The physiognomy of the histories of the ancients as described very accurately reflects the character of their philosophy, which never attained to the conception of the spirit, and therefore also failed to attain to that of humanity, liberty, and progress, which are aspects or synonyms of the former. It certainly passed from physiology or cosmology to ethic, logic, and rhetoric; but it schematized and materialized these spiritual disciplines because it treated them empirically. Thus their ethic did not rise above the custom of Greece and Rome, nor their logic above abstract forms of reasoning and discussing, nor their poetic above classes of literature. For this reason all assume the form of precepts. 'Anti-historical philosophy' has been universally recognized and described, but it is anti-historical because anti-spiritual, anti-historical because naturalistic. The ancients also failed to notice the deficiency observed by us, for they were entirely occupied with the joy of the effort of passing from myth to science and thus to the collection and classification of the facts of reality. That is to say, they were engrossed upon the sole problem which they set themselves to solve, and solved so successfully that they supplied naturalism with the instruments which it still employs: formal logic, grammar, the doctrine of the virtues, the doctrine of literary classes, categories of civil rights, and so forth. These were all Græco-Roman creations. But that ancient historians and philosophers were not explicitly aware of the above defect in its proper terms, or rather in our modern terms, does not mean that they were not to some extent exercised by it. In every historical period exist problems theoretically formulated and for that very reason solved, while others have not yet arrived at complete theoretical maturity, but are seen, intuited, though not yet adequately thought. If the former are the positive contribution of that time to the chain whose links form the human spirit, the latter represent an unsatisfied demand, which binds that time in another way to the coming time. The great attention paid to the negative aspect of every epoch sometimes leads to the forgetting of the other aspect, and to the consequent imagining of a humanity that passes not from satisfaction to satisfaction through dissatisfaction, but from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction and from error to error. But obscurities and discordances are possible in so far as light and concord have been previously attained. Thus they represent in their way progress, as is to be seen from the history that we are recounting, where we find them very numerous for the very reason that the age of mythologies and of prodigies has been left behind. If Greece and Rome had not been both more than Greece and more than Rome, if they had not been the human spirit, which is infinitely greater than any Greece and any Rome--its transitory individuations--they would have been satisfied with the