But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last exhausted its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not wholly unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and world-history (as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries that the scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been exceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical material—especially of material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme—the picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student who is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man that he clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word “Middle Age,”[18] invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to cover a formless and constantly extending mass which can only be defined, negatively, as every thing not classifiable under any pretext in one of the other two (tolerably well-ordered) groups. We have an excellent example of this in our feeble treatment and hesitant judgment of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, above all, it has become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history of the world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region and then,—with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event important only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event of purely Western and not even Arabian significance),—of West-Central Europe. When Hegel declared so naïvely that he meant to ignore those peoples which did not fit into his scheme of history, he was only making an honest avowal of methodic premisses that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and every historical work shows in its lay- out. In fact it has now become an affair of scientific tact to determine which of the historical developments shall be _seriously_ taken into account and which not. Ranke is a good example. ----- Footnote 11: See Vol. II, pp. 31, 175. Footnote 12: Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ (1903), pp. 275 ff. Footnote 13: In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics of the Apostle Paul, while the periodic is represented by the Apocalypse. Footnote 14: As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, “newest time” (_neueste Zeit_). Footnote 15: K. Burdach, _Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus_, 1918, pp. 48 et seq. (English readers may be referred to the article _Joachim of Floris_ by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI ed., _Tr._) Footnote 16: The expression “antique”—meant of course in the dualistic sense—is found as early as the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.). Footnote 17: