112 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



In order to understand better the process that is going on, let us 

 consider the following contrasts. 



Take first a period in which all men, within a relatively small 

 community, such as we see in the beginnings of a nation, are abso- 

 lutely of the same psychic equality, so much so that they in action 

 and feeling can be said to stand side by side as examples of the 

 same endowments. Then take another age in which, within a given 

 community of much greater extent, each individual differs in kind 

 from all others, so that even more than is at present the case - 

 his volitions and sensations differ radically from those of his fellow 

 men. 



It is clear, then, that we have here the two poles of human activity, 

 whose influences must give different results in any study of the 

 currents of life that we call historical psychic existence, the life 

 embraced within the limits of these poles. In the first case the 

 treatment would yield only a delineation of the life of units; for the 

 treatment of the collective psychic existence would produce as a 

 result only a sum of the already known, the psychic existence of the 

 individual. In the second case we should indeed take a glance first 

 at the psychic life of the unit, from which it would be seen that it by 

 no means included the character of the life of the many, but rather 

 that the collective psychic life fertilized by the marked deviations 

 of the individual within itself is quite a thing in itself, with its peculiar 

 psychic or socio-psychic character; and that to this spiritual life 

 of the whole, the psychic activity of the individual is in such a 

 manner subordinate as to be dominated by it for the best and highest 

 ends. 



One sees, therefore, that the first case of the coexistence of per- 

 sons psychically quite identical would result in a purely individual 

 psychology; the second case of coexistence of absolutely differ- 

 entiated persons would result in a radically socio-psychological 

 historical method of treatment. 



But the instances just given never occur in perfection. However, 

 the connections formed among them constitute principles in the 

 course of history and historical science; the pole of similarly organ- 

 ized persons appears in the beginning of cultural development as 

 the principle of lower culture, while the pole of dissimilar units 

 reveals itself as underlying higher cultures, for the simple reason 

 that the trend of evolution is toward progressive differentiation 

 and intergradation of the human soul. 



If on the results of the examples cited and deduced in a purely 

 psychological manner are based the main principles of every develop- 

 ment of historical treatment from the lowest to the highest, one 

 finds corresponding to them, in the various civilizations of the 

 world, the same course of history, descriptive or scientific. It begins 



