Let me illustrate and explain. It is possible, indeed it is easy, to contemplate aspects of history with the coolest intellectual interest. In this mood we might, for instance, study the development of science and religion out of primitive magics and superstitions. In this mood we might observe the characteristics of the city state, or the growth and decay of feudalism, or the history of the Mongols. On the other hand, the interest often becomes tinged with stronger feelings when we sympathetically follow the changing fortunes of particular individuals or communities. We are then, as it were, spectators of a drama, moved by dramatic hopes and fears, dramatic likes and dislikes, dramatic “pity and terror.” And our emotions are not merely those appropriate to drama; they have, besides, that special quality (already referred to) which depends on the belief that they are occasioned by real events in a world of real people. But there is yet a third case to be considered, in which the two previous cases are included and partially submerged. This occurs when the object of our contemplative interest is not episodic but general, not the fate of this man or that nation, this type of polity or that stage of civilisation, but the fate of mankind itself, its past and future, its collective destiny. Now we may, if we please, treat this as no more than a chapter of natural history. Compared with the chapter devoted, let us say, to the Dinosaurs it no doubt has the disadvantage of being as yet unfinished, for the Dinosaurs are extinct, and man still survives. On the other hand, though the natural history of “Homo Sapiens” is incomplete, we may admit that it possesses a peculiar interest for the biologist; but this interest is scientific, not historical. For what does historical interest require? Not merely “brute fact,” but brute fact about beings who are more than animals, who look before and after, who dream about the past and hope about the future, who plan and strive and suffer for ends of their own invention; for ideals which reach far beyond the appetites and fears which rule the lives of their brother beasts. Such beings have a “natural history,” but it is not with this that we are concerned. The history which concerns us is the history of self-conscious personalities, and of communities which are (in a sense) self-conscious also. Can the contemplative values which this possesses, especially in its most comprehensive shape, be regarded as independent of our world-outlook? Surely not.