With the increase of erudition, of the variety of documents and information available, went hand in hand a more refined criticism as to the authenticity of the one and of the value as evidence of the other. Fueter does well to note the progress in method accomplished by the Benedictines and by Leibnitz (who did not surpass those excellent and learned monks in this respect, although he was a philosopher) up to Muratori, who did not restrict himself to testing the genuineness of tradition, but initiated criticism of the tendencies of individual witnesses, of the interests and passions which colour and give their shape to narratives. The en-lightened, with Voltaire at their head, initiated another kind of criticism of a more intrinsic sort, directed to things and to the knowledge of things (to literary, moral, political, and military experience), recognizing the impossibility that things should have happened in the way that they are said to have happened by superficial, credulous, or prejudiced historians, and attempting to reconstruct them in the only way that they could have happened. We shall admire in Voltaire (especially in the _Siècle_) his lack of confidence in the reports of courtiers and servants, accustomed to forge calumnies and to interpret maliciously and anecdotically the external actions of sovereigns and statesmen. This happened because the historiography of the enlightenment, while it preserved and even exaggerated pragmatism, yet on the other hand refined and spiritualized it, as will have been observed in the expressions preferred by Voltaire and even in the theologizing Bossuet: _l'esprit des nations, l'esprit du temps._ What that _esprit_ was naturally remained vague, because the support of philosophy, in which at that time those newly imported concepts introduced an unexpected element of conflict, was lacking to refer it to the ideal determinations of the spirit in its development and to conceive the various epochs and the various nations as each playing its own part in the spiritual drama. Thus it often happened that _esprit_ was perverted into a fixed quality, such as _race_, if it were a question of nations, and into a current or mode, if periods were spoken of, and was thus naturalized and pragmatized. _Trois choses,_ wrote Voltaire, _influent sans cesse sur l'esprit des hommes, le climat, le gouvernement, et la religion: c'est la seule manière d'expliquer l'énigme du monde:_ where the 'spirit' is lowered to the position of a product of natural, and social circumstances. The suggestive word had, however, been pronounced, and a clear consciousness of the terms themselves of the social, political, and cultural struggle that was being carried on would have little by little emerged. For the time being, climate, government, religion, genius of the peoples, genius of the time, were all more or less happy attempts to go beyond pragmatism and to place causality in a universal order. This effort, and at the same time its