150 MODERN HISTORY OF EUROPE 



question arises whether this conventional nomenclature is any 

 longer appropriate, whether all post-medieval history can be scienti- 

 fically classified as a period, with the same right and meaning as the 

 Middle Ages. " Ancient History " is of course a merely conventional 

 and convenient, unscientific term; is this true of "Modern History " 

 also? It may be thought that the answer is affirmative. It may 

 seem probable that the changes which began at the end of the 

 eighteenth century, the great movements of thought which have 

 thrilled the nineteenth century, the implications of the far-reaching 

 vistas of knowledge which have been opened, mark as new and 

 striking a departure as any to which our records go back, and con- 

 stitute a Neu-zeit in the fullest sense of the word; that in the nine- 

 teenth as in the sixteenth century man entered into a new domain of 

 ideas; that of the nineteenth as much as of the sixteenth are we 

 justified in saying 



Ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 



If so, our nomenclature should be altered. The three centuries after 

 Columbus should be called by some other name, such as post-medieval, 

 and " modern " should be appropriated to the period ushered in by the 

 French Revolution and the formation of the American Common- 

 wealth, until in turn a new period shall claim a name which can 

 never be permanently attached. It would follow that in the His- 

 torical Department at this Congress, there should be another section; 

 the nineteenth century, the more modern modern period, should have 

 a section to itself. In Germany, a distinction of this kind has been 

 adopted. The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are 

 described as die neuere Zeit; while the nineteenth is distinguished as 

 die neueste Zett. 



Among the notes which form the stamp and signature of this 

 neueste Zeit is the new historical interest, if I may say so, which has 

 become prevalent in the world and is itself an historical fact of su- 

 preme importance. It is expressed not only in the enormous amount 

 of research that has been done, but in the axiom of " history for its 

 own sake, "and also in the attempts to create a philosophy of history. 

 It is a new force set free, which will have its own place in the complex 

 of the driving forces of the world. It is to be taken along with the 

 equally recent development of a consciousness of our relations to 

 future generations, which is practically reflected in a growing sense of 

 duty to posterity. Both facts taken together, the interest in human 

 experience and the interest in human destiny, represent a new sense 

 of the solidarity of humanity, linking past ages and ages to come. 

 In other words, the human mind has begun to rise above the immedi- 

 ate horizon of the circumstances and interests of the present genera- 

 tion, and to realize seriously, not as a mere object of learned curi- 

 osity, the significance of the past and the potentialities of the future. 



