in his lectures, which 
 moved upon the middle line between free uttemnce 
 and literal delivery from manuscript. He did this by 
 his splendid diction, by his sharp and ingenious exposi- 
 tion, by his extraordinaiy art of letting, at tlie right time 
 and place and often only by a brief, hint-like remark, a 
 surprising blaze of light flash upon sjiecial personali- 
 ties. Great also was the effect of the powerful, maidy 
 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. 
 
 liis last days, although other and ^'•ounger 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 })racticed 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 ahvays again 
 straight to his lectures, was at bottom, if I see rightly, 
 Droysen's peculiar, mighty personalit}-, 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.' Hoav 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 (JUSTAV DIIOVSKN. XXV 
 
 render to the idea of the g'ood, lu; viewed as alone 
 wortliy of respect and achniration. 'What,' he once 
 asked, 'is the truly g-reat in history ? It is controlled, /^ 
 ennohled, t>lorificd passion '; hut 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 jieople 
 have supposed, and as TIans Prntz has again recently 
 asserted and emphasized in the N(tt'to)uil-ZeitHnu — not 
 in the sj)liere of the Greek woild did Droysen's moral 
 view of the univei-se have its loots, Imt in the soil of 
 Christianity. In his thought the develo])nient of 
 humanity — whose preparatory stages he characterizes jis 
 recognition of self and recognition of the world (see his 
 Princi[)les of Histo ry') — completes itself in the recogni- f^* 
 tion of (iod. Histor y itself is to him 'not the light and 
 the truth hut t)nly a witness and a conservation of them,, fr 
 a sermon upon them; as John wjis 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 rei)eat or to express it in deliiiitely formu- 
 lated utterances or propositions. 
 
 During his exuberant activity Droysen delivered over 
 two hunch'ed 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 *^ 
 coui-se 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. 
 
 Man}^ placed his course of lectures on Greek history 
 il i at the head. This certainly combined Droysen's compre- 
 hensive knowledge of the ancient Avorld 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 diadoehi, 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
 
 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 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 I Oh that , /' 
 he in preference to so many others had been called 
 to fill u[) this painful gap so long felt I 
 
 Still larger than Droysen's classes in ancient hi story /^ /j 
 were those which heard him upon modern and the 
 most recent periods. The lectures upon the latter were 
 of even more univei"sal interest than the others. In 
 tliem he took his hearei-s 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 Wai-s for Freedom, 
 and the Revolutionary time of 1848 with its proxi- 
 mate results. These lectures bore, like the othei-s, a 
 thorouglily sjjirited, 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 understiind- 
 insT which these lectures afforded of (xerman history, 5 
 a better insight into the i)resent and its tasks, so tliat 
 the power of the political shibboleth, which especially 
 in the fii-st half of the sixties dominated so much the 
 miLsings and iispirations of our youth, Wiis more and 
 more broken. 
 
 It is equally true that Droysen extremely seldom 
 allf)wed 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 1804, when tlie constitu-
 
 XXVlll BIOGRArHICAL 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 reca})itulation 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 Avas 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 therel)y 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 DIJOYSEN. XXIX 
 
 investigations and undertakings, had great and endur- 
 ing support in his alnlity (quietly and surely to lind 
 his way into every one's individuality. 
 
 During the time of conflict in the sixties, when, 
 among othei-s, 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 i)arti(ipation by speech or writing, and only occa- 
 sionally indicated liis position, which was not that of the 
 opposition. Subsequently, too, when those great events 
 and transformations leading to the erection of the 
 national state Avere taking place, he greeted them 
 ratlier with silent joy than with loud acclaim, and, in 
 general, the older he grew, he held himself more and 
 more aloof from tlie 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 i)eriod 
 of lal)(»r 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 l)een dangerous bad the 
 Danish crown followed them. Tliese acts called 
 Droysen into the political arena. He composed what 
 has become celebrated as the 'Kiel Address,' which met 
 with a stoim of approval and was instantly covered 
 with thousands of sukscriptions. As in this wiiting, 
 so siibse(iiu*ntly, in a second, namely when Frederick 
 VII announced the consolidated-constitution of Den- 
 mark. Droysen came out witli noble manliness, and
 
 XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 glowing tlirough and throngh 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 Avith adverse counsel and your heart 
 with the unrighteous plunder ; ^ 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, di'ew up 
 its protocol. Afterwards, when men's hope-filled 
 di'eams 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 'GeliehV
 
 JOHANN GUSTAV DltOVSEN. XXXI 
 
 Aveie tqton him. Deeply moved and scarcely master of 
 himself, he seized the pen and subscribed. What lie 
 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 a« irrefutably 
 demonstrated by her liistory. J 7. 
 
 As an historian he conceived to be e(pially certain his 
 duty to stam[) 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, i)lanned in the broadest 
 style, the Histoiy of Prussian Policy. In this he now //, 
 espied the principal ta«k of his life, and to it he hence- 
 forth consecrated liis entire strengtli. 
 
 iVfter his service at Frankfort Droysen never again 
 came forward as memljer of a political Ijody. 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 fii-st German parliament as 
 simjdy a first, though unsuccessful effort, to be followed 
 by otliei-s with happier result; and in the all>um pro- 
 vided for its members — characteristically enough of 
 his then view of things — he wrote, slightly altering the 
 Vergilian vei-se : Tantae moliit erat Gennanam rotulere 
 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
 
 XXxii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 one who has made such a fiasco as we did at Frankfort,' he 
 expressed himself on a hiter 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- 
 Avard 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 firet 
 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
 
 .lOllANN CUSTAV ]>1:(»VS1:N. XXMll 
 
 moral need of liis imtuie. Oiiee an enthusiastic pupil 
 of Hegel, he later became a thorough connoisseur and 
 atbnii'er 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 pereist^ 
 ence and a thoroughness hard to be matched by any 
 modern historian, although the results of this are not 
 innnediately manifest in his writings, unless we take 
 into account his tendency, which increased with liis 
 years, toward abstract expressions. 
 
 Amid this abundance of richest endowment Droy- 
 sen did not dissipate his power, but with the vni- 
 usual energy characteristic of him, was able to limit 
 himself to the realm for which it was manifest he was 
 peculiarl}- adapted, that of history. A master in investi- 
 gating details, a« is shown by his minor but thoroughly 
 clavssical treatises upon Pufendurf, El)erhard "Windeck, 
 the Marchioness of Bayreuth, the Strahlendorf Opinion, 
 and othei's, 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 no less tlian that of 
 the closing Middle Age ami modern times. Yet tliese 
 different periods a})peared to him not Jis disconnected 
 fragments, but j^ an historic totality organically united. 
 This susceptibility of his for univei-sal 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
 
 XXXIV 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 Maurenbrecher 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 ^ 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 possil^le for him to continue his lectures till 
 just l)efore 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 l)een for years. 
 
 1 July, 1H84. llanke died on May 2;5, 1880.
 
 JUHANN GUSTAV DliOYSKN. XXXV 
 
 Only a little while before his end, upon the 
 pressing advice of his i)hysician, he saw himself neces- 
 sitated to announce by a notice upon the blackboard 
 a cessation of liis 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 fatlier, 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 Ix'Tori! liis end, 
 Droysen's strong love for work came back, lie had 
 himself canied to his writing-desk and liis pen handed 
 him. I)ul llic iingers that had so often guided it now 
 refused the service. Deeply moved, Droysen laid down 
 the pen, teai-s streaming from his eyes. He knew it 
 now ; he wsis at the goal. He proceeded to arrange 
 everything with care, even in respect to his fuiu'ral. 
 On the evening of June iHth the shadows of death 
 sank down around liim deeper and deeper. But yet, 
 clear to the last, he had for every tender service of 
 love, bringing it« brief alleviation, its transient coolness 
 to the heated head, a mild, friendl}- smile of thanks. 
 Thus, surrounded by the faithful, ministering love of 
 his children, he fell softly and calmly aslee}). 
 
 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. 
 
 II<iri\ pid iiiiiiiKi. 
 
 1)H. IlKRM. KHiGEK. 
 H<)I.ti;xii.vi;i;n, .Inly, 1884.
 
 OUTLINE 
 
 THE rrjNnrT.ES of history.
 
 Outline of the Principles of History. 
 
 No one will witliliold from historiciil 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 d" etrc 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 
 tluMi ail attemi)t has been made to do this, the solution 
 having l)een sometimes jtut 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 i)lace in the Encyclopedia of ' / <y 
 Philosophy. Writers of a different teiideney, skeptical 
 about logical necessities, all the more eonfideiitly on 
 this account reeoiiinu'iid us to develop l iistor} ' out of 'V> '' 
 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, (piestions the very existence of -so-called l/i/, 
 history .^ 'Peoples exist purely in the abstract; the rLO-- 
 
 3
 
 % 
 
 (/•iW 
 
 4 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 , ; y" 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 mir aculous work ings of 
 
 /JJ 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 Ei ghteen th Centuiy, 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 ' essenti ally political history ,' and 
 
 ^'i'^^that the many sorts of elementary, auxiliary and other 
 
 sciences belonging to our department group themselves 
 
 .^//..-.around this kernel. Then the essence of liistory has 
 
 ,^^ ' been recognized as consi stinof in me thod, and this 
 
 l!/y' characterized as a ' critic ism of the so urces,' as a setting 
 
 forth of the '})ure fact.' Others have found the de- 
 
 finitive task of our science in arti stic exjjos ition, 'the 
 
 l/\ work of the historical artist,' and even celebrate as the 
 
 '■^ greatest liistorian 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 Avith tliis. It must make clear
 
 PRENCIPLES OF HISTORY. 5 
 
 to itself its aims, its means, its foundations. Only 
 tluis can it exalt itself to the lieiglit of its task ; only 
 thus, to use expressions from Bacon, can it set aside 
 the preconceptions now governing its procedure, the 
 idols of tlie theatre, tribe, forum and den, for whose 
 maintenance just its powerful interests are active now 
 as once interposed in favor of astrology, of lawsuits 
 against witches, and of belief in pious and impious 
 witchcraft. I>y thus becoming conscious, history will 
 make good its jurisdiction over an incomparal)ly wider -^ 
 realm of luunan interests than it is likely or possible 
 that the science should master otlierwise. 
 
 The need of attaining clear conceptions touching our 
 science and its prol)lem, every instructor wlio hiis to 
 introduce youth into the study will feel, just as I have, 
 tliough 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 l)ecause in our daily experience 
 they seem to have Ix-en solved long ago. 
 
 The political events of to-day, to-morrow belong to\ 
 history . The business transaction of to-day, if of con- \^^/U 
 T^ sequence enough, takes rank, after a generation, as a 
 ', piece of liistory. How is it that these mere affaii-s tur: 
 into history 'M What criterion is to determine whethe 
 tliey l>ecome liistory or not ? The contract of purchase 
 concluded totlay l)etween private individuals, — is it 
 the thoiLsand yeai-s that transfomis it into an historical 
 document ? 
 
 Every one declares history to l)e an important means 
 of culture ; and in the education of totlay it certainly 
 1 Geschdfte into Geschichte. 
 
 w 
 
 m
 
 6 JOHAXN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 is a weighty element. But why is it thus ? In what 
 
 form ? Did not history render the same service to the f^ 
 
 '*7(// Greeks of the age of Pericles? To be sm^e the form 
 
 V was different then, — probably that of the Homeric 
 
 J 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 Avhat has been 
 purposed. AVill 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 
 historj^ 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. 7 
 
 Right here another list of (questions presented itself, 
 questions touching the rehition of this potency in his - ^Qf 
 tory to the individual, touching his position between JJ' 
 this and the moral potencies wliich bear him on and 
 bring him to self-realization, toudiing his duties and 
 his highest duty; considerations leading far beyond the 
 immediate comjjass of our study, and of course, con- 
 vincing us that the problem b^- 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, a^s the studies of nature have 
 done with so splendid a result, to make themselves 
 their own foundatiori ? One tiling was clear : that if 
 the historian, with his merely historical cognizance of 
 what philosophy, theology, the oljservation of nature, 
 etc., have wrought out, was to take hold of these 
 ditticult problems, he nuist have no inclination to 
 speculate, but must in his own empirical Avay jjroceed 
 fi'om the sim[)le and solid basis of what has been done 
 and disc(nered. 
 
 I found in William von Humboldt's investigations 
 the thought wliich, so I believed, opened the way to a 
 sort of a solution to these problems. He seemed to me 
 to Ixj for the historical sciences a Bacon. We cannot 
 speak of a philosophical system of Humboldt's, but 
 what the ancient expression Jiscrilxjs to the greatest of 
 historians, 'political undei-standing and the power of l-"^ 
 inter]i)retation,' ^ these he possessed in remarkable har- 
 mony. His thinking, his investigations, likewise the
 
 8 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 wonderful knowledge of the world won through that 
 active life of his, led him to a view of the world Avliieli 
 had its centre of giavit}^ 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- 
 (piainted 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 wliich 
 the moral world, producing, so to speak, ever new 
 electric currents in ever new polarizations, moves by 
 creating forms and creates forms l)y moving. 
 
 It appeared to me possible by the aid of these 
 thoughts to pierce deeper into the question 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 tins. 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.
 
 IXTPvODUCTION. 
 
 L — HISTUKY. 
 
 ^ 
 
 § 1. 
 
 Nature and History are the widest conceptions under 
 which the human mind ap})rehen(Ls the world of phe- 
 nomena. And it apprehends them tlius, according to 
 the intuitions of time and space, which jn-esent 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 ajjprehension 
 that thus distinguishes them, according as they appear 
 to relate themselves more to space or to time. 
 
 The conceptions of time and s])ace increase in defin- 
 iteness and content in the measure in which the side- 
 by-side chai-acter of that wliich is and the successive 
 charact€r of that which has become, are perceived,) 
 investigated and undei"stood. 
 
 §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 rase of othei-s 
 to supplement the repetition with ascent, addition, 
 
 9 
 
 / -
 
 10 JOHANX GUSTAV DKOYSEN. 
 
 ceaseless growth, tlie system continually making, so to 
 speak, ' a contribution to itself.' ^ 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 we 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 ensemhle of this restless progress 
 upward is the moral world. Only to this does the ex- 
 pression 'Ilistiiry' lind 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 
 Avithout, 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, eidarging and build- 
 ing up its world, finds itself in possession of the 
 external w^orld, that is, so far as it can and nuist possess 
 this in order to grasp it, and, by knowledge, will and 
 formative power, rule it. 
 
