530 Darwinism and History 
development. Such notions were excluded by the fundamental 
doctrines of the dominant religion which bounded and bound men’s 
minds. As the course of history was held to be determined from 
hour to hour by the arbitrary will of an extra-cosmic person, there 
could be no self-contained causal development, only a dispensation 
imposed from without. And as it was believed that the world was 
within no great distance from the end of this dispensation, there 
was no motive to take much interest in understanding the temporal, 
which was to be only temporary. 
The intellectual movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge 
immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted 
to the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for 
Thucydides and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction 
in the art of politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of 
a new culture, different from anything that had gone before ; but at 
the time men were not conscious of this; they saw clearly that the 
traditions of classical antiquity had been lost for a long period, and 
they were seeking to revive them, but otherwise they did not perceive 
that the world had moved, and that their own spirit, culture, and 
conditions were entirely unlike those of the thirteenth century. It 
was hardly till the seventeenth century that the presence of a new 
age, as different from the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and 
Rome, was fully realised. It was then that the triple division of 
ancient, medieval, and modern was first applied to the history of 
western civilisation. Whatever objections may be urged against 
this division, which has now become almost a category of thought, it 
marks a most significant advance in man’s view of his own past. 
He has become conscious of the immense changes in civilisation 
which have come about slowly in the course of time, and history 
confronts him with a new aspect. He has to explain how those 
changes have been produced, how the transformations were effected. 
The appearance of this problem was almost simultaneous with the 
rise of rationalism, and the great historians and thinkers of the 
eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, attempted 
to explain the movement of civilisation by purely natural causes. 
These brilliant writers prepared the way for the genetic history of 
the following century. But in the spirit of the Aufklirung, that 
eighteenth-century Enlightenment to which they belonged, they were 
concerned to judge all phenomena before the tribunal of reason; 
and the apotheosis of “reason” tended to foster a certain superior 
@ priori attitude, which was not favourable to objective treatment 
and was incompatible with a “historical sense.” Moreover the tra- 
ditions of pragmatical historiography had by no means disappeared. 
