Historical intellectualism has opened the way to the many attempts, made especially during the last two centuries and continued to-day, to discover _a philosophy of history,_ an _ideal history,_ a _sociology,_ a _historical psychology,_ or whatever else a science may be called, whose object is to extract from history concepts and universal laws. What must these laws, these universals be? Historical laws and historical concepts? In that case, an elementary acquaintance with the theory of knowledge suffices to make clear the absurdity of the attempt. When such expressions as a _historical law,_ a _historical concept_ are not simply metaphors colloquially employed, they are truly contradictory terms: the adjective is as unsuitable to the substantive as in the expressions "qualitative quantity" or "pluralistic monism." History implies concreteness and individuality, law and concept mean abstractness and universality. But if the attempt to extract _historical_ laws and concepts from history be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of history, but rather, according to circumstances, either philosophy in its various forms of Ethics, Logic, etc., or empirical science with its infinite divisions and subdivisions. The search is in fact either for those philosophical concepts which, as already remarked, are the basis of every historical construction and differentiate perception from intuition, historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already formed historical intuitions are collected and arranged in types and classes, which is exactly the method of the natural sciences. Great thinkers have sometimes donned the ill-fitting cloak of the philosophy of history, and notwithstanding the covering, they have attained philosophical truths of the greatest magnitude. The cloak discarded, the truth has remained. Modern sociologists are rather to be blamed, not so much for the illusion in which they are involved when they talk of an impossible science of sociology, as for the infecundity which almost always accompanies their illusion. It matters little that Æsthetic should be called "sociological Æsthetic," or Logic, "sociological Logic." The grave evil is that such Æsthetic is an old-fashioned expression of sensationalism, such Logic verbal and incoherent. The philosophical movement to which we have referred has however borne two good fruits in relation to history. First of all, a keener desire has arisen for a theory of history, that is, a theory of the nature and the limits of history, a theory which, in conformity with the analysis made above, cannot obtain satisfaction save in a general science of intuition, in an Æsthetic, in which the theory of history would form a special chapter, distinguished by the insertion of universal functions. Furthermore, concrete truths