Let us begin our analytical studies of the value and the meaning of human history, by considering some opinions which deserve the foremost place in our discussion, not as being the first in time, but as being the first in simplicity. I refer to the views of men like Buckle, Taine, and Lamprecht, and especially Lamprecht, for he has tried the hardest to justify theoretically what he regards the only scientific aim of history to be. If we may make use of our logical scheme of the three possible aspects of history, it is clear from the beginning that the history of mankind, as understood by the three authors we have named, but most particularly by Lamprecht, is neither a mere enumeration nor a true evolution, but that it has to do with *cumulations*, in the clearest of their possible forms. The processes of civilisation among the different peoples are in fact to be compared logically with the origin of volcanoes or mountain-ranges in Japan, or in Italy, or in America, and show us a typical series of consecutive phases, as do these. There exists, for instance, in the sphere of any single civilisation an economic system, founded first on the exchange of natural products, and then on money. There are, or better, perhaps, there are said to be, characteristic phases succeeding one another in the arts, such as the “typical,” the “individualistic,” and the “subjective” phases. Any civilisation may be said to have its “middle ages,” and so on. All these are “laws” of course in the meaning of “rules” only, for they are far from being elemental, they are not “principles” in any sense. And there are other sorts of “rules” at work for exceptional cases: revolutions have their rules, and imperialism, for instance, has its rules also. Now, as the consecutive phases of history have been shown to be true cumulations, it follows that the rules which are revealed by our analysis, are rules relating to the very origin of cumulations also. The real *element* upon which the cumulation-phases, and the cumulation-rules together rest, is the human individual as the bearer of its psychology. Nobody, it seems to me, has shown more clearly than Simmel that it is the human individual, *qua* individual, which is concerned in *every* kind of history. History, viewed as a series of cumulations, may in fact claim to satisfy the intellect by “explaining” a good deal of historical facts. It explains by means of the elemental factor of individual psychology, which every one knows from himself, and by the simple concept that there is a cumulation, supported by language and by writing as its principal factors, which both of course rest on psychology again. Psychology, so we may say, is capable of leading to cumulation phenomena; the cumulations in history are such that we are able to understand them by our everyday psychology; and history, so far as it is of scientific value, consists exclusively of cumulations.