. PROGRESS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 639 



regulating ideas, which are directing the activity of our mind. Con- 

 jecture, which may be looked for as the sounding-lead of science, 

 springs up from the impression made upon our mind by the first 

 observation of facts; so the state of our mind, that is, the whole of 

 our knowledge and of our ideas, is contributing for a great part to its 

 springing up. Quite as an engineer or a geologist cannot seek after 

 hidden treasuries of ore in any country, without being guided by 

 certain principles or by the results of previous inquiries, so the 

 historian cannot sound the past without being directed by some 

 presuppositions. To be guided by conjecture without being sub- 

 dued to it, to be able to change it as soon as the study of documents 

 require, that is just the historian's skill. 



In the field of historical study it is not, as in that of philosophical 

 researches, Kant whose influence was directly quickening. His ab- 

 stract idealism and his quite static criticism do not care for history. 

 Like the leading thinkers of the French Revolution he looks only 

 after human nature in itself and does not want to study it in time 

 or space. The teeming principles for ecclesiastical history came 

 from other thinkers: from Lessing, who regenerated the old purely 

 intellectual rationalism by his esthetical sense of spiritual life's 

 sound realities and by a thoroughly human conception of religion 

 and ethics; from Herder, the poet and the prophet, the first 

 perhaps who possessed that living sense of history which we have now, 

 one of the first certainly who was gifted with that precious ability 

 of feeling intimately what other civilizations and other peoples had 

 thought or experienced, instead of judging them all by the measure of 

 his own time and of his own spirit; Herder, the generous author, 

 who set forth the organic conception of history considered as the 

 education of humanity, without isolating the individual man from 

 society nor humankind from nature; from Schleiermacher, who 

 acknowledged the specific character of religion, that is, the con- 

 sciousness of the band which unites the finite and the infinite being, 

 and who taught thus theologians to distinguish in every particular 

 religion what is temporary, local, and special in it from what is 

 properly and fundamentally religious in it; and above all others 

 from Hegel, whose philosophy proclaimed identity of the real and 

 the rational and by his identification of "sein" and "werden" 

 assigned to moral as well as to physical science the no longer con- 

 tested duty of recognizing the logical evolution of things and beings. 

 Thus the whole religious history of mankind was involved in the 

 organic unity of universal evolution as the highest expression of the 

 internal dialectics which are the life of the Spirit or the Being. 



To be sure, the influence of those great thinkers was not always 

 a good one. Historians, who drew their inspiration too exclusively 

 from one or the other of them, fell victims of their imagination, of 



