Apart from this transformation, which was only partially complete even in the Age of Enlightenment, the idea of religious development that grew up in connection withChristian thought involvestwopresuppositions. The first of these is that the pathway of mankind wasdetermined by God, and not voluntarily chosen by man himself. It is not to religious thought that the characteristic features of the development must be ascribed. The development, moreover, is not immanent in religion; it is the result of external causes. The second presupposition is that this development follows a preconceivedplan; it embodies a purpose—indeed, it expresses purpose in the very highest degree precisely because it proceeds from the will of God. Even the co-operation of individuals in the fulfilment of this plan is but the result of divine predetermination, or happens because God has made known His purposes to these individuals. Thus, this course of thought leads with inner necessity to the conception ofrevelation. This conception combines two essentially irreconcilable ideas, offsetting each by the other. The religious destiny of man is thought to lie outside his own control: it is imposed upon him from without, and is communicated to him in the form of an illumination which he receives from the supersensuous world. Thus, religious development itself becomes a supersensuous process, which falls beyond the possibilities of the ordinary means of human knowledge. As its goal lies in the supersensuous, so also is the development itself a supersensuous process that extends over into the world of sense.
But at this point the religious view of world history necessarily came into sharp conflict with the philosophical view, though the latter had in certain respects appropriated the idea, developed by the former, of a teleological direction of human destinies. The philosopher, always trusting the guidance of his own reason, might admit both a goal and a plan, but that these should be inaccessible to thelux naturalis, as the philosophy of the Enlightenment called rational knowledge in distinction fromlux supranaturalis, or revelation, he could not concede. The logical outcome of this course of thought was an auxiliary concept which appeared to surmount the difficulty, and also possessed the happy characteristic of leaving every one free to retain,along with the natural light, as much or as little of the supernatural thought of an earlier period as he might deem wise. This auxiliary concept was that ofeducation—a conception that would readily suggest itself to an age vitally interested in pedagogical questions. The thought here involved represents merely a special application to this particular instance of the idea that the world is governed by a personal deity. Thus it came about that, from the time of Locke and Leibniz down to that of Lessing and Herder, the favourite conception of history was that of an education of mankind. But it is significant that the very work whose title incorporates this idea, Lessing'sEducation of the Human Race, really ends by displacing it. True, as a result of Biblical tradition, the idea of education is here brought into connection with the thought that the Jewish race is the chosen people of God. Freed from this connection, however, and applied to mankind in general, the idea of education, in Lessing's work, becomes that ofself-education, or, what is the same thing, that of adevelopmentdetermined by the general laws of mental life. Hence conditions were ripe for the further advance made by Herder, in hisIdeas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Though frequently lapsing, in his discussions of details, into the transcendent teleology of the preceding period, Herder nevertheless did away in principle with the restriction of the history of mankind to religious development, substituting for the latter the development to humanity.
Thus was determined the programme which historical science, at about the same time, accepted as its own—the programme of a universal history, whose task did not consist in presenting a loosely connected series of the histories of separate States, but in describing the common participation of peoples and States in the development of a universal culture. Furthermore, the way was cleared for the philosophical position that history is not, as was once thought, the expression of a predetermined plan whose purpose is that of a divine education, but that it is the result of laws immanent in historical life itself. Though variously expressed andpartly obscured by surviving ideas of the preceding period, this is the fundamental conviction common to the nineteenth-century philosophers of history. It received its most complete expression in the writings of Hegel, not merely in hisLectures on the Philosophy of History, but in his entire philosophy, which reflects throughout a broad historical outlook. History had by this time come to be regarded as a strictly self-dependent development of ideas in which each advance proceeds with rigid logical necessity from that which went before. In other words, it was thought of as a development of reason in time, or, in the phraseology of a religious world-view, as the living development of God himself. God is no longer conceived as a transmundane being who guides the destinies of mankind according to a preconceived plan. On the contrary, He is represented as immanent in the world. His innermost nature is described as the world-reason, and this is said to be unfolded particularly in the history of mankind.
