History or historical narrative is, as we know, very closely related to art, in contradistinction to the abstract sciences, since both art and history do not construct concepts of class, but represent concrete and individuated facts. History, however, is not art pure and simple, but is distinguished from it, because artistic representation is in it continually illuminated with the critical distinction between the real and the possible, what has happened and what has been imagined, the existing and the inexisting, with the consequent determinations connected with them, as to this or that particular mode of reality, event, and existence, that have taken place. In every historical narrative are always to be found, understood or implied, the affirmations that the narrative is real, that a different narrative would be imaginary, that the reality of the event in question properly belongs to this or that concept of politics, rights, war, diplomacy, economy, and so on. All this is quite absent from art, which is by nature ingenuous and free of critical discernment; so much so, that hardly have its representations become objects of reflection, than they are dissolved as art, to reappear with a changed appearance (no longer youthful, but virile or senile), as history. [Sidenote: _The concept of existentiality in history._] But if this distinction between art and history be precisely determined gnoseologically, when it has been said that in history the predicate of existentiality is added to mere representation (and, therefore, all the other predicates connected with the case, referring to the various forms of existence), and that therefore, the representative and artistic form of history contains in itself rational and philosophical method as precedent, yet there always remains the ulterior philosophical problem: What is the origin of that predicate of reality or existentiality on which all the others lean? We have already demonstrated that it was altogether inadmissible to derive it from a mysterious faculty called _Faith,_ or to consider it as the apprehension of something extraneous to the spirit in universal, as _a datum or position._ And we also stated that if the spirit recognize its existence, yet it cannot attain to the criterion elsewhere than from itself; which criterion was nothing but the first reflection of the spirit upon the practical activity itself, giving rise to the duplication of reality that has happened and reality only desired, or of reality and irreality, of existing and inexisting. [Sidenote: _Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the existing, desires and the unexisting._]