The last-mentioned case occurs frequently in books that bear the title of Philosophy of history. These certainly cannot be considered to have been refuted when the concept of that science has been refuted. Science is one thing and the book another. The error of a false attempt at science is one thing and the value of books, which usually (especially with great thinkers and writers) have deeper motives and more valuable parts, is another. Among books upon the philosophy of history are numbered some masterpieces of human genius,--fountains of truth, at which many generations have quenched their thirst and to which men return perpetually. They have often indeed been marvellous books on history, true history, produced by reaction against superficial, partisan or trifling histories. They have for the first time revealed the true character of certain epochs, of certain events, of certain individuals.[1] The sterile form of duality and opposition between Philosophy of history and simple History, concealed the fruitful polemic of a better history against a worse history. Even the formulae, which were falsely regarded as deductions of concepts (for example, that the Middle Ages are the negation of antiquity and the Renaissance the negation of the Middle Ages, or that the Germanic spirit, from the Reformation to the Romantic movement, is the affirmation of inward liberty, or that Italy of the fifteenth century represents Art, France the State, and so on), were at bottom vivacious expressions of predominant characteristics, by means of which the various epochs and events were portrayed. These expressions and truths could be accepted without there being any necessity for presupposing clear and fixed oppositions and distinctions, or for denying the extra-temporality of spiritual forms. Besides these historical characteristics, discoveries more strictly philosophical appeared for the first time in those books; hence not only do we find in them the first outlines of a Logic of historical science (a Logic of the individual judgment), but also, sometimes in imaginative forms, determinations of eternal aspects of the Spirit, which had previously been unknown or ill-known. Such is the case with the concept of _progress_ and _providence,_ and of that other concept concerning the spiritual autonomy of _language_ and of _art,_ which presented itself for the first time as the discovery of the historical epoch, in which man, wholly sense and imagination, without intelligible genera and concepts, is supposed to have spoken and poetized without reasoning. In an equally imaginary fashion the constancy of the spirit, which eternally repeats itself, also found in those philosophies the formula of the perpetual _passing_ away and returning of the various epochs of civilization. These philosophical truths, like the historical characteristics, must be purged, the first from the representations improperly united with them, the second from