 1 fTTiSoo-is ei's avTo. Aristotle, de anlma, II, 5, 7. Appendix II at the 
 end of tliis "Ontline" is an aniplitication of §§ 1 and 2 here.
 
 I'KINCII'LKS (»F msroKV, 11 
 
 §5. 
 All ('iii[)iriral iiivestip^ation <i^ovenis itself aecortliiig 
 to tlu' (lata to wliicli it is diicrtcd, and it can only 
 diret't itscdt' to such data iis are inimediatcly present to 
 it and susceptible oi being cognized tlirough the senses. 
 'J'he data for historieal investigation are not piu>t things, 
 for these have disappeared, but things which are still 
 present here and now, whether recollections of what 
 Avas done, or renniants of things that have existed and, 
 of events that have occurred. 
 
 §6. 
 
 Every jxuut 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 
 liowever, as faded traces and suppressed gleams 
 Apart from knowledge these are as if they existed not 
 Oidy 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 jjast. 
 Yet what Ijecomes clear is not past events as pas' 
 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 
 narroAvness of its existence, forward by means of its 
 willing and its hopes, backward through the fullness of
 
 ^ 
 
 12 JOHANN GITSTAV DIIOYSEN. 
 
 its memories. Tims, ideally locking together in itself 
 both the future and the })ast, 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 tlu'ough the mind itself. ' Memory, that mother of 
 Muses, Avho shapes all things,' ^ creates for it the forms 
 and the materials for a world which is in the truest 
 sense the mind's own. 
 
 §7. 
 
 I It is only the traces which man has left, only what 
 man'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 
 existence an expression of his individual nature, of his 
 ' I.' Whatever residue of such human expressions and 
 imprints is anywise, anywhere, present to us, that 
 speaks to us and we can understand it. 
 
 11. -THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 
 
 §8. 
 
 The method of historical investigation is determined 
 by the morphological character of its material. The 
 
 (essence of historical method is tmderstandin(/ by means 
 of investigation. 
 
 § 9- 
 
 The possibility of this understanding arises from the 
 J kinship of our nature with that of the utterances lying 
 
 ^ /jLvrifx-qv dirdvTijiv /j-ovaofxriTop (pyavrju. — jlCschylus, Prmietheus, 40l\. 
 
 LV=
 
 ^l;^^■cu•LE8 of histukv. 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 eveiy 
 utterance. On being percei%X'd, 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, oidy in a certain way, in certain relations, 
 namely those wherein tlicse things seem to us to corre- 
 spond to categories of our thinking. Those tbjngs 
 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 llieir individual existences, to dismember 
 and destroy them, to use and consume them. With 
 human beimjs, 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 *• I ' 
 enclosed in itself, yet each in its utterances disclosing 
 itself to every other. 
 
 § 10. 
 The individual utterance is understo(td as a siini)le 
 speaking forth of the inner nature, im/olving possil)ility 
 of inference backward to that inner nature. This 
 inner nature, offering this utterance in the way of a 
 specimen, is undei-stood 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-
 
 ^1 
 
 14 JOHAXN GUSTAV DKOYSEX. 
 
 sions. The individual is understood in tlie total, 
 the total from the individual. 
 
 The person who understands, heeause he, like him 
 whom he has to understand, is an 'I,' a totality in him- 
 self, tills out for liimself the other's totality from the 
 individual utterance and tlie incUvidual utterance from 
 fthe other's totality. The process of understanding is 
 / as truly synthetic as analytic, as truly inductive as 
 J deductive. 
 
 § 11. 
 From the logical mechanism of the understanding 
 process there is to he 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. 
 I The individual is only relatively a totality. He 
 I understands and is understood only as a specimen and 
 \ expression of the partnerships whose member he is and 
 I in whose essence and development he has part, him- 
 self being but an expression of this essence and 
 aevelopment. 
 
 The combined influence of times, j^eoples, states, 
 religions, etc., is only a sort of an expression of the 
 absolute totality, whose reality Ave instinctively surmise 
 and believe in because it comes before us in our ' Cogito
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HISTUKY. 15 
 
 ergo %um^ that is, as the cei-tainty of our o^vn pei"Sonal 
 being, and tus 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 wliich 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 possil)le scientific methods 
 are : the soeculati ve, })liilosophieally or theologically, 
 the ] >hvsi(^d , and the h istorica l. Their essence is to 
 find out, to exj^un, to undei"stand. Hence the old 
 canon of the sciences : Logic, Physics, Ethics, which 
 are not tliree ways to one goal, but the three sides of a 
 prism, tlirnugli wliicli tlie human eye. if it will, may, 
 in colored reflection, catch foregleams of the eternal 
 light wliose direct sj)l('n(lor it would not be able to bear. 
 
 § 15. 
 The moral world, ceaselessly moved by many ends, 
 and finally, so we instinctively surmise and l>elieve, by 
 the supreme end, is in a state of restless development 
 and of internal elevation and growth, 'on and on, as 
 man eternalizes himself.* ^ Considered in the successive 
 character of these its movements the moral world pre- 
 
 ^ Ad iivti (til oni cnme riinm s^eternn. — Dante, Tn/'iriid, XV, 84.
 
 16 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 sents itself to us as Histo ry. 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 In'oaden its circle of vision. 
 
 Historical things have their truth in the mora l force s, 
 as natural things have theirs in the natural 'laws,' 
 mechanical, physical, chemical, etc. Historical things 
 are the per[)etual actualization of these moral forces. 
 To think historically, means to see tlieir truth in the 
 I actualities resulting from that moral energy. 
 
 III. — THE PROBLEM OF THIS "OUTLINE." 
 
 § 16. 
 
 This Hint or ik or discussion of tlie Principles of 
 History is not an encyclopedia of the liistorical sciences, 
 or a philosopliy or tlieology of Jiistory, 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, whicli is to l)e an organon of historical thinking 
 and investigation. 
 
 § 17. 
 Canvass the history of this prol)lem from Thucydides 
 and Polybius to Jean Bodin and Lessing. The kernel of 
 the question is in William von Humbolclt 's Introduction 
 to the Kmvi-lioKjuane. See also Gervinus's ' Princi])les 
 of Hi story ' [7//.s^or/^], Comte's 'Positive Philosophy,' 
 Schaffle's 'Structure and Life of the Social Body,' etc.
 
 PRINCirLKS OV IIISTUKY. 17 
 
 § 18. 
 
 '■Historik'' embraces three doctrines: that of method 
 for historical investigation, that of the system beh)nging 
 to the matter to he historically investigated, and that of 
 the systematic presentation of the historical results. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF METHOD. 
 
 § 19. 
 
 Historical investigation presnp[)oses the reflection 
 that even tlie (;ontent of our ' I " is a mediated content, 
 one that has heen developed, that is, is an historical 
 resnlt (s^ 12.) Tlie recognized means of tliis mediation 
 is meuKuv, dru/xi'v/fn?. Our knowledge is at tirst a 
 something received, a something Avhicli has passed 
 over to ns, 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 coniniaud. Out of the totalit}' 
 of that whieh \\'i- thus fully possess, out of oitr appre- 
 ciation of this 'eontent' 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 mattei- of fact. But is 
 the trutli ically as this idea j)i'eseuts it to us? To be 
 convinced touching its validity we must reflect U[)on 
 the manner in which it had origin in us; we nmst 
 investigates the combination of means thidugh which 
 we come by it; we nuist test it, make it cleai-, prove it.
 
 18 JOHANN GUSTAV DllOYSEN. 
 
 I. _ INVENTION. 
 
 §20. 
 
 The j)oint 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, ' the underground 
 work.'i 
 
 § 21. 
 Historical mateiial is partly what is still immediatel}^ 
 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 : 
 
 (rt) Works whose form is due to human agency, — 
 artistic, technical etc., as roads, plats of leveled ground, 
 and the like. 
 
 (h) Conditions constituting w^hat we have spoken 
 of as the ' moral partnerships,' viz., customs and usages, 
 laws, political and ecclesiastical ordinances, and the 
 like. 
 
 (c) 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 Njt'bulir.
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HISTOKV. 19 
 
 (^7) Papers relating to business, as correspondence, 
 business bills, archives of all sort«, and other things of 
 tliis nature. 
 
 §23. 
 
 Remains in the creation of which the purpose of 
 serving the memory coftperated with other aims, such 
 as ornaments, practical utility, etc., aic Abniiiniciits. 
 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 insigniticant 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 memoiy. 
 
 Every recollection of the past, so long as it is not 
 externally fixed, as in verses, in sacred fornuda*, or in 
 written composition of some kind, partakes the life 
 and the transformation of the circle of ideas l)elonging 
 to tho.se who cherish it. Tradition in the Church of 
 Rome illustrates this. The credil)ility of oral tradition 
 is oidy quantitatively different from that of written. 
 
 Our Sources may grasp the subject either in a pre- 
 dominantlv sul)jective way, or in the closest possible 
 accord with the facts, ••pragmatically.' To the suIh 
 jective order l)elong partly such Sources as i)resent a 
 view clou<led by a superabundance of phantasy or of 
 feeling, like legends, historical lyrics, etc., partly such 
 as use historical matter of fact only a^j material for
 
 20 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 considerations and arguments of a different natui'e, 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 im})art 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. 
 
 §25. 
 
 The three species of materials will vary in relative 
 value according to the pui'i)Ose 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 ma}' 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- 
 lU cal inquiry in history must dispense with the great 
 helps which corresponding study in the physical woild 
 possesses in observation and experiment. Still the fact 
 that all sorts of experiments are yet making in the 
 moral world and under the most thoroufyh observation,
 
 PKI^'C1^LES OF JII.STOUV. 21 
 
 compensates historical investigation through the clear- 
 ing up of its obscure ' x ' by means of analogies. 
 
 §26. 
 
 Historical Interrogation results iu our ascertaining 
 ^\hat Remains, Monuments and Sources are to l)c 
 brouglit forward for the 'reply.' It is the art of liis- ( 
 torical 'investigation' to extend and complete tlie ^ 
 historical material ; and especiall}' : (a) by search and 
 discovery, as of a diviner; (h) by combination, whicli, 
 l)Utting tljings in their pro})er places, makes into mate- 
 rial for history that which appeai-s not to be such : 
 witness A. Kirchoff's Histor y of tlie Greek al[)habet ; // < 
 
 (c) b}" analogy, which casts light upon tlie su])ject 
 through similarities of result under similar conditions ; 
 
 (d) hy hypotliesis, proof of wliich is evidence for the 
 event in ([uestion. 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 otheix. 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. 
 
 II.__ri{ITI('IS.M. 
 
 § 28. 
 Criticism does not seek 'the exact historical fact'; _-. 
 for every so-cidlcd historical fact, apart from the means — 7 
 
 r
 
 22 JOHANN GUSTAV 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. 
 
 («) 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 l)ranch is the testing of the genuineness 
 of records and other pieces of writing by outward signs, 
 in contrast with the so-called ' higlier criticism.' 
 
 § 31. 
 (/*) We must also inquire whether the material 
 has maintained its original and pretended character
 
 PRESrCIPLES OF HISTORY. 23 
 
 unchanged, or, if not, what clianges 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 fii-st form 
 to the form before us. In such a deinonstration the 
 separated jtarts are nnitually i'Xi)lanatory and confirm- 
 atory [Ferdinand Christian IJaur]. 
 
 § 32. 
 
 (e) 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 offei"s 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 jiartially, 
 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 exi)erienee, 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 pei-sonal relations of the author 
 of the accovuit. 
 
 (4) Whether incorrectness was unavoida))le through 
 insuthciency of the means for observation and forming 
 judgment.
 
 24 JUHANN GUSTAV DJtOYSEN. 
 
 In 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 teclmically called ' 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 prevalent 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 comjdexion 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 atmos})lieric process of 
 ascending and self-precipitating vapors from wliich the 
 true Sources or springs are replenished. 
 
 As a rule the earliest historical composition respecting 
 an event governs all subsequent tradition. That case
 
 i'i;iNcii'Li:s OF iiist<»i;y. 2o 
 
 is the most loituiiato wlieie this coiniiositiou is conteni- 
 poniiy with the events which it handles; that is, hefoie 
 the effects pnxhued l»y event:^ have brought any 
 change of view concerning the elhcient facts and 
 persons, and l)efore any new, epocli-niaking event has 
 created a different worhl of thouirht. 
 
 §35. 
 
 (<i') We nuist iiKpiire whether llic niali'iial as we 
 have it still contains all tiit^ points tor which the inves- 
 tigation seeks testimony, or in what mea.sure it is 
 incomplete. This cpiestion 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 ; 
 oidy individual views of what existed and occurred. 
 Any historical mateiial has gaps in it, and even the 
 most exact investigation is not free from errors. The 
 measure of sharpness wherewith these gap« and possible 
 erroi-s are signalized is the nieasiue of the certainty of 
 our investigation. 
 
 The critical arrangement is not settled merely accord- 
 ing to the j)oint of view of succe .sion 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 wliich the intei-secting lines 
 will aft'oid. The registei-s in the Corpus Inscriptionum 
 Latinarum illustrate this. 
 
 §36. 
 
 The outi-ome of criticism is not 'the exact historical 
 fact.' It is the placing of the material in such a con-
 
 26 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 dition as renders possible a relatively safe and eorrect 
 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. — INTERPRET ATIOK 
 § 37. 
 Beginnings are neither sought by criticism nor de- 
 manded by interpretation. In the moral world 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 Histor y only a reproduction of Avhat 
 is permanently identical with itself, it would be void of 
 freedom and responsibility, Avithout moral content and 
 only of an organic nature. The essence of iiiterpreta- 
 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 (r«) the mechanism of the 
 moving limbs, (?>) the tension of the muscles according 
 to the evenness or unevenness, smoothness, hardness, 
 etc., of the ground, (c) tlie will which moves the body,
 
 TltlXCirLKS (IF HISTOIIV. 27 
 
 and ('/) llio purpose which leads the person who wills 
 to walk, so criticism completes itself from four points 
 of view. The exaltation of an}^ one of these as h}^ 
 itself essentially or exclusively determinative of va- 
 lidity, is the source of many theoretical and i)ractical 
 eiToi-s. It is doctrinaiie (§ 92), 
 
 §39. 
 
