The absurdity of this programme must be clearly set forth, because those who formulate it are wont to concede equivocally that a Philosophy of history must be founded upon actual data, and have induction as its basis. In reality, were those actual data documents to be interpreted, we should not have the Philosophy of history that they desire, but simply History. The actual data, the so-called formless material, in the programme of the Philosophy of history, are at the most already constructed histories, which do not content the philosophers of history. They do not content them, not because they judge them to be false interpretations of the documents (in which case nothing else would be needed but to correct history with history, carrying out the work that all historians do); but because the _very method of history_ does not content them, and they demand something else. History is despised as mere narration, and considered not as a form of thought, but as its material, a chaotic mass of representations. The true form of thought is for them the Philosophy of history, which appears in history and not in documents. And how does it appear? If the documents are removed, the _a priori_ synthesis is no longer possible. It arises, then, by the parthenogenesis of the abstract concept, which history finds in itself, without the spark being struck by confrontation with documents. History is deduced _a priori,_ not in the concrete but in the void. Whatever be the declarations which philosophers of history add to their programme, its essence cannot be changed. Were these declarations made seriously and all their logical consequences accepted, there would be no reason for maintaining a Philosophy of history beside and beyond history. The two things would become identical, and the programme itself would be annulled, both for those who propose it, and for us who judge it to be contradictory. This is the dilemma, from which there is no escape: either the Philosophy of history is an interpretation of documents, and in this case it is synonymous with History and makes no new claim;--or it does make a new claim and in that case, being no longer interpretation of documents and intending all the same to think facts, it thinks them without documents and draws them from the empty concept, and we have the Philosophy of history, philosophism, panlogism. [Sidenote: _Philosophy of history and false analogies._]