However superior this conception may be to the preceding semi-mythological and semi-rationalistic theory of a divine education, it is clearly apparent that it was the outcome of a continuous development, characterized, we may doubtless say, by strict logical necessity. Antecedent to it were, first, the conception that this world is a preparation for the kingdom of God, and, later, the thought that life is an education in accordance with a predetermined plan. That the Hegelian conception is the result of such a development is evident from the very fact that it continues to regard the destinies of mankind as guided by a plan. This plan has, from stage to stage, merely passed from transcendence to immanence, inasmuch as it is finally thought to be present to the mind of the philosopher who interprets the meaning of history. Hence this later philosophy of history resembles the earlier in still another respect. Ultimately, both are more concerned with the future than with the past, thus being at once history and prophecy. Even at the later period, the central question to whose answer everything else is preparatory concerns the final goal toward which mankindis striving. Hence it is that the philosophers of this age are led time and again to divide the total life of humanity into periods inclusive of past, present, and future, precisely as did the world-plan of Augustine, whose basal conception was the idea of redemption. Since these periods are not derived from the progress of events, but are for the most part imposed upon it in conformity to the dictates of logic, the course of history is mapped out by reference to logical categories. Each of the great cultural peoples is portrayed as representing a specific idea, and, disregarding everything that might disturb their sequence, these ideas are arranged in a logical series. Thus, Hegel begins his reconstruction of history with an account of the Chinese as the people who possessed the earliest civilization. He does so, however, not because Chinese culture was as a matter of fact the earliest, but because it has apparently been more stable than other cultures, as well as more closely bound up with rigid external forms. Correspondingly, all succeeding stages of history are arranged by Hegel according to the principle, on the one hand, of a progress from bondage to spiritual freedom, and, on the other, of a transition from finite limitation to a striving for the infinite. This philosophy of history should not be criticized for its lack of knowledge concerning the beginnings of culture. Its fundamental error lies in the fact that, in tracing the development of mankind, it is guided, not by the rich concrete actuality of events but by a logical schematism which is in large measure imposed upon history, and only to a far less degree abstracted from it. That which was once a plan prescribed by God for mankind here at length becomes a plan elaborated by philosophers.
Without question, therefore, a philosophy of history must henceforth adopt a different course. True, it cannot dispense with principles that are in a certain sense external to history itself. Yet the function of such a philosophy would appear to consist in considering historical life from the point of view of the purposes that come to realizationwithin it, and of the values that are created on the various levels of historical culture. Such a teleology of history—indeed, in the last analysis, every teleology—must be preceded by a causal investigation, which begins, here as everywhere, by entirely ignoring purposes and values. Now, history is really an account of mental life. As such, it gives consideration to physical factors only in so far as they furnish the indispensable basis of mind. Hence the direct approach to a philosophy of history which aims, not to acquire a knowledge of reality froma prioriconcepts but, conversely, to derive ideas from reality, is apsychological account of the development of mankind. Although the concrete significance of the particular, as such, precludes the historian from disregarding it, everything that is merely particular should be ignored by one who is giving a psychological account of events. The aim, in this latter case, should be that of discovering the determining motives of historical life and its changes, and of interpreting these by reference to the universal laws of mind. Supplementing this aim should be the endeavour to gain, so far as possible, an insight into the laws that are immanent in history itself. Our first three chapters have attempted to give an account of the development of folk consciousness during the periods that, for the most part, preceded self-conscious historical life. But neither this account nor the bare outline which our final chapter gives of the beginnings of the development to humanity must pretend to be a substitute for, or in any way to represent, a philosophy of history. The difference between an investigation such as ours and a philosophy of history is precisely the same as that which distinguishes a psychological description of mental life in general from a philosophical interpretation. But, if anywhere, it is especially in the field of history that a psychological analysis, concerned primarily to understand life in its actual occurrence, must precede questions regarding the meaning of events and the value which individual historical characters possess as respects both themselves and their permanent influence. In other words, we may henceforthdemand that any philosophy of history which seeks to contribute to our understanding of the questions just mentioned, should be based on a psychological account of the development of mankind.
The point that we would emphasize is not that the philosophy of history has failed, in the past centuries, to find a satisfactory solution of its problem, and that its failure was inevitable. To the historical mind there is a far more important consideration. This consists in the fact that, when freed from its original mythological and teleological connections, the general conception of a history of mankind developed during these centuries has given clear definition to the idea of humanity in its most universal form. Humanity, it has been shown, includes within itself all antecedent social phenomena—peoples and States, religion and culture. This entire social complex has been subsumed under the principle that law is immanent in all history.
Prepared by Dr. Alma de Vries Schaub on the basis of the German Index compiled by Dr. Hans Lindau.