 («) ' Prap^matic ' interpreta tion takes up the hodv of 
 criticised facts according to the causal nexus naturally 
 binding together the original events in their course, in 
 order to re-construct this coui-se of events as it once 
 actually was. By ' body of criticised facts ' is meant 
 those remains and those views of the once actual coui-se 
 of events which have been verified and arranged in the 
 work of criticism. In case of plentiful nu'terial the 
 simple demonstrative procedure is sufficient. If the 
 material is defective, the nature of the thing as made 
 known to us from similar ca^es leads us to apply 
 analogy, viz., a comparison between the known (plant ity 
 and the ' x ' in question. The analogy between the 
 two ' x's ' so far as they are mutually sup})lementary, 
 yields the ^ com parat ive pnx'edure.' The sui)})Ositi()n 
 of a connection in wliich the matter possessed b\- us 
 only in fragments displays itself as fitting into the 
 ' curve ' of the assumed coiniection, thus confirminsf 
 itself visibly, as it were, is ' hypothesis.' • 
 
 §40. 
 
 (I'O The * inte iiH'etation of the c onditions' proceeds 
 upon the truth that we must think the conditions which 
 made the original fact possible and })ossible so and so.
 
 28 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 as a part of the fact itself, and hence as certain to 
 enter, however fragmentarily, into all vieAVS 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 bomidaries, 
 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 contenn)orary 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 innueasuralile field of '•techno- 
 logical interpretation,' which thus far remains almost 
 untouched. The moral means include the j^assions of 
 men, the moods of the masses, the prejudices or views 
 governing them, etc. The general, the statesman, the 
 artist, who wishes to o})erate upon the masses and 
 througli them, has his character in that same measure 
 determined hf them. 
 
 § 41. 
 
 (c) '■ IVv cliologic al__interpretation ' seeks in the 
 given fact, the acts of will which produced it. Such 
 inter] ) reta tion may take cognizance of the subject who 
 willed, and of the energy of liis volition so far as this
 
 PUINCII'LKS OF mST()i;V. 20 
 
 influenced the course of events under survey, and of 
 his intellectual force so far tus tliis determined his will. 
 Hut neither did the subject of the volition fully ex- 
 haust himself in this one turn of things, nor did that 
 Avhicli came to pass conn; to j)ass merely through the 
 strcui^-tli of this one man's will or intelliL'cnci!. It is 
 neither the pure noi' the entire expression ot" iiis per- 
 sonality. 
 
 Personality as such does not lind in Hist ory tlie tests ^i/ 
 of its value, in what it undertakes, does or suffers 
 there. To it is reserved a circle of its own, wheiein, 
 liowever poor or rich in gifts it may be, signilicant or 
 insi<''niti(ant in respect to effects or results, it has to do 
 with itscir and its (Jod, a circle of its own, wherein is 
 the truest source of its willing- and existence, where 
 that takes place which justilies or condemns it before 
 itself and before (iod. His conscience ( Gctrisi^i'n) is the 
 most certain Q/eivisseste^ thing which the indi\idual 
 possesses ; it is the truth of his existence. Into this 
 sanctuary the ken of investigation docs not j)rcss. 
 
 Human being uiulerstands luinian iK'ing, l)ut oidy 
 in an external way; each perceives the other's act, 
 speech, mien, yet always only this one deed or 
 feature, this single element. Prove that I luidcr- 
 staud my fellow rightly or entirely I cannot. It is 
 another thing for a friend to believe in his friend ; or, 
 in a ca.se of love, for the one party to liold fast to the 
 other's image 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 coui-se of events 
 which they jjresent, from the characters of certain
 
 1 
 
 30 JOHANN GUSTAV DKOYSEN, 
 
 persons. They poetize on to each event a psj'chological 
 interpretation. Bnt in actnal 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. Tlu'ough 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 of 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 tliis or that 
 one among the moral potencies, on account of the idea 
 whose bearer he was. 
 
 §42. 
 
 ((7) The ' interpretation of ide as ' tills up the gap 
 which psychological interpretation leaves. For the 
 individual builds a world for himself in that measure 
 in wliich he has part in the moral potencies. And the 
 more diligently and successfully he builds, in his j)lace 
 and for the brief space of his life, the more has he 
 furthered those partnerships in which he lived and 
 wliich lived in him; and the more has he on his part 
 served the moral potencies wliich 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 unfolding.
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HIRTOIIY. 31 
 
 The ethical 's\-stem' of any period is only the gn\,si> 
 ing and bringing together of the ethical life thus far 
 unfolded; only an attempt to sum it u[> and speak it 
 out according to its theoretical content. 
 
 Every period is a complex (^f the outworkings of all 
 the moral potencies, liowever developed or rudimentary 
 their unfolding may he, liowever mucli the liigher may 
 still l»e veiled in tlit; lower, as when the State existed in 
 the form of the family. 
 
 S 43. 
 
 In the great divei>iit3' of tlie moral spheres wherein 
 human life takes root and moves, investigation finds 
 the list of questions with wliich it approaches any 
 given liistorical material in order to interpret it as to 
 its ethieal content. 
 
 We can proeced in eitlier of two ways. 
 
 (^f ) 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 (piestion and up to tiiat 
 time. In this way we get the 'ethical horizon' within 
 which stood everything tliat was and was done at this 
 period among tliis jx'oph". We thus secure the measure 
 for every individual process within this period among 
 this people. 
 
 (/') Or, dynamically, we may seek and seize the 
 progressive elements in the given state of moral foiina- 
 tions, and by [tutting these into relation with that 
 state to which they have led in acting themselves out, 
 catcli sight of the movement at that period and among 
 that })eo})le, the striving and struggling of men, their 
 victories and defeats.
 
 32 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 §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, 
 everything 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 
 intei yret ation j^oints 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 HISTOUV. 33 
 
 What goes on daily in this moral world is never done 
 or purposed by any sensible pei-son as history . It is i M 
 only subsequently that a peculiar way of survejang the 
 finished and the past makes history out of common 
 doings ( G<'schirJift' out of Geschafte}. To apprehend 
 the moral world liistorically means to apprehend it 
 according to its development and growth, according to 
 the causal succession of its movement (§ 15). 
 
 h H 
 
 §46. 
 
 The secret of all movement or motion is its endl— ^^^^ 
 (to o6ev tf Kivrjai-;). Inasnuich as historical investigation ' 
 is directed to the advancing movement of the moral 
 world, takes account of its tlirection, sees end after end 
 unveil and fulfil itself, it infere and concludes (§ 12) 
 to a supreme end wherein the movement completes 
 itself, wlierein what makes this world of men keep 
 moving, cii'cling and eeaselessly hastening on is seen to 
 be rest, consunnnation, an eternal present. 
 
 §47. 
 
 The human l)eing during his space of life in the 
 finite has, in virtue of his likeness to God, to be an 
 infinite subject, a totality in liiniself. his own measure 
 and end ; but not l>eing like the (iodhead also a cau-m 
 mi., he has not to become, unaided, what he ought to 
 be. Into his character as a human being he develops 
 only in the moral pai'tnei-ships. 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 fatlier and iiiotlier — thus l)oni 
 to Ik? conscious, free and responsible, each man for
 
 34 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 himself (§ 42) 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 woild. Without the restless growth and 
 development of its moral partnerships, that is, without 
 Historyj its work would be like a mountain of infusoria 
 shells. Without the consciousness of continuity, viz., 
 without Historv , 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 Matte r wherein it creates forms. \ ^f 
 
 II. In relation to the Forms into which it shapes) ,,Avu 
 itself. 
 
 III. In relation to the Worker s tln'ough Avliom it ij-ii, 
 builds itself up. 
 
 IV. In relation to the Ends which realize tliemselves >v 
 in its movement. 
 
 7
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 55 
 
 I.— THE WORK OF HISTOR Y IX RELATION^ /^^ 
 TO ITS KINDS OF MATTER. 
 
 §50. 
 
 The Matter for the work of History comprises what 
 nature ori<,nnally gave and what Histo ry itself has "^^ 
 evolved. Hoth these are at once the condition and the 
 means of this woik, at once its hnsiness and its limits 
 ation. The ceaseless enlargement of the matter foi- 
 the woik is the measure of the enlargement of tlie 
 work itself. 
 
 § 51. 
 
 (a) As man studies and comprehends nafure, rules 
 and transforms nature to serve liuiiiaii ends, tlie work 
 of History lifts nature up into the moral spliere, and 
 spreatLs abroad over the circle of the caith the signs, 
 the aeriKjo nohilis of human will and power. Such 
 signs are discoveries, inventions, improvements, agri- 
 culture, mining, the training and breeding of animals, 
 changes prodiu'ed in countries and landscapes by the 
 transmigration of plants and animals, tlie eirele of the 
 sciences, and many others j)arallel to each of those 
 named. 
 
 §52. 
 
 (h) The work of 1 1 isto ry causes the mere creature ^l7^ 
 man, by discovering in the sweat of liis brow what lie 
 ia ^lesi^iied j o l)e, to re;i1J7e J_his de simi and to discover 
 it l)y realizing it. Out of the mere (/enuM homo it thus 
 makes TTiehistorical man. which means the moral man. 
 Amplification of this would invohe Anthroi)oh>gy, 
 
 26i
 
 36 JOHANN GUSTAV DKOYSEN. 
 
 Ethnography, the question of races and of the crossing 
 of races, the propagation of the human race, and so on. 
 
 § 53. 
 («?) Those human formations which liave 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. 
 (f^) Out of the purposes of men and the ardor or 
 passion with which they surrender to these, ^istory 
 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 HIST(3E,Y IN RELATION 
 TO ITS EORMS. 
 
 § 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-sufificiency needs nothing, is either a 
 brute or a God.' ^ In the moral potencies lies the 
 
 1 '0 5^ ixT) dwd/uLfvoi Koivciiveiv f) fiyjS^v ded/uevos 8l aiirapKeiav . . . r] Orjplov 
 ^ 0€6s icTTi. — Aristotle, Politics I, 1, 12.
 
 PRINCn^LES OF HISTORY. 37 
 
 educating might of llistorj, 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. 
 
 Eacli 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 
 lal)()r on its belialf, 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 tlie 
 molecules \\liicli laid too-ether in intinite number would 
 produce humanity. He belongs to his family, people, 
 state, etc., is a living member only through them, 'as 
 the hand sei)arate from the l)ody is no longer a hand.' 
 
 'Hie doetrin(! of native human rights goes beyond its 
 own })remises. It forgets that there is no right without 
 duty, and that a thousand kinds of obligations are 
 fulfilled toward every individual before he himself has 
 been able to acquire a right. 
 
 §66. 
 
 The partnerships, in accordance with the nature of 
 the human being, sjjring 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 partiiei'sliii)s ' that which is 
 natural has to be made moral by means of a i)rimary
 
 38 JOHANN 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. 
 (flr) The Faisiily. — Here, in the narrowest space, 
 in the forms lowest down towards the creature, are 
 found the strongest moral ties, the deepest social sul> 
 structures. Under this rubric consider, with much 
 else, the gradations of marriage up to monogamy, 
 paternal authority, the family liearth, so-called patri- 
 archal government, and l)lood-vengeance. 
 
 § 59. 
 (I)) The Netghborhood. — Here come into view 
 the first develojiments f)f friction in the s})atial 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,' ^ 'by an appetency 
 for the union,' ^ as Dicpearchus says. Notice the tribal 
 
 1 ' Not 0i5(ret but 6^a-et. ' 
 
 2 w6d(i) T^s ffvv68ov. I'artly owning to the misspelling, in Droysen's 
 text, of one of tliem, 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. Tliey 
 are from a fragment of Dicsearchiis handed down by Stephanus of 
 Byzantium, and are given by Carolus Mullerus, Frar/menta Tlistori- 
 carum Gnticarum, vol. ii, p. 238, left hand column, §9, as follows:
 
 IMMNni'LKS (»F IIISTOKV. 30 
 
 hero, the tjcnlUivia sacnt., raciiil iuul clan loiiuations, 
 cognationes et propinquifates, battles and cleavages. 
 
 §61. 
 
 (f/) TiiK Pkoi'LK. — We have heie to study com- 
 momvealtlis and religions as instituted l)y nature, tlie 
 'etlinie' age of the world, the fixedness and tlie mo- 
 bility of })eo|)les' types, in fact the whole subject of 
 the so-called comparative psychology of peoples, and of 
 'Demology,' includiuL;' tlie jjriiiciple of nationality. 
 
 §62. 
 
 B. In the 'ideid partnerships ' it is the task of the 
 spiritual nature to lind expression for itself and to pass 
 over into the sphere of actual things, tliat 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 lias 
 evolved even whx^'ii carrying these furtlier. Vocal 
 imitation is not mere mimicry of sound, l)ut a trans- 
 lation of perceptions into vocal expression. Trace the 
 successive stages of linguistic evolution, in nudtiplicity 
 of forms, complexity of syntax, growth of specific 
 
 oi<TT€ irpdrepov irbOip t^s (Tvvbdov yevofjAvrji d5eX<^a?$ avv dSeX^oj ; or, as 
 Miiller prefers to read : (jjffTC irbOi^ t^s ffwb^ov t^s irpbripov yevo/jJvrjs. 
 He is talking about the traii.sference of a woman from one pliratria to 
 another, and says: ".so that formerly, owing to the desire of coition 
 of sistei-s with a brother, a different comnuuuty of .sacra wa.s estal> 
 li.shed." 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 JOHANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 ^^A, meanings to words. Accordingly, by no means does 
 ^ f '^\ ' tlie life of language cease where the life of History 
 - ^- begins' (Schleicher). Study sound and writing, also 
 
 ' ( y 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 cojiying, 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 
 (Rumohr). 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. 
 
 ((7) 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, 
 (,i and the sacred history involved in every religion.
 
 PELNCIPLES OF HISTOUY. 41 
 
 §67. 
 
 C. In the 'practical partnerehips ' move those iiilei- 
 ests ■wliich are conteii<h»(( and (h^l)atable, always at the 
 same time bound together and driven on ])y 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. 
 
