It would nevertheless be altogether erroneous to found upon the exaggeration to which the theological and pragmatical views attained in the historiography of the enlightenment, and see in it a decadence or regression similar to that of the Renaissance and of other predecessors. Not only were germs of error evolved at that time, not only did the difficulties that had appeared in the previous period become more acute, but there was also developed, and elevated to a high degree of efficiency, that historiography of spiritual values which Christian historiography had intensified and almost created, and which the Renaissance had begun to transfer to the earth. Voltaire as historiographer deserves to be defended (and this has recently been done by several writers, admirably by Fueter), because he has a lively perception of the need of bringing history back from the treatment of the external to that of the internal and strives to satisfy this need. For this reason, books that gave accounts of wars, treaties, ceremonies, and solemnities seemed to him to be nothing but 'archives' or 'historical dictionaries,' useful for consultation on certain occasions, but history, true history, he held to be something altogether different. The duty of true history could not be to weight the memory with external or material facts, or as he called them events (événements), but to discover what was the society of men in the past, _la société des hommes, comment on vivait dans l'intérieur des familles, quels arts étaient cultivés,_ and to paint 'manners' (_les mours_); not to lose itself in the multitude of insignificant particulars (_petits faits_), but to collect only those that were of importance (_considérables_) and to explain the spirit (_l'esprit_) that had produced them. Owing to this preference that Voltaire accords to manners over battles we find in him the conception (although it remains without adequate treatment and gets lost in the ardour of polemic) that it is not for history to trace the portrait of human splendours and miseries (_les détails de la splendeur et de la misère humaine_) but only of manners and of the arts, that is, of the positive work; in his _Siècle de Louis XIV_ he says that he wishes to illustrate the government of that monarch, not in so far as il a fait du bien aux français, but in so far as il a fait du lien aux hommes. What Voltaire undertook, and to no small extent achieved, forms the principal object of all historians' labours at this period. Whoever wishes to do so can see in Fueter's book how the great pictures to be found in Voltaire's _Essai sur les mours_ and _Siècle_ were imitated in the pages both of French writers and in those of other European countries--for instance, in the celebrated introduction by Robertson to his history of Charles V. It will also be noticed how the special histories of this or that aspect of culture are multiplied and perfected, as though several of the _desiderata_ mentioned by