[Sidenote: _The criterion of progress and history._] Every representation of human history has the concept of _progress_ as foundation. But by progress must not be understood the imaginary _law of progress_ which is supposed to lead the generations of man with irresistible force to some unknown destiny, according to a providential plan which we can divine and then understand logically. A supposed law of this sort is the negation of history itself, of that accidentality, that empiricity, that contingency, which distinguish concrete fact from abstraction. And for the same reason, progress has nothing to do with the so-called law of _evolution,_ which, if it mean that reality evolves (and it is only reality in so far as it evolves or becomes), cannot be called a law, and if it be given as a law, becomes identical with the law of progress in the sense just described. The progress of which we speak here is nothing but _the very concept of human activity,_ which, working upon the material supplied to it by nature, conquers its obstacles and bends it to its own ends. Such conception of progress, that is to say, of human activity applied to a given material, is the _point of view_ of the historian of humanity. No one but a mere collector of unrelated facts, a mere antiquary or inconsequent annalist, can put together the smallest narrative of human doings unless he have a determined point of view, that is to say, a personal conviction of his own regarding the facts whose history he has undertaken to relate. No one can start from the confused and discordant mass of crude facts and arrive at the historical work of art save by means of this apperception, which makes it possible to carve a definite representation in that rough and formless mass. The historian of a practical action should know what is economy and what is morality; the historian of mathematics, what is mathematics; the historian of botany, what is botany; the historian of philosophy, what is philosophy. If he does not really know these things, he must at least have the illusion of knowing them; otherwise he will not even be able to delude himself into believing that he is writing history.