 (rt) The Sphere of Socif:ty. — Society assumes to 
 offer to every man that position in wliicli the moral 
 partnerships shall best supplement him and he them. 
 Here come up for review distinctions l)etween classes, 
 differences of bhjcjd and of culture, tradition and 
 custom, the conservative elements of society, parties, 
 public opinion, and so on; in line, all that goes to 
 constitute the social republic. 
 
 §69. 
 
 (^0 The Sphere of Property. — Econonuc organ- 
 ization assumes to embrace and to determine all the 
 economic conditions and means necessaril}- pertaining 
 to the moral partnei"sliips : acquisition and competition, 
 capital and labor, wealtli and poverty, barter and money- 
 exchange, the variation of values and the development 
 of credit. Consider the State as a form of connnunism. 
 
 §70. 
 
 (e) The Sphere of Jt-stice. — The system of 
 justice assumes to give foundation to and to regulate all 
 the jural forms in wliich tlie moral partnerships proceed.
 
 42 JO H ANN GUSTAV DROYSEN. 
 
 Gauge here the reach of the sphere of justice. ' Justice 
 must remain justice,' but also must wish to be nothing 
 else. The modes of establishing it, putting 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 (^Mechtsstaaf). 
 
 §71. 
 
 (f?) The Sphere of Authority. — The State as- 
 sumes to be the sum, the united organism, of all the 
 moi'al partnershi})S, their common home and harbor, and 
 so far their end. 
 
 The State is the })ublic power, offensive and defensive, 
 both at home and abroad. In the life of the State and 
 of States, authority is thus the essential thing, 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. '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 jnstice, property, 
 society, Avherever 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 iU own scope. Under its pro- 
 tection and laws, under its guardianshi]) and responsi- 
 bility they all move forward to its salvation or ruin.
 
 PRINCIl'MOS OK IIISTOKV. 48 
 
 The State is not llu' sum of lln' individuals whom it 
 comprehends, nor docs it arise fiom 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 i)lace 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 hosteni interna auctoritas esfo^^ 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 IX RELATION l^ ^' 
 TO THE WORKERS. 
 
 § 72. 
 
 All changes and formations in the; moral world are 
 wrought by acts of will, as in the oi'ganic 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 l)eing is a moial sul)ject ; only thus is 
 he a Inunan l)eing. He has lo huild 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 foreif^ier your title shall be eternal.' Roman Law 
 i»f the Twelve Tables.
 
 
 ^/^ 
 
 44 JOHANN GUSTAV DUOY.SEN. 
 
 subject of development, Ave feel an infinite interest. 
 Witness bow insatiably poetiy and romance follow out 
 and realize tbis interest. 
 / Even tbe narrow, tbe very narrowest of buman 
 relations, strivings, activities, etc., liave a process, a 
 history, and are for tbe persons involved, bistorical. 
 So family bistories, local bistories, special bistories. 
 But over all tbese and sucli bistories is History. 
 
 §74. 
 As tbis marriage, tbis work of art, tbis State, stands 
 related to the idea of tbe family, of the beautiful, of 
 authority, so does tbe empirical, ephemeral ' I ' (§ 55) 
 stand related to that ' I ' in which tbe })bilosopber 
 thinks, the artist creates, the judge judges, tbe historian 
 investigates. Tbe Universal, tbis ' I ' of humanity, is 
 the subject of History. History is the yvw^i aavrov ^ of 
 Humanity, its consciousness. 
 
 §75. 
 The li fe pulse of bistorica l mo vement is freedo m. 
 Tbe word 'freedom' 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 tbe 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 tbe postulate of freedom. 
 1 'Know Thyself.'
 
 PRINCil'LES OK IIISTOIIY. 45 
 
 § 76. s:^c/.^^j; 
 
 The pro]:)leni of the life of History is not to be 2**' ^, 
 sought in the false alternative between freedom and 
 necessity. Necessity is the opposite of arl)itrariness, 
 accident, aimlessness; morality is the 'ought' — lying 
 in the realm of the good, and is not sul)ject to compul- 
 sion. Being free is the ()})posite of suffering compul- 
 sion, of being dead of will, destitute of 'I'; the moral 
 is the willing of the good and is not suljject to 
 compulsion. 
 
 The highest freedom is to live for the highest good, 
 for the end suijreme (§ 4()), towai'd ^\■lli('h the move- , 
 
 ment of all movements, the science of which is His- ^7> VJ 
 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.'^ 
 
 §77. 
 
 All movement in the historical world goes on in this 
 
 way: Thought, which is the ideal counterpart of things 
 
 as they really exist, devclojjs itself as tilings ought to 
 
 be; and characters, iill(Ml with tlu? thought, bring the 
 
 things to its standard. The condition of being thus 
 
 filled with a thought is passion (Tra^os), whic-li comes 
 
 under obligation and responsibility in and through 
 
 action, according to the old proverb, 'act much, suffer 
 
 nuich.'^ 
 
 §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 corona e mitrin. — Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 
 142. - dpdffavTi iraOeiu. — vEschyliis, Choej^hori, '.US.
 
 46 JOHANN GUSTAV DKOY8EN. 
 
 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 ' ^ — 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 few are the genuine 
 
 Bacchanals' [/3aK;(ot 8e' re TraPpotJ . ^ 
 
 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 mSTORY IN RELATION 
 TO rrS ENDS. 
 
 § 80. 
 All development and growth is movement toward an 
 end, which is to be fulfilled by the movement, thus 
 
 1 Xa/jLTrdda exovres Sia8i!i(Tov(nv dXXi^Xois. 
 
 2 For the Greek, and the entire reference, see Plato, Phaedo, 60 C. 
 — Tr.
 
 I'laNCll'LES (»F IllHToKV. 47 
 
 coming to its realization. In the moral world end 
 links itself to end in an infinite chain. Every one of 
 these ends has ])riniarily its own way to go and its own 
 development to further, l)nt at the same time each is a 
 condition for the others and is eonditioiied hy them. 
 Often enough tliey repress, interi'upt and coiitiadict 
 one another. Often appear here and there temporary 
 and partial steps l)ackwards; but always oidy that 
 presently, with so much stronger advance and with 
 exalted elasticity, work may l)e })ushe(l forwaid at some 
 new spot or in some new form, each form im})elling the 
 rest and impelled by them. 
 
 § 81. 
 
 The highest end, which conditions without l)eing 
 conditioned, moving them all, embracing them all, ex- 
 plaining them all, that is, tlie supreme end (§ 1")), is 
 not to be discovered l)y em[)irical 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 ns, 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 finiteness when it is tiu-ned 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 JOHANN GUSTAV DllOYSEN. 
 
 §82. 
 
 What their genus is to animals and plants — for the 
 genus exists ' in order that they may participate in the 
 A ^ ^. timeless and the divine ' ^ — 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 
 
 '0^ / /'f them. Ethics and Histor y^ are co-ordinates, as it were ; 
 
 /V, for Histo ry furnishes the genesis of the 'postulate of 
 
 the practical reason,' which postulate 'pure reason' 
 
 could not discover. 
 
 §83. 
 A History is humanity becoming and being conscious 
 
 j:y concerning itself. The epochs of H istory are not the 
 life })eriods of this ' I ' of Humanity — empirically we 
 do not know whether this race ' I ' is RTowinef old or 
 renewing its youth, only that it does not continue to 
 be what it was or is, — Ijut 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 'Lva. Tov del koX rod deiov /tter^xwcrtv.
 
 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 wliat it sees hy l^eing IIIKmI 
 with a light in which and from Avliich everything is, 
 even its seeing being a remote reflection of that liglit 
 itself. The direct gloiy of that light our eye could 
 not l)ear, but practicing, clarifying, inflaming its vision 
 in the illuminated spheres wliich do disclose themselves 
 to it, it catches gleauLS of ever greater reaches, ever 
 more comprehensive emi:)yreans. Among the circles 
 thus formed the human world with its histoi-y is one. 3^B^ 
 The historically great is only a mote in the sun-mist of 
 this manifestation of God. 
 
 § 86. 
 Histor y is Humanity's knowledge of itself, its cer- ^^ 
 tainty about itself. It is not 'the light and the truth,' 
 but a search therefor, a sermon thereupon, a consecra- 
 tion thereto. It is like John the Baptist, ' not that Light 
 but sent to bear witness of that Ligfht.' ^ 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF SYSTEMATIC 
 PRESENTATION. 
 
 §87. 
 As eveiything which moves the mind calls for a 
 corresponding expression wherein the mind may sliape 
 it, so also the results of historical investigation need 
 their forms of expression — 'an exposition of history,' ^<t, 
 
 * OvK fju rh (pQs dW Sti fxaprvpriar] irepl tov 0a>T(5s. - — John, i : 8.
 
 50 JOHANN GUST A V DROYSEN. 
 
 as Herodotus 1 lias 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 by the ' distribution of time and space applied 
 to the acts of human freedom in the State,' ^ or follow- 
 ing the accidental medley of chronicles, remarkable 
 events, pictures from antiquity, narratives ' of exploits 
 in which the narrator personally took part ; ' * but they are 
 fixed by the doul^le nature of the matter investigated. 
 
 The investigation which knows how, from the present 
 and from certain elements given in tlie jjresent 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 things 
 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 enersfy which the oroinal thino-s 
 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 icTTopirjs aTrSSei^is. - Gerviims. ■'' Waclisnmth. 
 
 ^ Auliis Gellius : qutbiis rehiift (([/endis intcrfuerif 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 methotls. 
 
 §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 afresli ; and the facts regarded through this illu- 
 sion as 'transmitted,' passed for valid History , much as 
 if the history of Alexander the (ireat's successoi-s should 
 pass a,s nothing hut a succession of wai-s, because for- 
 sooth our sources for that period speak of scarcely any- 
 thing else but Avai-s. Only since we have begun to 
 recognize Monuments and Remains as included in his- 
 toiical mati'rial and to avail ourselves of tlicm method- 
 ically, has the investigation of past events gone deeper 
 and planted itself on a firmer foundation. And with 
 the di.scovery of tlie immeasvuable gaps in our historical 
 knowledge, whicli investigation has not yet filled u^) 
 and ])erhaps now never can fill up, investigation espies 
 ever wider l)readths to the domains with which it has 
 to do. and anticipates one day filling them witli 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. 
 
 ('0 *" J nteiTogative exp osition,' to set forth the resnlt 
 at which investi<_ration has aiii\-ed. uses the form of iu'
 
 o2 JOHANN GUSTAV DllOYSEN. 
 
 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 
 tbamatic 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 exp osition ' sets forth the results of 
 investigation as a course of events in imitation of its 
 actual development. It takes those results and shapes 
 fi'om them an image of the genesis of the historical 
 facts upon which investigation has been at work. It is 
 only in appearance that the 'facts' in such a case 
 speak for themselves, alone, exclusively, 'objectively.' 
 Without the narrator to make them speak, they would
 
 PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY. 63 
 
 be dumb. It is not objectivity tbat is tbe bistorian's 
 best glory. His justness consists in seeking to under- 
 stand. 
 
 Recitative exposition is possil)le in eitberof four forms: 
 
 (1) Tbe 'pragmiitic' sbows bow an event tbat was 
 premeditated or foreordained by fate, coukl occur, did 
 occur, and was forced to occur so and so, tbrougli tbe 
 movement of tbings converging upon tbat })oint. 
 
 (2) Tbe 'monograpliic ' sbows bow in its develop- 
 ment and growtli an liistorical formation grounded and 
 deepened itself and wrougbt itself out, brougbt foitli 
 its genius, as it were. 
 
 (3) Tbe '• biog rapbie al ' sbows bow tbe genius of an 
 historical personality determined from tbe beginning 
 tbe action and suftering of tbat personality, and also 
 manifested and attested itself in tbe same. 
 
 (4) Tbe *■ cat astroj)lii c ' sbows various foiins, tenden- 
 cies, interests, parties, etc., eacb witb some rigbt on its 
 side, engaged in a battle, wberein tbe bigber tbougbt, 
 whose elements or sides display tliemselves in the 
 parties contending in the struggle, justifies and fulfils 
 itself by vanquishing and reconciling them. This 
 sj)ecies of ex])osition shows bow out of tbe wais of the 
 Titans a new world and tbe uv.w gods eame into being. 
 
 §92. 
 
 ((') ' Didactic exposition ' seizes tbe matter tbat has 
 been investigate([7"under tbe thought of its great his- 
 torical continuity, in order to bring out its signitieaiue 
 as instruction for the present. History is not instructive -f, ^j^ 
 in consequence of affording patterns for imitation or 
 rules for new application, but tluough 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.' ^ 
 
 Finished intellectual training is culture. This is 
 
 ^ ' Qi^' • military, legal, theological, if intended for these callings, 
 
 i>^ i^^v or general culture if it has the aim of exercising and 
 
 •^ developing in us not this 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 
 
 f technical — derives its matter as well as its forms (§ 6) 
 
 ^ S',/f from Historv - And indeed the fact that the great 
 
 A^ / 1 1^ movements of History complete themselves in a small 
 
 /\^ circle of typical foi'mations, the greatest in a still 
 
 4L smaller circle, makes it possible valuably to a]3ply His- 
 
 iM L / / 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 
 
 {■^^, /f Histor y, 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, CEuvres, IV, p. xvii : Cest un repertoire 
 (TiiMea qui fournit de la matiere que le jugement doit passer au creuset 
 pour V^purer.
 
 rniNClI'LKS OF lllSTnltV. 55 
 
 the enforcement of ;i canon seeniinj^ for every Sunday 
 a sermon according to a prescribed j)attern. Rather 
 shouhl every sermon ])e a new witness to the living 
 evangelical spirit in our Church ; and so far as the 
 congregation is editied hy them they are so. 
 
 The coiTect form of didactic exposition is tiie his- 
 torical instruction of youth. Particularh' is this so 
 where it is in the hands of a teacher who moves in the 
 fiehLs 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 bcai-s witness to the spirit that fills and bears on 
 the life of History . 
 
 § 93. 
 
 (rf) ' Discussive exposit ion ' takes the total result of 
 the investigation, gathers all its rays as in a concave 
 miiTor, 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 undei-standing 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 com parison has 
 to assign its place in the progressive coui*se and sweep 
 of human endeavor. AVe here refer to criticism, scien- 
 tific, iesthetic, of the publicist, etc. 
 
