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INTRODUCTION
No science can escape from the conditions imposed by the constitution of the thinking mind which gives it birth. Even History, for all its striving after exactitude, objectivity, and minuteness of investigation, does not escape from such conditions. These are summed up in the fact that we are constantly obliged to come back to present experience. The present continually hovers before the backward-looking glance, because it is by the aid of analogies drawn from the life of to-day---however little this may be consciously before the mind---that we reach the causal explanation of the events of the past. But what is still more important is that we always, either voluntarily or involun-
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tarily, relate the course of past events to the complex of effects which lies before us in the present, and that we are constantly drawing either special or general conclusions from the past and making use of them in our task of shaping the present with a view to the future.
Subjects which do not admit of such a relation to the present belong to the antiquarian, and investigations which entirely and on principle leave such considerations out of account have value only for the virtuoso, or as work for work's sake. Even when we employ the art, so familiar to modern thinking, of tracing out evolutionary series, we do so at bottom only in order that we may be able to understand the present itself in its place in such a series; and when we follow the not less familiar tendency to construct historical laws out of these series, there lies in the background the wish to insert the, "particular" of the present into the "general" of the whole course of things, in order that both present and future may be better understood.
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Thus the understanding of the present is always the final goal of all history. History is just the whole life experience of our race, which we have to remember as long and as well, to apply to our present existence as well and as closely, as we can. Every historical investigation works tacitly with these coefficients; and it is avowedly the highest goal of history wherever history is conscious of itself as an organic science with a definite significance for the whole of our knowledge.
Expressly to set oneself such a task implies, of course, an undertaking in which the constructive intelligence plays a part---the grasping together of the present under a general conception characteristic of its essence, and the comparison of this whole with the past as a group of historical factors and tendencies which have also to be described and characterised by general concepts. The fact is, that no historical investigation, be it as specialist as you please, can dispense with general conceptions of this kind; all it can do is to make the mistake of
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thinking them self-explanatory. But when that is done, the really important problems remain latent in the supposed self-explanatory conceptions, and these must ever anew be made the object of historical thought. Of course the distinctively constructive and conceptual character of such thought must be frankly admitted. It takes detailed investigation as its presupposition, and remains dependent upon it; it has its own special dangers and pitfalls in the way of false generalisation, and should bear itself modestly towards strict professional research. That, however, does not alter the fact that it has constantly to be freshly undertaken, and that in it real historical thought finds its expression. It alone makes it possible to group the already worked-up material with a view to further work, to trace out the connexions and to interrogate the material afresh. It, above all, makes possible the attainment of the chief aim which is tacitly pursued by all history the understanding of the present. With all
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its consciousness of the many sources of error by which it is beset, it may confidently insist upon its rights.
This constructive thought will not, indeed, after the manner of the older theology, meditate upon the ways of Providence, or, like Hegel, trace out the necessary selfunfolding of the Idea, or, again, like psychological positivism, reconstruct the necessary causal succession of certain collective conditions, or mental and spiritual types. It will only, while remaining entirely within the limits of experience, formulate, so far as possible, the various great factors of our historical existence in general concepts, and endeavour to throw light on the actual relations, causal and genetic, between the aforesaid successive and overlapping types of civilisation. From these successions and
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intersections it has then to explain our modern world, to which we refer, for purposes of comparison or derivation, all historical knowledge, -and which we desire to understand in its characteristic fundamental features, to the end that we may understand ourselves. All constructive work going beyond this in the direction of the philosophy of history belongs, not to history proper, but to philosophy, to metaphysics, to ethics, or to religious conviction. On the
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strictly a posteriori lines, however, which have just been indicated, constructive work of this kind belongs to history proper, and it is only on these empirical lines that the following attempt at such construction is planned.