No doubt there is much truth in such a conception of history; but no doubt also, it puts history in the second rank as compared with psychology; just as geology stands in the second rank as compared with chemistry or physics. Geology and human history may lead to generalities in the form of rules, but these rules are *known* to be not elemental but only cumulative; and moreover, we know the elements concerned in them. The elements, therefore, are the real subjects for further studies in the realm of philosophy, but not the cumulations, not the rules, which are known to be due to accidental constellations. Of course, the “single” is the immediate subject of this sort of history, but the single as such is emphatically pronounced to be insignificant, and the cumulations and the cumulative rules, though “singles” in a higher sense of the word, are shown to be anything but elementalities. Therefore, on a conception of human history such as that of Buckle, Taine, Lamprecht, and others, we, of course, ought to take an interest in history, because what is “explained” by historical research touches all of us most personally every day and every year. But our philosophy, our view of the world, would remain the same without history as it is with it. We only study history, and especially the history of our own civilisation, because it is a field of actuality which directly relates to ourselves, just as we study for practical purposes the railway time-tables of our own country, but not of Australia; just as we study the local time-table in particular. If the mere *rerum cognoscere causas* is regarded as the criterium of science, history of Lamprecht’s type of course is a science, for its explanations rest upon the demonstration of the typical constellations and of the elemental factor or law from which together the next constellations are known necessarily to follow. But history of this kind is not a science in the sense of discovering *den ruhenden Pol in der Erscheinungen Flucht*. HUMAN HISTORY NOT AN “EVOLUTION” Quite another view of history has been maintained by Hegel, if his explanations about the *Entwicklung des objectiven Geistes* (“the development of the objective mind”) may be co-ordinated with our strictly logical categories of the possible aspects of history. But I believe we are entitled to say that it was a real *evolution* of mankind that Hegel was thinking of; an evolution regarding mankind as spiritual beings and having an end, at least ideally. One psychical state was considered by Hegel to generate the next, not as a mere cumulation of elemental stages, but in such a way that each of the states would represent an elementality and an irreducibility in itself; and he assumed that there was a continuous series of such stages of the mind through the course of generations. Is there any sufficient reason in historical facts for such an assumption?