 The points to be established in any given discussion 
 lie partly within the subject discussed, as that tliis 
 nation, this power, this church, etc., has had, in virtue 
 of its historical antecedents, such or such a character. 
 For instance, the old '.sint ut xunt aut non t<{nt\ But
 
 56 JOHANN GUSTAV DEOYSEN. 
 
 also in outside matters simply conditioning and deter- 
 mining tlie suljject, and in fact in the whole congeries 
 of events prevailing at any moment, the elements wliich 
 give broad determination to its historical connection 
 ■ are to he 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 theor}" has 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, Avliich at any given time led to 
 the further step, was, witli 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. 
 y 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 pra ctice, 
 ' able to see into realities, and to do the things that are 
 to be done.' ^ The State is, however, but the most 
 complex among the organisms belonging to the moral 
 
 1 QeWprjTLKOS TUIV OPTWV Kai WpaKTiKbs tQp deOVTCJV.
 
 PRINfll'LES OK IIISTOUV. 57 
 
 potencies. Every formation of the kind retpiires similar 
 self-control throngh discussion. We may specify ec- 
 clesiastical government, the conduct of industrial under- 
 takings, the arrangement of a scientilic expedition, and 
 such things. 
 
 § 94. 
 
 With till' last iianicd fdiiii of exposition our science 
 indeed entei-s wide realms ; hut it cainiot forhear to 
 aftimi it« 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 ap])licahle. P^ven the investigations and 
 results of the natural sciences are not the Avork of 
 abstract ohservation and experiment, as if they uttered 
 no voice save tliat 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 fii-st gives to the ^' A. 
 minds investigating in this field the elevation and 
 compiuss of views and thoughts enabling them thus to 
 obsei've 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, fn)m 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 JUHANN GUSTAV DIIOYSEN. 
 
 tents itself with being able in its expositions of results, 
 to give only so mucli 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 
 Avere 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 tlie Eaiik of 
 a Science. 
 
 BKING A KEVIEW OF TIIH HISTOR Y OF CIVILIZATION 
 IN ENGLAND,! HV II. T. HlTTvLK. 
 
 Our age is fond of boasting that no preceding one 
 .equals it in the freedom and bokhiess with which it 
 works or in the magnitude or the practical character of 
 its results. True, and we must, Avithout envy, give tlie 
 prize to tlie natural sciences for what they accomplish 
 toward this result, and for the Avay in which they 
 accomplish it. 
 
 The energy of these branches of learning comes from 
 their having a completely clear consciousness of their 
 j)rol)lcms, their means, their methods, and from the fact 
 that they consider the things whicli they draw into tlie 
 compass of their investigations under those i)oints of 
 view, and those only, upon whicli their method is Uised. 
 
 A French investigator strikingly characterizes this 
 field of studies in the foUowijig 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.' 
 
 iVol. I, e.l. •_', London. IS.-)S. Vol. IL 1»JI. 
 
 61 
 
 /^,
 
 62 APPENDICES. 
 
 But this judgment here appears in a universal form, 
 whose legitimacy is more than questionahle. 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 sociall}^ and politically. 
 
 Buckle is not the first who has attempted to treat 
 the unscientific character of Histo ry, the ' methodless 
 matter,' ^ 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 '■Philosophie Posi- 
 tive,^ have developed speculatively. Buckle undertakes 
 to ground in a comprehensive historical exposition. 
 
 1 d/xidodos v\i]. See page 107.
 
 THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 63 
 
 He si^eaks with sharp exijressioiis of the 'guikl of 
 historians ' and tlieir doings hitherto, of the poverty of 
 thought under which they have hibored, and the absence 
 of i)rinciples in their investigations. He tliinks tliat, 
 working in tlieir way, 'every 1)ootmaker is fitted for a 
 writer of histor y.' 'If, through indolence of thought If* 
 or natural limitation he is not capable of handling the 
 highest branches of knowledge, he needs only to apply 
 a few yeai-s to the reading of a certain number of ])ooks, 
 and he may Avrite the histor y of a great people and j f. 
 attain consideration in his profession." Mr. Buckle lintLs 
 that 'as regards all higher tendencies of human think- 
 ing, History still lies in deplorable incompleteness and " 'y 
 presents so confused and anarchical an appearance as 
 were to be expected only in case of a subject with 
 unknown laws or destitute as 3-et even of a foundation.' 
 
 lie purposes to raise Histo ry to a science by showing nJ 
 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 coui-se of 
 human destiny were those indicated by the ideius of 
 chance and necessity, that ' in all probability ' out of 
 these grew later the ' dogmas ' of free will and pre- 
 destination, tliat Ixitli 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 y 
 the human race, its advance and its decline, its ha[)j)i- 
 ness and its misery, must be the fruit of a double agency, 
 the working of outer phenomena upon our nature and 
 the wdiking of our natuic ii})on outer ])lienome]ia.' 
 He has confidence tliat lie lias discovered the "laws' of
 
 O-i 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 Jtdaiory of civilization among the English, 
 French, Spanish, and Scotch, that he may illustrate by 
 these examples the application of liis method and the 
 justilication of the laws discovered l)y him. He arrives 
 at these laws, as he says, in the two only possible ways, 
 deduction and induction. He i)roceeds 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 tliat 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 tlie great discovery pre- 
 sented by him better than the gifted dilettant in our 
 studies could do. 
 
 Von Sybel's Zeifschrift contained some time ago a few 
 instructive essays upon Historical Metliod and the mode
 
 THE ELEVATION OF lllSTOKY. 65 
 
 and reach of historical knowledge, showing also liow 
 guardedly History should deal with those questions / u 
 which, never of a purely historical nature, must yet l^ 
 treated and in her way solved by our science, unless she 
 i-i willing to run tlie risk of having problems offered 
 her, paths ])rescribed for her and dclinitions of science 
 thrust u[)(»n licr from a foreign source, to wliicli slie 
 cannot agree without self-i'cnunciation, Avithout giving 
 over that calling in the field of human knowledge which 
 she and she alone can fulfil. 
 
 The recognition \\\\\ not be denied to historical stud- 
 ies that even they liave some })art in the intellectual 
 nKU'ement of our age, that they are active in discovering 
 the new, in investigating anew what has l)een transmit- 
 ted, and in presenting results in appropriate forms. But 
 when asked their scientific justification and their rela- 
 tion to the other circles of Imman knowledge, when 
 asked what is tlie 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 membei"s of our 'guild' may have thought through 
 these questions, our science has not 3^et set its theory 
 and system on a lirm footing. Meantime we console 
 ourselves with the tliought that it is not only a science 
 but aiso 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 whicli have been reached 
 througli these means. I'lie 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 
 ai^. And the deep impression which the work has 
 made not only upon the numerous lovers of each newest 
 pai-adox, be it table-rapping, phalanstery, or the olive 
 leaf of the friencLs 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 ' errors ', as he calls tliem, 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 2)reeisely 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 u[) to the 
 present time the Kantian pliilosophy has been the ex- 
 trenu^ limit to wliieh Knt^dish tliiiikers have ventured. 
 lie calls Buckle's philosopliy 'incom[)lete thinking, in 
 which crude criticism jjasses as pliilosophy,' and charges 
 upon his author, in spite of the Ved.is and of Cousin 
 and Kant, the only non-English authorities he quotes, 
 ' a truly antit^ue consciousness touching all proper 
 thought.' When, however, he greets the laws found by 
 Buckle 'as a splendid and entirely truthful program of 
 the j^rogress of the human mind," and speaks of the 
 reformer's role which the work is to play even in (ier- 
 many, tlie utterances badly embarrass us. Must we, an 
 ' antistrophe ' a.s it were to our former statement, admit 
 that a large element of error, inadequacy and anticpie- 
 ness runs right through Buckle's philosoi)bi( al buttress- 
 ing of his theory, yet does not lessen the reformatory 
 significance of his work, this Ijeing injured as little by 
 the philosophical as by the historical dilettantism of 
 the author? 
 
 Perha[)s, free from the scholastic 'anticipations' of 
 both these two departments, and so al)le 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 undci^tanding, by which History ^^^ 
 is to be raised to the rank of a science. He rei)eatedly 
 confesses that lie wishes to observe and argue entirely 
 and only as an enq)iriclst. At least tlie great and sinq)le 
 outlines of the empirical procedure, pi-ovidcd 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 Avhose 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 
 laise History to a science by itself as it places it among 
 tlie 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 tliere, 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 foi-ms of sensuous perception, 
 and like orijans in ijeneral with their diverse functions ?
 
 TUK ELEVATION OF JILSTOKY. 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 
 certaiidy never undertake to show us the justness of 
 this belief by pretending that one can smell with the 
 liands as well as touch, digest with the feet, see tones 
 and Ileal- (•(»]( )i-s. To l)e sure, the vibrations of a string 
 wliicli the ear perceives as a deep tone can also be seen 
 I)}- the eye ; but the property of these vilnations 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 
 dei)artmcnts with which the 'science of Hist ory ' has to ^ V^ 
 do, tlu'i'c is niiK li which is level and accessible to natuial- 
 scientiiic method also, as well iis to various other forms 
 of scientilic knowledge. But since phenomena, how- 
 ever many or few, since points of view and relations 
 remain whicli are accessible to none of the other kinds 
 of knowledge, it is clear that theie must be for them 
 another method, special and particular. If there is to 
 Im.^ a 'science of Histor y,' in whieli we too l)elieve, this ^/ 
 means that there exists a circle of phenomena for which 
 neitlier the theological, the philosophical, the mathe- 
 matical noi- tlie physical manner of consideration is 
 adapted, tliat there are questions to which speculation 
 gives no answer, whether, tlieologically, it liave the 
 absolute for its point of departure, or, philosophically, 
 take it for its goal ; which are equally unanswered by 
 that em[)iricism which apprehends the world of i)he- 
 nomenaby its quantitative procedure, and by any disei- 
 ])line ])ertaining to the pmctical departments of the 
 moral woild.
 
 70 APPENDICES. 
 
 Our founder of the science of History approaches his 
 task with enviahle naivete. He considers it unnecessary 
 to investigate the ideas with which he intends to work, 
 or to limit off the department in which his hiws find 
 their application. What science is he 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 J^ositive, 
 V. p. 18, who remarks with displeasure that 'it is 
 entirely inappropriate to characterize as History the 
 piling up of chsconnected facts.' How memorable is 
 this sentence of the French thinker, and how instructive 
 it is that the Englishman appropiiates 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 unstuft'ed animal skins 
 Zoology ? Did anyone ever suppose it even possible to 
 collect and pile together, whether in an orderly or in a 
 disordei'ly way, purely ol)jective 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 Avished to kindle a light for us his- 
 torians groping in the dark, he should first of all have 
 made it clear to liimself and to us how and with what 
 right ' History/ has lieen al)le to fix itself as name for 
 a definite series of pluMiomena, as '■Natui'c* lias sue-
 
 THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 71 
 
 ceeded in making itself tlie name of anotlier detinite 
 series of manifestations. He should have shown what 
 it means that the Avondeiful alnidgei, the huiiian spirit, 
 apprehends spatial manifestations as Nature and tem})o- 
 ral oeeurrenees as History ; not l)eeause they are so and 
 so distinguished ohjectively, hut in order to he ahle to 
 grasp and think them. He wouhl then have known 
 the nature of the material ^ith whieli a 'science of 
 History '' can have to do. If he liad heen aware what '^ 
 it means to have heen an em])irieist, lie would not have 
 omitted to investigate, as the nature of all empiricism 
 demands, the manner in which these materials of histor- 
 ical investigation lie he fore 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 l)efore us 
 as materials for investigation ; that instead these facts 
 vanished forever with the moment to which they he- 
 longed, and that, a« human, we possess only the present, 
 the here and now, with the impulse and ahility, of 
 coui-se, hy leai-ning, insight, and will, to develop im- 
 measurahly this ephemeral point. He would have seen 
 that among the processes peculiar to the realm of the 
 spirit, one of the most remarkal)lc is that which makes 
 it possihle for us again to awaken to i)resent reality 
 events which are forever past and now lie heliind us, 
 and to make them live in our minds, that is, to all 
 luuuan intents and purposes, make tlicm eternal. 
 
 If Buckle liad wished to raise us and himself alnive 
 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 his we 
 , \j- 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 avIio 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 inimitably manifold interplay of interests, conflicts, 
 businesses, of motives, passions, forces and restrictions, 
 the sum of which has been well named the moral Avorld. 
 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^ ( Ge- 
 V' '* schichte) emerges, so to speak, out of men's doings 
 (^Gesehaften). 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 (>F HISTORV. 73 
 
 wliat it can and cannot do ; what kind of fcrtainty 
 it is in condition to give, and what kind of truth it 
 is calcuhited to ascertain. 
 
 Buckle has the goodness to recognize that l)elief in 
 the value of Jliston ' is widely extended, and that liis- ^J. 
 torical material ha« been collected wliicli on the \\hole 
 enjoys and connuancLs profound attention and respwct. 
 He depicts in broad outlines what a nia«s of investiga- 
 tions and discoveries ha« been already made in the field //^ /^ 
 of Histoij. l»ut, lie adds, -if we were to tell liow(_y 'I 
 little this material has been utilized, Ave slK)uld have to 
 sketch quite another picture.' How little it lias 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 
 projjositions from it? When the j)rophets, to warn and 
 l)unish the Israelites, held before them tlie image of 
 themselves, how different was the result from what 
 followed wlien they pointed out liow the God of their 
 fathere had testified to them ' all the way from Egypt.' 
 When Thucydides wrote his Histoiy yvith its ' peri)etual // 
 value ' (^KTrjfjM. cts a« ), ought he to have meant by this 
 proud i)hrase the artistic form in which he wrote and 
 not the historical drama of which he wrote? Ruckle'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. 
 
 9 to our conseioiLsiiess 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 
 
 I »y-_ 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 Noav 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 everj^ 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 ^ 
 
 i // existence extended. Histor y gives us the consciousness ; f ^^ 
 of what we are and have. • {p^ I 
 
 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.' AVe find here the justification of tliis 
 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 Ave have lived and toiled through over again, as a
 
 TIIK i;i,i:\A'll«>N OK HIST(»|:V. (i) 
 
 coiitinnalioii, tlial Avliieli has, in the History of times, ji^ 
 pL'oph's and liuiiiaiiity, heen wiouglit out in men's spirit 
 in the way of tliought. C ivilizatio n is satisfied only 
 with the results of ^■ n\U\ jj^''^nik\ utmost fullness of 
 mere Avealth, it is poor, blase with opulence of enjoyment. 
 
