_R. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History: France, etc., pages 5-10._ HISTORY: The subjects and objects of History. "The position for which I have always striven is this, that history is past politics, that politics are present history. The true subject of history, of any history that deserves the name, is man in his political capacity, man as the member of an organized society, governed according to law. History, in any other aspect, hardly rises above antiquarianism, though I am far from holding that even simple antiquarianism, even the merest scraping together of local and genealogical detail, is necessarily antiquarian rubbish. I know not why the pursuits of the antiquary should be called rubbish, any more than the pursuits of the seeker after knowledge of any other kind. Still, the pursuits of the antiquary, the man of local and special detail, the man of buildings or coins or weapons or manuscripts, are not in themselves history, though they are constantly found to be most valuable helps to history. The collections of the antiquary are not history; but they are materials for history, materials of which the historian makes grateful use, and without which he would often be sore put to in doing his own work. … It is not too much to say that no kind of knowledge, of whatever kind, will be useless to the historian. There is none, however seemingly distant from his subject, which may not stand him in good stead at some pinch, sooner or later. But his immediate subject, that to which all other things are secondary, is man as the member of a political community. Rightly to understand man in that character, he must study him in all the forms, in all the developments, that political society has taken. Effects have to be traced up to their causes, causes have to be traced up to their effects; and we cannot go through either of those needful processes if we confine our studies either to the political societies of our own day or to political societies on a great physical scale. The object of history is to watch the workings of one side, and that the highest side, of human nature in all its shapes; and we do not see human nature in all its shapes, unless we follow it into all times and all circumstances under which we have any means of studying it. … In one sense it is perfectly true that history is always repeating itself; in another sense it would be equally true to say that history never repeats itself at all. No historical position can be exactly the same as any earlier historical position, if only for the reason that the earlier position has gone before it. … Even where the reproduction is unconscious, where the likeness is simply the result of the working of like causes, still the two results can never be exactly the same, if only because the earlier result itself