Rectified in these terms, the question becomes clear, and requires a negative answer. When we narrate artistic or philosophical, economic or ethical history, we place ourselves at the point of view of the individual activity. As we expose æsthetic or philosophical products, useful or moral actions, we judge them at the same time æsthetically, philosophically, economically, morally, and we know in every case if the action has been such as it ought. Who would hesitate to affirm that (at least, as an affirmative method) the _Africa_ of Petrarch was not what he wished it to be, a poetic work; or that Emmanuel Kant did not succeed in establishing from his practical postulates, according to his intention, the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul; or that Themistocles behaved in an undecided manner as regards Xerxes, not knowing how to resolve to sacrifice his ambitions to the safety of Greece, nor to inflict a grave loss upon his country, in order to satisfy his desire for vengeance; or that Napoleon ignored the rights of man, and behaved as one without scruples, when he ordered the arrest and shooting of the Duc d'Enghien? But what can be the advantage of asking if the arrest of the Persian expansion in Europe were a bad thing or a good? if the creation of the Roman Empire deserve blame? if the Catholic Church were wrong in concentrating Western religion in herself? if the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the French of the eighteenth, or the Italian of the nineteenth, could have been avoided? if Dante could have been born in our day and have sung the Kantian rather than the Thomist philosophy? if Michael Angelo might have painted the victories of the modern industrial world, which Manzotti has made into a ballet in his _Excelsior,_ instead of the visions of the Last Judgment? Here we have before us, not individual spirits, whose work we examine in given circumstances, but facts that have happened, and these are the work, not of the individual, but of the Whole. They are (as has already been said) the work of God, and God is not to be judged, or rather He is to be judged, but not from the visual angle at which individual works and actions are to be judged. He is not to be judged as a poet or as a philosopher, as a statesman or a hero, as a finite being working in the infinite. The contemplation of His work is at the same time judgment. _Die Weltgeschichte das Weltgericht_: the history itself of the world is the judgment of the world, and in recounting the course of history, while not applying the judgment of the categories above indicated, which are inapplicable, we do, however, apply a judgment, which is that of necessity and reality. That which has been had to be; and that which is truly real is truly rational.