 After liuckle has eonn)lained how little the rich and 
 ever-gro\\ ing 'mass of facts' has liitherto been utilized, 
 he assigns as a reason explaining this phenomenon a 
 ' peculiarly unfortunate circumstance.' ' In all tlie 
 other great departments of investigation,' he says, 'the 
 necessity of gene raliza tion is admitted by eveiy 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 lis to be dominated by 
 the strange thought that their Ijusiness is solely to 
 recount tmnsactions, enlivening these at the utmost 
 witli 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. Genera lizations 1 y 
 then are the laws which Buckle seeks. He thinks it[/^ 
 possible in the way of generalization to find the laws 
 wliidi shall reveal, tliat is, determine with necessity, 
 the plicnoniciia of tlic moral world. Tlicii aic the rules 
 of a language linguistic laws:' To be sure, induction 
 sums up particulars into the general fact ; not, however, 
 simply l)y arriving at a generality ha}>-liazard, l)ut 
 by combining particnlai-s 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 necessaiy to give himself and us any 
 account of the logic of his investigation. He satisfies 
 liimself with setting aside a ' preliminary hinth-ance ' 
 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 us 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 Aveasel 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 
 Histor y must employ exclusively the one or the other of 
 those methocLs. Fortunately there are between heaven 
 and eai'th 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 ; tldngs Avhich 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 wliat exists and
 
 THE ELEVATION OF lUSTOUY. 77 
 
 develops in a liiimaii fasliioii, that wliieli is most truly 
 our own beetmies Avider, deeper, freer, indeed only then 
 becomes oui-s. Certain as it is tliat we human beings 
 also weave our lives into the general mutiition of matter, 
 and correct Jis 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,' 
 e(iually and in fact intinitely 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 sjirung up and is still springing up, a second 
 creation, not of new materials l)ut of forms, of thoughts, 
 of societies with their virtues and duties, in a word, the 
 Moral World. 
 
 In this lealm of the moral world everything is acces- 
 sible to our undei-standing, from the most insignificant 
 love-story to great state transactions, from the solitary 
 mental work of the poet or the thinker to the im- 
 nu'asurablc cond»inations of the world's commerce, or 
 poverty's struggle so l)eset with temptation. What- 
 ever exists we may underetand, inasmuch 5us we can 
 apprehend it as something that has developed from 
 beginnings. 
 
 It has already been mentioned that IJuckle does not 
 so much leave the freedom of the will, in connection 
 with divine piovidence, out of view, but rather declares 
 it an illusion and throws it ovei'board. Within the pre- 
 cinctij of philosophy also something similar has recently 
 been taught. A thinker whom I regard with pei"sonal 
 esteem says : ' If we call all that an individual man is, 
 has and performs A, then this A arises out of a -j- a-, 
 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 
 X may be, 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 
 anotlier 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 ' exphiin " the Sistine Madonna, would 
 be, in the formula A^=a -\-jc, the service of the vanish- 
 ingly little X. Similarly everywhere. Let statistics go 
 on shoAAing 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 Avhich 'ex- 
 plain ' the fact that among a thousand mothers tAventy, 
 thirty, or whatever the numl)er 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 Avill be profoundly 
 convinced that in the fornuda A =^(t -\- x the vanishingly 
 little X is of immeasurable weight, that in fact it em- 
 braces the entire moral Avorth of the human being, his 
 total and exclusive value.
 
 TEIK ELKVATION <>F llISTOltY. 7i> 
 
 No intellio-ent man will think of dcnj-ing that the 
 statistical mctliod of considei'ing human affairs has its 
 great worth; l)ut we must not forget how little, rela- 
 tively, it can accomplish and is meant to accomplish. 
 Many and perha[)S all human relations have a legal 
 side; yet no one will on that account bid us seek for 
 the understanding of the Eroica ^ or of Faust among 
 jurists' (U'linitious conci'rning intellectual property. 
 
 1 will not follow IJucklc in his further discussions 
 
 touching the -laws of nature,' 'mental laws,' the 
 
 superiority of the intellectual over the moral forces, 
 and so on. TIk; essence of his views in the first part 
 he sums up at the beginning of the second, in the 
 following four 'generic thoughts,' which ])ass accord- 
 ing to liini for the foiindations of a History of Civilizar^^ ij 
 turn. '1. Tlie progress of the human race depends 
 upon the effect with w inch the laws of phenomena are 
 investiirated 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 tlu-n in tni-n furthers investigation 
 and is furthered by it. •'>. The discoveries made in 
 tliis maniu'r strengthen the intluence of intellectual 
 truths and weaken relatively, though not absolutely, 
 the intluence of moral truths, the latter being in conse- 
 (pu'uce less subject to giowtli 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 ita affairs 
 
 1 The Sinfonia Eroica, of Beethoven. See Grove, Beethoveii's Nine 
 Symphonies. — Tr.
 
 80 APPENDICES. 
 
 are watched over and protected at every step by State 
 and Church, the State teaching men what to do, the 
 Church 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 generalizar- 
 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.' ^ 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 
 with 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 Cifiiis em erg it Veritas ex errore quam ex confusione.
 
 THE KLi:\'ATI()N <)F IIISTOIIV. 81 
 
 If Buckle recognizes the great work of the human 
 race in Histor} -, how coukl he help asking himself the * . / 
 nattirt' of tliis work, out of what material aud for wliat 
 ends it has originated, and how the workers are related 
 to it? Had lie doiu; this lie would — for it is worth 
 M'hih' to pause a moment owr these (pu^stions ^ — -have 
 recognized that historical ^\■oI•k emhraces, in respect to 
 its material, hoth natural data and historical growths, 
 and that each constitutes for it at once a means and a 
 limitation, at oiici' condition and impulse. lie 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 inteiest 
 and accei)t its s[»len(lid j)ro(lncts with pleasure and 
 gratitude. But if Buckle had been mindful of the 
 further questions referred to, he would have saved him- 
 self from tliinking that the conclusions arrived at in 
 that dej)artment — the laws ascertained, as he thinks, 
 in the way of gene ral iy.;it ion — are the sum of Hi stor y // /i^ 
 and - laise History to the rank of a science' by 'ex- /</ 
 j)laiiiing' its phenomena. This exjilains them as little 
 as the l)eautif ul statue of The Praying Boy ^ is explained 
 by the bronze out of wliich it was poured, the clay 
 which foi-med the model of it, or the fire which melted 
 the metal. The idea of the image that was to be 
 (to T I rjv dvui) was neccssary, as 'the master of those 
 who know' l(»ng ago taught, and this was in the 
 
 1 In the Old Musiuni, Hcrlin. Ii is hclicvi'il to be fmni an oriuinal 
 of the time of Lysippns. Fndt ric tlic (iri-at imirliasi'd it for 10,000 
 Thnl.T [S7,r,00]. — Tr.
 
 82 APPENDICES. 
 
 artist's soul before the ^^'ork in which it was to be 
 realized existed. There was need also of the purpose 
 which the statue should fulfil, jierhaps a vow to the 
 rescuing god whose temple it Avas to adorn. The skilful 
 hand, too, was required, to put together the motive, 
 the thought-image and the mateiial 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 
 rfL-Buckle does with 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 Avho see and observe 
 in respect to any work only the deft \^<je»c}iic]it~^ agents 
 which })erforni it, just as if the fates \_G-eschlc1ce'^ did 
 not take their course in spite of the good or evil will 
 of the })eople through whom they are put in execution ; ^ 
 or those who, ahvays on hand with tlieir 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 C'luirch, the social order, etc., ought 
 to have been obliged to exist and develoji. Each of 
 these ways of viewing things is in itself partial, untrue, 
 destructive, even though eacli is in a sense justified 
 and necessary. ' Everything,' teaches the ancient 
 philosopher just referred to, ' everything which subsists 
 
 ' Tlic autlior intended a play upon the two words in the brackets, 
 but ill iisiui;- them confuses rather than clarifies his meaninic. — Tr.
 
 THE ELEVATION OF HISTORY. 83 
 
 l)y the ajrency of a cause, and is not, like the divinity, 
 self-snhsistent,' contains those four elements,^ no one 
 of Avliicli a-lone and by itself can explain the wliole. 
 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 jjermeated hy each other. We 
 thus separate and distinguisli, altliough aware tliat 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 immetliately. 
 
 Pardon these very elementary oUservations. In view 
 of Buckle's confused procedure they could not liave 
 been avoided if the questions involved wei-e to be 
 gotten onto a safer track. 
 
 We see that in Histo ry the material upon wliich it /*/ 
 works is not the only thing to Ije considered. Close to 
 the material comes the form. In its varydng forms 
 _llisti>i'y has a ceaseless and ever progressive life. These 'f 
 
 forms are the moral partnei"ships in wliieli we become 
 bodily and spiritually what we are, and by virtue of 
 which we raise oui-selves above the miserable desolation 
 and indigence of our atomic egoism, giving and receiv- 
 ing in order tlius to Ijccome the richer the more we 
 bind and obligate oui-selves. These are dei)artments in 
 wliich laws of an entirely different nature and enei'gy 
 from tliosc wliich the new science seeks, have their 
 place and exercise their power. These moral forces, 
 
 1 RefeiTed to on pages 81, 82, viz., the material, the form, the 
 movuig cause, and tlie end or final cause. The thought is from 
 Aristotle. — Tr. '
 
 84 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 Ijarriers 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 ]iew acquisition which forms the 
 essence of culture. Moreover, he does not or will not
 
 THE EI.EVATIOX OF HlSTUltV. 85 
 
 see tliat in that vanisliingly little x lies the whole and 
 the only Avoith of personality, a worth which is not 
 measured ])y the circumference of the sphere in which it 
 Avorks, 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 ton-cs, in tliose collisions of duties wliicli 
 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 
 ficc-will ' is explained as an illusion? 
 
 liiickle does not, to l)e sure, go so far as to reject 
 that dogma of free-will because of any assumption of 
 its resting on tlie proposition that there is such a thing 
 as si)irit or soul, and that this is a petitio principii. He 
 does not conclude with those who explain all these 
 imj)onderables, like undei-standing, conscience, will, etc., 
 as involuntary functions of the brain, as secretions of 
 I know not wliat giay 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 ba,sed mainly upon our 
 'uncertainty regarding the existence of self-conscious- 
 ness,' he must either jjermit us to consider his own 
 argument, founded upon such uncertainty, as uncertain, 
 or else prove that he can argue with(uit the existence 
 of self-consciousness, that is, of a thinking ego, and
 
 86 APPENDICES. 
 
 that he has as a thought-automaton, destitute of self- 
 consciousness, composed the work by which he intends 
 
 jU to elevate Histo ry 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,' ^ 
 
 4 , thus ground out, became the new science of Histor y. 
 
 In spite of all this Buckle recognizes the ' progress ' 
 
 ^H_ in Histoiy, and is unwearied in describing it as Avhat 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. A^ital 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 <r6(/)t<r/ua, Kup/xa, Tfjlfi/xa, TratTrdXij/i' 6\ov. The quotation is from 
 Aristoplianes, Blnlft, -toO, 4;]1, wliere tliese epithets are applied to a 
 person. — Tr.
 
 TlIK KLKVA ri(»N <tl' IIISTOUY. 87 
 
 knowledge, ])iit as an element in that which it wishes 
 to know, it has neither jjlace nor expression for the 
 idea of piir[)Ose, Init leaves it out of account, partly 
 degrading it to utility, thus leaving open Lessing's old 
 question, 'what tlien is the utility of utility?' and 
 l)artly waiving it, under forms sneli as the eternity of 
 matter, evolntion, etc., as a prol)h'm for other methods. 
 In adducing the idea of progress lus 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 hrouglit him to the priinum mobile^ 
 that hy the nature of enipirical methods it is unattain- 
 able in this way, and that it cannot even l)e adequately 
 expressed by the speech of science with its conceptions 
 and way of thinking; but does this justify the con- 
 clusion that a primiun mobile does not exist save as a 
 2)iece of our error? Are there not various other forms 
 of knowledge, other methods, competent, ])erhaj)s, in 
 virtue of their nature to treat precisely the realities 
 wliich the forms and methods of natural science decline 
 and decline Jis a logical consecjuence of their point of 
 view, and which the historical also either decline or 
 treat inadecpiatel}? 'I'o illustrate, would tliere l)e no 
 sucli thing as an .Tsthetic judgment 1)ecausc no such 
 (Mtuld be airived at by jurists" piocedure, or no legal 
 I)rop(>sition because such wa.s sought in vain u'stheti- 
 cally? One who maintains that progress marks the 
 historical world may lament that only a i)art of this 
 movement pt-culiar to humanity is open to our view, 
 and tJiat 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 APPENDICES. 
 
 know itself as a totality, l)y the circumstance that one 
 form of empiricism shows him a riddle which another 
 does not solve? After recognizing that a problem, a 
 riddle, exists, will lie 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 chai-ade, as a woi'd-catch, or as a syllable or 
 letter riddle? Because from the one standpoint of 
 scientific knowledge a certain side of the total beinsr 
 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 eye 
 just grazes metaphysics a little as in perspective, must 
 we conclude that this third side has no existence 
 except as an illusion of ours? If we cannot take hold 
 of light Avith 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 ? 
 jf^ I pursue these questions no further, since they lie 
 Tq beyond the circle of thoughts in which Buckle's effort 
 l^-,^.^) found a scientific doctrine of Histo ry moves. The 
 Aiints 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 l)egins to engage the attention, of the;
 
 THE ELEVATION OF JllSTOlM'. 89 
 
 scientific world. This problem appears destined to 
 become the middle point of the great discussion which 
 will mark the next imjjortant turn in the entire life of 
 the sciences. No one can consider tlic growing estrange- 
 ment between the exact and the speculative discij)lines, 
 the dissidcnce between the materialistic and the super- 
 natural vit'W of the ^\(lrld which gapes wider day hy 
 day, to be normal and true. These o})})Osing contentions 
 demand reconciliation, and this nuist be worked out in 
 connection with Buckle's task. For the ethical world, 
 the world of History , wliich is the proljlem of that task, <2.- <<„ 
 takes pai't in both spheres, and it shows by every phase 
 of human existence and action that that contrast is no 
 absolute one. It is the jx'culiar 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 finst 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 otliei', to reconcile them in 
 that method which applies to the ethical and historical 
 world, to develop them into the view of the world 
 which ha*> its basis in the truth of hunmn 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.— NATURE. AND HISTORY. 
 
