of my « Synthèse de l'histoire de l'Humanité », with many unjust criticisms of detail and, occasionally too, abuse, as in the « Revue des Questions Historiques » from the pen of a very young man who had specialised only in the local history of his native Britanny. I will explain its principal object.
For me the history of mankind is an organism having its organic necessities, its organic development, possessing a body and a mind.
In this organism, territories and nations appear for the first time at the precise moment when they possess one of two qualities: — either to represent the whole, to be « representative » in the sense that Emerson referred to personalities, or to be in advance of the rest of mankind, giving it new inspiration and becoming the leading factor in its development.
Large and small states, great or small groupings are, in the history of mankind, not interesting from this point of view, but only insofar as concerns the qualities already mentioned. Often a second-class nation, possessing little territory, would attract the attention of the historian because it identified itself with the current movement or prepared to become great in the future.
To look in such a book for facts regarding a country for a set number of years is to have no appreciation of the intentions of the author and the critic mentioned above could therefore speak in his own sense of a work of «less than embryonic character». It is possible to forgive the aggressive modesty of his estimate.
In this presentation of history many changes in the present mode of writing occur owing to the necessity of suitably presenting the new point of view itself.
