economic forms answering to the changed conditions of spirits. In like manner, the Middle Age, which was evidently in part progress, because it solved problems left unsolved by the preceding civilization, posed others that it did not solve and that were solved in the succeeding centuries; but if the posing of these new problems, which, while destroying the old, failed to substitute provisionally anything, was apparently not progress, neither was it regress, but the beginning of new progress. The same is to be said of precursors, conquered in their time, but conquerors in history, of the restorations and reactions that are so only in name, because they contain in themselves that with which they contend, if for no other reason, then for the very reason that they contend: of heroes and initiators, who were conquered and martyrized, yet knew that they were triumphing and did triumph in dying; the cross and the pyre will become symbols of victory: _in hoc signo vinces._ And finally, if the positivism of the second half of the nineteenth century seem as a whole so greatly inferior to idealism, that comes from its not being philosophy at all, but a hybrid jumble of natural sciences and metaphysic, thus intensifying an error that already existed in germ in idealism, and fecundating the problem for a better solution. Many philosophers living to-day are inferior to Socrates, because they have not even risen to the knowledge of the concept; but those who in our day have attained to the level of Socrates, are superior to him, because besides his thought they contain in themselves something that Socrates had not; and those philosophers who are logically on a level with Protagoras, surpass him, just because they are the Protagorases of the twentieth century. There is therefore never real regression in history; but only contradictions that follow upon solutions given, and prepare new ones. [Sidenote: _Individuals and History._] The solutions, once attained, are acquired for ever; the problems that have once been solved, do not again occur, or, which is the same thing, they recur in a different way to those of the past. The web of History is composed of such labours, to which all individuals collaborate; but it is not the work and cannot be the purpose of any of them in particular, because each one is exclusively intent on his particular work, and only in _rem suam agere,_ does he also do the business of the world. History is happening, which, as has been seen, is not to be judged practically, because it always transcends individuals, and to these and not to history is the practical judgment applicable. The judgment of History is in the very fact of its existence: its rationality is in its reality. [Sidenote: _Fate, Fortune, and Providence._]