318 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



of any kind would hardly satisfy the reader, if moral 

 judgment were its basis. Every reader, of course, has a 

 moral judgment of his own, but, unfortunately, almost 

 every reader's judgment is different from his neighbour's, 

 and there is no uniformity of moral principles as there 

 is of geometrical ones. We shall come back to this point. 

 At present we only state the fact that indeed moral 

 judgment can never be the foundation of history, and that 

 Eickert was very right to say so : it is enough to put the 

 names of Tolstoy and Nietzsche together to understand 

 how devoid of even the smallest general validity would be 

 a history resting upon moral principles. 



But what then are the " values * of Eickert to which 

 history has to relate, if moral values in their proper sense 

 have to be excluded ? It is here that his discussions 

 begin to become obscure and unsatisfactory, and the 

 reason is fairly intelligible. He is trying to prove the 

 impossible ; he wants to put history beside science in its 

 real philosophical importance, in spite of the fact that 

 all evidence to establish this is wanting. 



These " values," to which every historical act in its 

 singularity has to be related in order to become an 

 element of real history, are they after all nothing but those 

 groups of the products of civilisation which in fact absorb 

 the interest of men ? Is it to groups of cultural 

 phenomena, such as arts, science, the State, religion, war, 

 economics, and so on, that " historical " facts have to be 

 related ? Yes, as far as I understand our author, it is 

 simply to these or other even less important groups of 

 cultural effects cultural " cumulations," to apply our term 

 that a single action of a man or a group of men 



