But man is not merely a nobler animal, fashioned by degrees to reason or dignified into genius. His peculiar and distinctive excellence--his real essence--his true nature and destiny consist in his likeness to God; and from this principle proceeds a view of history totally different from that we have just described; for, according to it, man's history must be the history of the restoration of the likeness to God, or of the progress towards that restoration. That this sublime origin of man being once supposed--the divine image has been much altered, impaired, and defaced in the inmost recesses of the human breast, both of man in particular and of mankind in general, is a truth we may learn, independently of the positive doctrine of religion; for clearly is it vouched and confirmed by the testimony of our own feelings, our own experience of life, and a general survey of the world. No man who well knows that the image of God has been stamped on the human soul,--an image, whose old, half-obliterated characters are still to be found on all the pages of primitive history, and whose impress, not utterly effaced, every reflecting mind may discover in its own interior--can ever forego the hope, that, much as that divine image may seem, or may in fact be, impaired, its restoration is still possible. The man who knows from human life, and from his own experience, how great and arduous is this work--how many obstacles oppose its accomplishment, and how easily, even after a partial success, what already appeared won, may be again lost;--the man understanding this, will not be at a loss to comprehend any pause or retrogression, real or apparent, in the march of mankind; he will judge the fact with more equity, and consequently more accuracy; and will, in every case, confide in the guidance of that superior Providence, clearly visible in this regeneration of the world. If, in opposition to the Rationalist theory of man's endless perfectibility, we were to designate the opposite system of history founded on man's inborn likeness to his Maker, as the _legitimacy_ of historical philosophy; this title would not be incorrect, since all divine and human laws and rights, as they are found in history, depend in their first basis on the supposition of the high dignity and divine destination of man. Hence this view of history is the only one which restores to man the full rights and peculiar prerogatives of his being. Even to all other truths it restores their full force and rights; and it alone can do so without detriment to its own principle; for, as this is the simple truth, it is therefore complete and comprehensive. It must even acknowledge that man, beside his higher dignity and divine destiny, is and remains in his outward existence a physical creature--and though he be such not in an exclusive, but only secondary and subordinate sense, still, in respect to his external being and external development, he may be subject to certain natural laws in history.