 It is a traditional habit to apply the expression 
 'History' also to nature. We speak of 'Natural His- 
 toiy^' t>f 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
 
 NATUKE AND HlSTOliY. 01 
 
 oblig^L'd to object. The circle of conceptions belonging 
 to it our science will have to seek for itself, in its own, 
 that is, in an empirical manner. It will Ije permitted 
 to attempt this because its method is the method of 
 understanding. It proposes to undei-stand terms which 
 language and usage in language daily employ and offer 
 for it to practice upon. 
 
 We lind in our language the words ' nature ' and 
 'history.' What is meant In' 'history?' Every one 
 will agree that the idea of a coui-se of time, of the 
 tempoi-al, instantly connects itself Avith the word when- 
 ever heard. Of eternal, that is of timeless tinners, so 
 far as wc can grasp ideas of this kind, there is no 
 history. They appear to us a.s 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." Tliey 
 are spirit set amid tlu' coiiditioiLs of finitude. They 
 are countless in point of s})ace and in ceaseless develoi)- 
 ment in i)oint of time. The present which belongs to 
 them and to which they belong, is an analogue of 
 eternity, for eternity, which we do in it know from 
 experience but infer from the self-consciousness of our 
 spiritual l)eing; is tlie present as we have it, yet thought 
 without the limitation in \\ liich we have it, without the 
 change of coming and going and without the dimness 
 of future and pa,st. Human existence is Mind under 
 the ban of finitude, spiritual and sensuous at once and 
 in an inseparable manner, a conti"ast 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 
 finitude. Even then, though it now touches the earth 
 witli but the tips of its toes, it remains still under the 
 ban of finitude, 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 
 j)ractical 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 ol)jects that surround and 
 submerge liim, he is conditioned and moved by them 
 and driven about with them, so that, in the restless dust- 
 whirl of these restlessly changing finites, 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
 
 NATUIJE AND lllSTUKV. 93 
 
 at least in liis snvil to feel, ai)[)i'L'heii(l and know liimself 
 as such ; the abilit}' by thinking and willing, by eon- 
 sciousness and self-determination, always to keep mov- 
 ing, in no matter how narrow a road ; the ability by 
 observing, estimating, and comprehending tliem, to 
 become master of things outside himself. 
 
 That the little and indigent being of man possesses 
 and uses this power of lordship, lias always been the 
 riddle of contem[)lation. With naive depth of view 
 Genesis says that when God had created all kinds of 
 beasts of the field and all kinds of l)irds of the heavens, 
 'he brought them unto the man to see Avhat he would 
 call them : and whatsoever the man called every living 
 creature, that was the name tliereof.' ' 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 Avorld 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 thoiigli the form of 
 the manifestation corresponding to the name once im- 
 posed might by nutrition or exhaustion, or by repetition 
 in propagation, re[)resenting itself variously in various 
 vicissitudes, change never so nuich. 'i'he name was, as 
 it were, the permaiu'ut delining essence of the i)erpet- 
 ually changing manifestations. Tt 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 
 * Genesis ii: I'J.
 
 94 APPENDICES. 
 
 names are before us in infinite variableness, manifold- 
 ness, and differences of kind ; but the mind masters tliis 
 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 ratlier 
 their external phasis, things are simply numberless indi- 
 viduals in numberless combinations and separations and 
 in ceaseless change i but as represented in the human 
 mind they stand forth fixed and classified according to 
 their similarities, affinities and relations. They are the 
 ordeily signs and counterparts of the finite things chaoti- 
 cally flowing about us, of the confused multitude of 
 changing and hovering })henomena. 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 l)y 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,
 
 NATUllE AND IllSTOliY. 95 
 
 of separation and eoiiiliination, by virtue of which he is 
 continually embracing wider stretches, taking them up 
 into his representation and, as it were, building tliem 
 into his mind. The rose, one word for countless par- 
 ticular attributes, lie 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 (][uite 
 different from animals, yet plants and animals arise, 
 grow, and die in a similar manner. This life of theire 
 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 perce^jtible by the senses, are Nature and 
 History. They comprehend the world of phenomena 
 under the two most inclusive representations ever aj)- 
 applied, rei)resentations which have, perhaps wrongly, 
 Ijeen complimented by the title of intuitions a priori. 
 We are certain to embrace the totality of phenomena if 
 we think f)f 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 verm. The things of the empirical world exist 
 neither s[)atially nor tem})orally ; but we apprehend them 
 so according as the one or the other element apjjcars 
 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 coui-se not nuich is said when we have thus defined 
 the wonl t 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 b}^ 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 x, 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 em})ty 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
 
 NATURE AND HISTORY. 07 
 
 are contrasted yet always bound together, inseparable 
 yet always ^vrestling 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 witliin, the world 
 without us permits us to undei"stand 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 Avere to overcome indolent space in 
 ever new motion, and motion is all tlic time trjdng to 
 sink back again out of the impatience of time into the 
 repose of l)eing, 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 tlie temporal element recedes, in which it appeai-s 
 only transitorily, as it were, in order to sink back into 
 itself : phenomena Avhich in essence repeat themselves, 
 in which the endless succession of time is luoken up 
 into recurring cycles or periods of equal length. A 
 formation results which is 'characterized bv 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 
 ' 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 a})pear seems like a secondary element, 
 while every new form is individuall}^ cUffei-ent from the 
 others, so different indeed that each, as it assumes its 
 place after its predecessor, is conditioned l)y it, gi'ows 
 out of it, ideally takes it up into itself, yet wlien 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, filling 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 iwidocTLS ils avrd. See page 10.
 
 NATURE AND HISTORY. 99 
 
 of working itself out. For in every new the entire 
 series f)f past forms is ideally summed up, and every 
 one of them a|)i)eai-s 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, wliich we 
 designate by the expression 'History.' 
 
 Even those phenf)mena which we gather under the 
 expression 'Nature' exist in individual forms, separate 
 from each other, tliat is if we appi'ehend them also ;us 
 liomogeneous and similar. Out of ever}' wheat-keinel, 
 if it is not withdrawn from its periodic life l)y a different 
 apijlication, as germination, stalk-growth, flower, ripen- 
 ing of tlie fruit, there grows an individually diffei'ent 
 stalk, a new generation of kernels. The oaks in the 
 same wood, though sprung each like its neighljor 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 thfferences, but they appear to 
 us as not essential. Scientifically as practically, their 
 individuality is inunaterial to us. Among existences 
 of this kiud our mind has no special category for indi- 
 viduals. For lliis kiud 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 iiuleed 
 distinguish the individuals, l)ut tlieir 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 lias 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, coml^ustible 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 but 
 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 sj)ecies. 
 And when we appropriate and apply, sesthetically, 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 
 undei-stood and represented thereby ; but that we put 
 something into them wliich is not in them, something 
 quite remote fi'om them, in fact, so that these items of 
 nature serve us only as expressions of our feeling or 
 tliought, we, so to speak, anthropomorphising them ; a« 
 in Dante's Purgatory the loatksome picture of lust be- 
 comes under tlie passionate glance of the man surveying 
 it in desire, a woman blooming in l)eauty. 
 
 Also in the moral world, in the realm of those reali- 
 ties which we call History, there are elements whicli 
 can be meiusured, weighed and calculated. But these 
 material conditions by no means exhaust the life of the 
 moral world, or suthce to explain it ; and whoever 
 tliinks that he can explain it in this manner overlooks 
 or di'iiies that wliicli is here essential. The sexual im- 
 l)ulse does not exliaust or explain the moral miglit of 
 marriage. Common remembrance of common experi- 
 ences, j)ossession of common hopes and cares, losses and 
 successes, renew again even for couples who are growing 
 old, tlie warmth of tlieir first 1)liss. For them their mar 
 riage lias a history. In tliis liistory its moial miglit was 
 founded for tliem. and it is justitied and fulfilled in and 
 by the same. 
 
 In the moral univci-se there is certainly nothing 
 which may not be subject directly or indirectly to mate- 
 rial conditions, thougli the material conditions are not 
 the only ones operative or detenninative in this realm. 
 The nobility of our moral Innng consists in tlie 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 Moik
 
 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 
 enswathes 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 Ijodily kind merely as 
 their expressions, bearing their impress. True, they 
 can l)e perceived, understood, and investigated only in 
 these expressions and impressions ; but they do not 
 exist merel}' 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 envelopment of things 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 Avhole proud structure stands only within the
 
 NATURE AND HISTORY. 103 
 
 kiiowini^ mind. Dnr shrewd mother toncrue forms from 
 the participle of the word ' to know ' (^wisinen) its 
 descriptive for that which is certain (j/eivus). It does 
 not name tlie onter and so-called objective beinj^ of 
 things 'certain,' hut l)eings and occurrences considered 
 as 'known.' Not Avhat addresses us as sensuously 
 percepti])le is 'true,' according to our language. No" 
 material thing presents itself to us as ' true,' ])ut we 
 ' take it true ' ^ and make it certain by means of our 
 knowledge. 
 
 '■Our perception,' '• oiir knowledge ' : here would lurk 
 the most dubious sul)jectivism, were the human world 
 composed of atoms, each filling its span of space and 
 time, and witliout any connection from beginning to end ; 
 or of atomic men as exem[)litied 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 be born, 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, faitli or unfaith, etc., and it 
 is from and through them that he originally receives 
 whatever he is and has, whether of bodily or of s})iritual 
 fortune. 
 
 It is clear that the scepticism of these views does not 
 go to controvert the reality of the natural world, still 
 
 ^ Wakrnehmen, literally 'to take as true' (wahr, 'true,' and 
 nehineii, 'take,') is in German psychology the technical word denote 
 ing ' to perceive.' — Tr.
 
 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 threadljare ' 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 tlie outer totality in the midst 
 of which we stand. Tliese are tlie 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 liuman existence 
 and activity. This immediate reality we possess, and 
 we go 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- 
 preliend it, to free it as it Avere 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 straiglit lines, circle and poly- 
 gon never ceasing to be mutall}^ 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 
 
 wliilo ill fact these constructions are onl}' effort upon 
 effort gradually to trace a line outside those circles. 
 We deny the splierical lines of faith because our thought 
 can not exliaust them with its right-lined figures, any 
 more than that hoy of Augustine's, eagerly as he might 
 hail with his shell, covdd dry the hole which he had dug 
 on the si lore, when the sea was always ready to pour 
 over into it. 
 
 III. — ART AXD METHOD. 
 
 Poetry was composed l)efore poetics arose, as people 
 talked l)efore there were granunar and rhetoric. Prac- 
 tical needs had taught men to mix and analyze materials 
 and to apply the i)Owers of nature to human purposes, 
 before chemistry and physics had methodically investi- 
 gated nature and expressed its laws in scientific form. 
 
 Recollections also belong to humanity's deepest 
 nature and needs. However narrow or wide the circles 
 which tliey may endnacc, they are never in any wise 
 wanting to men. In the liighcst degree personal lus 
 they at fii-st appear, they yet form a bond between the 
 souls which meet in them. No human comnuinity is 
 without them. Each possesses in its previous life and ^'fi>) 
 history the image of its being, a comnion possession of ' 
 
 all" j)ai'ticipants, 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 ])eoi)le is directed. We can suppose also that their 
 faith gets for them its l)asis in the form of sacred stories,
 
 106 APPENDICES. 
 
 wliich 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 naive faith alone. 
 ^',^. }W'L '^^^^ earliest his tory , that of the Greeks, began Avith 
 /^ "^le 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 precUlection. 
 /'-/, But they have no treatise on the Principles of History, 
 no *liistorics,' 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 liistorical school. This 
 lu fact di-ew history into paths from Avhich Polybius vainly 
 exerted himself to bring it back. It became, and with 
 the Romans it remained, so far as philology did not get 
 /c> ) 1 1 possession of it, a part of rhetoric or heller 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 .MKTIIOI). 107 
 
 scientific thought than is that of declininfr anticiuity, 
 unless we except tlie sense for theological construction 
 which ths middle age here and there exhibits. This 
 judgment is true, in spite of the fact tliat an occasional 
 historian in the times of the Carolinmans 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 Cluucli. I^vcii 
 then, however, in these important scientific onsets, rhet- 
 oric again and speedily got the upper hand of history ' *^ 
 This occuiTed fii-st 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 
 tlieir way, had established their method and tl»erel)y 
 made a new beginning in scientific thought, did tlie 
 notion emerge of finding a methodical side even for the 
 Muethodless matter'^ of History. To the time of Gal- ^f. ^'^> 
 ileo and Bacon belongs Jean Bodin ; to that of Huygens 
 and Newton, Pufendorff and also Leibnitz, the thinkei', 
 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 a/j^$o8os v\ri. 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 Ilistoiy 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 'phUosopJiie de V histoire.'' 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 liistorical 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
 
 AKT AND METHOD. 101> 
 
 took I In this way it came to pa.ss 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 / / 
 Jlistory, were dominated by the rhetorical superiority of 
 other nations. 
 
 Tliis is not all. While such rhetorical art takes 
 ANcighty and tremendous events, with the diflicult 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 tlnilling and 
 diumatic effect when read. Com})osition is certain to 
 be so much the more comprehensible and pei"suasive 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 undei-stand 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 feUcitous 
 manner to avoid all tliis, so that the attentive reader, 
 when he has perused his Tliiers or Macaulay to the 
 end, is permitted to believe himself the richer by the 
 great experiences of the revolutions, party-wai-s, and 
 constitutional developments of which they treat. ' 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 AA^hich 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 re})resentations 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 
 elscAvhere the insight is attained or the confession made 
 /^, that ' Histo ry is at once art and science.' At the same 
 time the question of method, which is Avhat we are 
 concerned with here, is falling into obscurity anew. 
 
 What then, in Avorks of an historical kind, is the 
 
 mutual relation betAveen art and science ? For instance, 
 
 f^/^ . is the fact that History is marked l)y ' criticism and 
 
 U k" *■ learning' enough to give it a scientific character? Is 
 
 rs^y , that incumbent on art Avhich the historian ought in any 
 
 1 ' event to do? Should the historian's studies actually 
 
 have no other aim than that he may Avrite a f cav books ? 
 
 Should they have no application but to entertain by 
 
 instructing and to instruct by entertaining? 
 
 ,\j ' History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous 
 
 fortune of being required to be at the same time an 
 
 art, a fortune Avhicli, in spite of Platonic dialogues, 
 
 not even philosophy shares Avith it. It would not be
 
 AltT AND METIKJD. Ill 
 
 without interest to inquire the reason for this peculiarity /v 
 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 tliat its productions make 
 you forget the defects which inhere in its means of ex- 
 pression. .\rt 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. INIuses' work has the 
 power to make the observer or hearer fully and exclu- 
 sively receive and feel in a given expression ^liat that 
 work was meant to express. 
 
 It is different with the sciences. Particulaily 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 iiKpiire the scope of their methods, 
 recognizing that they can give right results only within 
 tlie limits essentially i)ertaining to them. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest service of the critical school in 
 Histor y, at least the one most important in respect to ^7 
 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 Hi story to pjist events is i)laced at the point 
 which yields a scientific rule. Tliis critical view that 
 past events lie before us no longer directly, Imt only in 
 a mediate manner, that we can not restore them ' o]> 
 jectively,' but can only fianie out of the 'sources' a
 
 112 APPENDICES. 
 
 more or less subjective apprehension, \aew, or copy of 
 them, that the apprehensions and views thus attainable 
 and won are all that it is possible for us to knoAv 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 lii story. 
 
 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 liistorical 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 Avere once different, more alive and 
 important than now ; others transformed and still in 
 Hving 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 wlien 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
 
 AKT a:sd aiethod. 113 
 
 they are like the other remnants, heing literary remains 
 of the time in which they arose. 
 
 The now usual method or technique of historical in- 
 vestigation wds developed from the study of times which 
 have transmitted, at least for ])olitical history , nothing ^-^ 
 or little hut the sort of views ahove characterized, from 
 more or less contempomry narratore. Mucli for wliicli 
 we sliould like to seek and incpiire, these accounts do 
 not touch at all. To the question how our emperoi-s 
 when they crossed the Alps on their journeys to Rome 
 cared for thousands of men and horses, to the question 
 m 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 we can now gather 
 therefrom, we become conscious even when we study 
 times from which the archives offer us something 
 more than the 'original documents' of closed pul)lic 
 law cases ; giving us diplomatic reports, reports of 
 administrative authorities and state i)apei-s of all 
 kinds. And further, how vividly prominent in sucli 
 study is the difference between the ' views ' of the 
 foreign anil)assadoi-s or of the domestic authorities, 
 and the remains tliat 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 naiTations, 
 lay before us an already formed idea of the ca,se, a 
 preliminary historical [licturc of wliat liad just liai)pencd.
 
 114 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 ^A 
 
 %f^ 
 
 They are remnants of that which happened ; they are 
 pieces of the transaction and of the course it pursued, 
 which still lie cUrectly before our eyes. And if I 
 may give the exj^ression 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 })aradox to ask 
 how History (^CrescJiichte) comes out of transactions 
 (^Greschaften), 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 raidc of 
 a science through the ap})lication 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 understancUng 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
 
 AUT AND METHOD. 115 
 
 is perceptible. What we have to do is to find 
 methodij, 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 su])jective kn(*\vlL'(lge. ()uly this seems able to 
 assert itself as tlic sense of the historical objectivity so 
 often named. 
 
 We are to discover metliods. There is need of differ- 
 ent ones for different problems, and often a combination 
 of several is re(piired for the solution of one problem. ^ 
 So long tis History was believed to be essentially politi- j^ /'y, 
 cal history, and the task of the historian was just to 
 recount in new })resentation and connection what had 
 been transmitted about revolutions, wars, state events, 
 etc., it might sufHce to take for use from the best 
 sources, whi ell liad pcrliaps been critically authenticated 
 as the l)est, the material to l)e wrought into a book, i 
 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 wliich is from that which was, 
 demands of a very different kind are made upon our 
 science. It lui^s to investigate formations according to 
 their historical connection, formati(nis 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 })ressing 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 liitherto 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 ; 
 hut 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 quany 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 
 1 \ V ^"'p good history which is ex})licitly 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 tliis kind — and writers should
 
 AUT AND METHOD. 117 
 
 leave off misapprehending Polybius's expression 'prag- 
 matic' — lie elements, conditions, necessities, traces of 
 wliich, provided we look more sliarply, may perhaps Ije 
 re-recognized in what still lies before us. The hyjXH 
 thetical line wliicli enabled us to trace that i)ragmati(' 
 nature of things then confirms itself, since this or that 
 fragment exactly iits into it. 
 
 Wlicn 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 othei-s, at least 
 for the Italian mastere, was found just the external 
 information that was desired. In their works and those 
 of their German contemporaries, h()\\'ever, 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 
 tlistinguisli that of tlie different artists, the tint of each 
 one's tone, his chiaroscuro, his brush-stroke. He wa,s 
 obliged to be sure how Albrecht Diirer's eye envisaged 
 the human form, else he could n()t show whether a 
 given crucifix was from his hand. In order finally to 
 decide whether this or that important portrait head Wiis 
 by Leonardo da Vinci or Holbein, lie had to bring to 
 his work, so to speak, a learned a])paratus of etchings, 
 hand sketches, etc. He nnist be familiar with the 
 mode of lookincf at thin"s in that asfe, the rangre of its 
 general knowledge, its common convictions, ecclesi- 
 {istical and i)rofane, its local and daily histor}% that he ^ 
 might bu able rightly to intfrpret what Wiis presented
 
 118 APPENDICES. 
 
 in the works of art or in tilings related thereto. He 
 was called upon not only sestlieticall}^ 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 woik 
 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- 
 tiv e Hist ory but the laws of historical investigation and 
 knowledge, — this is the task of Wsforik. 
 
 Mii^^- % 
 
 
 '^^ 
 
 ^
 
 INDEX. 
 
 .(Eschylus, Droysen's Translation 
 of, XV; quoted 12, ;}13. 
 
 Alexander the Great, Droysen's 
 History of, xvii. 
 
 Appendices, (il and fol.; charac- 
 ter of, ix, X. 
 
 Arndt, E. M., in Frankfort As- 
 sembly of 1H48, xxix. 
 
 Aristophanes, Droysen's TraiLsla- 
 tion of, xvi; quoted 8G. 
 
 Aristotle, Droysen a connoisseur 
 of, xxxii; (juot^^d 10, 30, 83. 
 
 Art and Method, 105 and fol. 
 
 Arts, the, ami the Beautiful, 40. 
 
 Authority, the Sphere of, 42. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bacon, F., quoted 80. 
 
 Baur, F. C, 23. 
 
 Beautiful, the. and the Arts, 40. 
 
 BioLTaphical Kxpo.'^ition, 03. 
 
 BiofH'iiphy, Droy.sen's, Sketch of, 
 xiv and fol. 
 
 Bodin, Jean, 1(5, 107. 
 
 Buckle, H. T., Hlstorj- of Civili- 
 zation reviewed, Gl and fol. 
 
 C. 
 
 Catastrophic Exposition, 53. 
 Cointe, 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, 2(5. 
 
 D. 
 
 Dahlinan, in Frankfort Assembly 
 of 1848, xxix. 
 
 Dante, <iuoted 15, 45. 
 
 Da Vinci, 117. 
 
 Diacritical procedure, 23. 
 
 Diciearchus, quoted 38. 
 
 Didactic Exposition, 53 and fol. 
 
 Diplomatics, 22. 
 
 Discussive Exposition, 55 and fol. 
 
 Droy.sen, G., son of J. G., vi. 
 
 Droysen, J. G., rank a,s historian, 
 v, vii, xiv and fol. ; bioja'aphies, 
 vi; pupils, vi; .style, v; his pref- 
 ace to the "Outline," ix; do. 
 to 3rd Ell., xi; education, xiv; 
 early teaching and works, xv, 
 xvi; transition to hlstorj-, xvi; 
 History of Hellenism, xvii; its 
 faults, xvii; tran.sition to mod. 
 hist., xviii; removal to Jena, 
 xLx; faith in a German Phnpire, 
 xix; Hi.story of Prussian Tolicy, 
 xix and fol. ; Droysen as a 
 teacher, xxi and fol.; his jwr- 
 sonality, xxiii; liis Chri.stianity, 
 xxiv; manliness, xxvii; political 
 activity, xxviii and fol. ; briefer 
 works, xxxii; relations with
 
 120 
 
 LNDEX. 
 
 Ranke, 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, 
 58, 54; — discussive, 55 and fol. 
 
 P. 
 
 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. 
 
 Gerviiuis, 16, 50. 
 
 Gottingen, liistorical School of 
 
 in 18th Century, 4. 
 yvwdt cravTOv, 44. 
 Gray Cloister, Gymnasium of, 
 
 Dtoysen teaches at, xiv, xxi. 
 Green, Arnold, Esq., learned 
 
 Hellenist, 38. 
 Griinhagen, Prof., of Breslau, vil. 
 
 H. 
 
 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 
 medifBval, 106 and fol. 
 
 Historik, the, or Outline of the 
 Principles of History. Charac- 
 ter of, vii, 16, 47. 
 
 History, various views of its na- 
 ture, 3 and fol. ; nature, 0, 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. 
 
 Ilolstein, and Schleswig, xxviii. 
 
 Humboldt, Wm. von, importance 
 of for History, 7 and fol., 16. 
 
 Ideal partnerships, the, of Society, 
 39 and fol. 
 
 Illumination, the English, 107. 
 
 Interpretation, in History, 2() and 
 fol.; jDragmatic, 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 
 
 Tnventioii, in History, 18 and fol. 
 Isaacssoliii, I'lof., vii. 
 
 J. 
 
 John, Gospel of, (luotcd, xxiv, 49. 
 Justice, the Sj^here of, 41. 
 
 Kant, (!(■), (iT. 
 
 " Kiel Address," the, xxviii. 
 Kirehoft', A., Greek Alphabet, 21. 
 Kosei", K., Prof., of Berlin, vii. 
 Kriiger, Dr. II., Biography of 
 Droysen, vi, xiv and fol. 
 
 Languajiis, the, and Speech, •)'.). 
 Leibnitz, 107. 
 Leo, xvii, 54. 
 Leasing, IG, 54, 87. 
 
 M. 
 
 Macavday, Essays, 108. 
 Materials, historical, 18 ami fol. 
 Matter for the work of History, 
 
 .35, m. 
 Maurenbrecher, Prof., compares 
 
 Droy.sen with Ranke, xxxiii. 
 Method, and Art, 105 and fol. ; 
 
 the doctrine of, 17 and fol.; 
 
 the historical, 12. 
 Methods, scientific, 15. 
 Monographic Exposition, 5o. 
 Monuments, historical, defined, 
 
 10. 
 Midler, Johannes von, 54. 
 
 N. 
 
 Natural partnersliips, the, of So- 
 ciety, -w and fol. 
 Nature, and History, 00 and fol. 
 
 Neigid)orhood, the, o8. 
 Niebuhr, tjuoted 18. 
 
 Partnerships, the natural, f>f So- 
 ciet}', ;J7 and fol. ; the ideal, ^0 
 and fol. ; the practical, 41 and fol. 
 
 People, the, 30. 
 
 Plato, (pioted, 40. 
 
 Polybius, l(i, 117; use of the term 
 'pragmatic,' 10, 20, 107. 
 
 I'ractical partnerships, the, 41 
 and fol. 
 
 Pragmatic sources, 20; interpre- 
 tation, 27; exposition, 55. 
 Comp., 19, 20, 107. 
 
 Praying Boy, the, (statue) 81. 
 
 Pi-esentation, systematic, the doc- 
 trine of, 49 and fol. 
 
 l*i-inclples of History (Historik), 
 Outline of, 3 and fol. 
 
 Prize of 1000 Thalei-s, rec'd by 
 Droysen, xxi. 
 
 I'robleni, the, of this '»utliue, 10. 
 
 Property, the Sphere of, 41. 
 
 Prussian Policy, Droysen's Ili.s- 
 toiy of, xix. 
 
 Prutz, Hans, mistaken view of 
 touching Droy.sen, xxiv. 
 
 Pufendorff, 107. 
 
 R. 
 
 Ranke, 54; — and Droysen, v, 
 
 xxxiii. 
 Raphael, 78, 117. 
 BecfUsstaat, the, 42. 
 Recitative Expo.sition, 52, 53. 
 Religions, the, and the Sacred, 40. 
 Remains, historical, kinds, 18, 19. 
 Roe.skild, assembly of Estates at 
 
 in 1844, xxviii.
 
 122 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Roman Law, of Twelve Tables, 
 quoted 43. 
 
 S. 
 
 Sacred, the, and Religions, 40. 
 Schaeffle, 10. 
 Schleicher, quoted 40. 
 Schleswig, and Holstein, xxviii. 
 Sciences, the, and the True, 40. 
 Society, the Sphere of, 41. 
 Sources, historical, defined, 10; 
 
 derived, defuied, 20. 
 Space, correlative to Nature, as 
 
 Time to History, 97. 
 Speech and the Languages, 30. 
 State, the, 42, 43, 
 Sybel, von, xxxviii, 04. [fol. 
 
 System, the doctrine of, 32 and 
 
 T. 
 
 Tables, Twelve, of Roman Law, 
 
 quoted 43. 
 Thiers, French Revolution, 108. 
 Thucydides, 10, 73. 
 
 Time, a correlative of History, 
 98 and fol. 
 
 Translation, the present, charac- 
 ter of, vii. 
 
 Translator, Preface of, v. 
 
 Tribe, the, 38. 
 
 I'rue, the, and the Sciences, 40. 
 
 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, 43 and 
 fol. 
 
 Y. 
 
 York of Wartenburg, Field Mar- 
 shal, Droysen's Biography of, 
 xviii.
 
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