118 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



anniversary of whose death has just been fittingly observed by 

 Germans throughout the world. In the realm of Germanic cultures, 

 and even beyond it, Herder stands as the creator of the conception 

 " folk-soul " (the psyche of the masses). He was the first to admit the 

 importance of the socio-psychic demands for the proper historical 

 comprehension of the most important of all human communities, 

 nations, and to draw from these the necessary conclusions. He 

 did it, 1 not in a calm, entirely emotionless, and intellectual spirit 

 of research, but rather by leaps, and with all the enthusiasm of 

 the explorer. His was a psychic attitude toward the new-found 

 inexhaustible material of the socio-psychic inter-relations. But to 

 reproach Herder on this score would betray an extremely small 

 socio-psychic understanding. When communities have made rapid 

 progress toward a higher spiritual existence, it is not in a rational 

 manner or with purely intellectual age-marks of the thought or pro- 

 cess. Rather with youthful feelings of anticipation, with an ecstatic 

 presentiment of dimly felt combinations, are the portals of a new 

 epoch entered. Science becomes a prophecy, philosophy turns to 

 poetical metaphysics. That was the character of the great German 

 period of subjectivity that began with Klopstock, and ended in the 

 spreading of the branches of the philosophy of identity the period 

 to which Herder, as one of its first great phenomena, belongs. There- 

 fore Herder's enthusiastic grasp of the socio-psychic elements of his- 

 tory does not stand alone. It is the property of the whole epoch and 

 dominates the characteristic movement of the time romanticism. 

 The advance step in all this was a clearer view of the vast combin- 

 ations of the phenomena of the mass-psyche an advance which 

 brought one to describe vital points poetically, in part or wholly so. 

 But there was not the clear comprehension of the constituent ele- 

 ments of the mass-psychic or even of the elementary disentangling 

 of combined phenomena. 



It has been reserved to the so-called history-of-civilization method 

 to attempt the description of socio-psychic phenomena, and Freytag, 

 Riehl, even Burckhardt, devoted themselves to this task. Since the 

 last decade of the last century, however, this method has gradually 

 grown out of date. 



That no progress was made in historical method during a long 

 period may be traced to the existence of too great a mass of material 

 to deal with. To this another cause must be added. The first great 

 subjective period, which had begun with 1750, ended about 1820, at 

 latest 1830; then about 1870 to 1880 another epoch begins, the second 

 period of subjectivism. In the interval, however (since 1820, at 

 least), the conquests of the first period began to be not so much 

 developed as intellectualized. Enthusiasm yielded to reflection, the 

 1 See his Ideas concerning the History of Mankind. 



