116 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



common to these masses, so that the idea asserts itself as a form 

 of higher thought integration. And in Western culture, as far as 

 investigation permits of a time-limit, it is in its purely historic- 

 graphic beginnings to be first found in the historical works of the 

 last half of the eighteenth century. 1 One naturally asks here, had 

 these higher forms of integration from the beginning a closer connec- 

 tion with the naturalistic or idealistic conception of history? It is of 

 interest to know that these comparatively abstract forms of intel- 

 lectual activity had, for purely psychological reasons at first, the 

 closest connection with idealistic historical description. Allied with 

 this is the fact that this activity, having developed along quite 

 primitive lines to a higher plane, was yet capable of assuming at 

 times a transcendental character. The ideas which were made the 

 basis of the understanding of the greatest historical concatenations 

 by isolation and abstraction of the elements common to them, did 

 not appear as human ideas, but were rather divine powers holding 

 sway behind these events, permeating and determining them, as 

 emanative and associative forms of the absolute working through the 

 fates of men. It was a sort of idealistic historical treatment which 

 slowly took shape in Germany in the course of the second half of the 

 eighteenth century, which then, owing to Schelling, passed over into 

 the great idealistic philosophy of German Romanticism, to which 

 from the point of view of the profoundest theory of life Ranke 

 paid homage as long as he lived, and which, starting from all these 

 points of its development, became a constituent part of all the 

 higher historical training of the nineteenth century. 



Meanwhile the strictly epistemological character of the theory of 

 the idea had certainly been recognized, and not least clearly at the 

 beginning of the great discussions of historical methods in the early 

 nineties of the last century, and which have not yet entirely ceased. 

 It can truly be said that to-day, practically no one believes in the 

 transcendency of historical ideas, that is, not fully, nor even in 

 the Ranke sense, but that, on the other hand, the usefulness of 

 the conceptions contained in them for the grouping of the greater 

 individual-psychic series of events is generally conceded. 



While the individual-psychological treatment of history has been 

 thus gradually developed to the state of perfection which marks it 

 to-day, it had long had its limits, and, as far as the main prin- 

 ciples of historical comprehension are concerned, its substitution 

 in the form of socio- psychological treatment had begun and had been 

 proved to be necessary. 



In the course of the latter part of the seventeenth, but more 

 especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all the peoples 



1 Cf . of recent date, Heussi, Church History and its Writing. Johann Lorenz 

 von Mosheims, Gotha, 1904. 



