attempts rather a sympathetic appreciation of his motives and purposes. It does not analyze the individual into universal principles but endeavors to understand him as a person. The discovery on which modern history has rested was the realization by historians (e.g., the awakening of Leopold von Ranke by Quentin Durward) that antiquity was peopled by actual human beings, with human desires and purposes, who could be understood and appreciated as one knows one's friends, not as lifeless abstractions, as pawns in a chess game of popes and emperors, but as persons whose lives can have a human significance. The task of the historian then became the re-creating of the men and women of the past, the entering into their feelings and desires, and the interpreting of their actions to posterity. By this method can be understood also the larger social movements of which history must take cognizance, for these exist only as a community of standards of value among individuals. By this method alone can the course of history be rendered really intelligible, for these are the actual forces by which it is determined.
The logical outcome of the development of such a method has been the transformation of history into a self-sufficing science, which means that the principles of historical unity must be found within history itself. The failure to appreciate the fact of historical continuity, the fact that history itself provides the threads of connection necessary to unify the chaos of historical data, is the weakness of the historians of the eighteenth century. The Age of Faith, and even the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had for the most part found historical continuity (so far as the matter was theoretically considered) in the abiding purpose of a ruling Providence, who shaped the events of human life in accord with that purpose. The prevailing scepticism, or at best the lukewarm faith of the eighteenth century had completely undermined this conception. Or, perhaps, it would be fairer to say that its inadequacy for the purposes of history were becoming increasingly evident to historians. At all events, it was discarded and, for the time, no new idea had appeared to take its place. The facts were left hanging at loose ends. The single events and individuals were not seen in historical perspective and understood in the light of the social forces which they both exemplified and directed.
