THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY 113 



always with the individual-psychological investigation of the past, 

 and arrives finally at a markedly social-psychological point of view. 

 In a word, it is the course of events which begins with the heroic 

 poem and ends with the history of civilization. If we paint the 

 panorama of this historiographic development rather more vividly 

 and minutely, it will be seen that the individuals of the lower stages 

 of civilization have as little consciousness of the conditions that 

 are characteristic of them, as of the difference between these con- 

 ditions and those of other stages of civilization. The English, French, 

 Italian, and, in particular, the German poet of the golden age of 

 medievalism who worked over the materials of classic antiquity, 

 transferred them unconsciously to the conditions of his own age. 

 ^Eneas became a knight, and Dido a fair chatelaine. It was only the 

 beginning of modern times, the closing centuries of dying medieval- 

 ism, that brought the dawn of a comprehension of the differences 

 of various cultural conditions, and therefore in our opinion a quick- 

 ened sense of the historical difference of the periods of civilization 

 in general 1 . Similar observations might be made in the history of 

 ancient peoples and in the cultural phases of Eastern Asia. Every- 

 where the beginnings of socio-psychological historical compre- 

 hension are coincident with the emancipation of individuality from 

 medieval restraint, in order to enter on the so-called new age with 

 the more rapid process of its own differentiation. 



But before this stage is reached, centuries have elapsed, and cen- 

 turies in which history was understood only in the individual- 

 psychologic sense, merely as the product of single distinguished 

 individuals. And correspondingly the forms of historical tradition 

 are purely individual. Almost everywhere there appear two forms 

 which may be taken as typical, genealogy and the heroic poem. 



A characteristic beginning! Whence arises its dual nature? In 

 both instances we are concerned with the memory of single persons, 

 particularly of ancestors. But in the one case the barren record is 

 taken from the purely prosaic reality of a natural pedigree, in the 

 other the single individual is selected and his deeds immortalized 

 in poetic form with an exaggerated objectivity. How does this 

 difference arise? We are here face to face with a radical division in 

 the historical point of view, one which occurs in all ages in higher as 

 in lower stages of culture. It can be characterized as the difference 

 between naturalism and idealism. In the first instance reality is 

 followed closely, held fast, copied. To this belong the rapid offhand 

 Sketches, the journalism of to-day in so far as it serves as the annal- 

 istic medium of news; and, finally, statistics. In the other case 

 there intervenes between the simultaneous photographic and phono- 

 graphic impression of occurrences and their collective reproduction, 

 time, and with time, memory. Memory, with its thousand strange 



