in the slow and laborious development of the spirit, if, according to the new conception, instead of developing, the spirit was to leap, and had indeed already made a great leap and left the past far behind? It was sufficient to rummage from time to time among them and extract some curious detail, which should fit in with the polemic of the moment. _C'est un vaste magasin, où vous prendrez ce qui est à votre usage,_ said Voltaire. Thus the learned and the enlightened, both of them children of their time, remained divided among themselves, the former incapable of rising to the level of history owing to their slight vivacity of spirit, the latter overrunning it owing to their too great vivacity, and reducing it to a form of journalism. All these limits, just because they are limits, assign its proper sphere to the historiography of the enlightenment, but they must not be taken as meaning that it had not made any progress. That historiography, plunged in the work at the moment most urgent, surrounded with the splendour of the truths that it was in the act of revealing around it, failed to see those limits and its own deficiencies, or saw them rarely and with difficulty. It was aware only that it progressed and progressed rapidly, nor was it wrong in this belief. Nor are those critics (among whom is Fueter) wrong who now defend it from the bad reputation that has befallen it and celebrate its many virtues, which we also have set in a clear light and have added to, and whose connexion and unity we have proved. Yet we must not leave that bad reputation unexplained, for it sounds far more serious than the usual depreciation by every historical period of the one that has preceded it, with the view of showing its inferiority to the present. Here, on the contrary, we find a particular judgment of depreciation, pronounced even by comparison with the periods that preceded the enlightenment, so that this period, and not, for example, the Renaissance, has especially received the epithet of 'anti-historical' ("the anti-historical eighteenth century"). We find the explanation of this when we think of the dissipation then taking place of all symbolical veils, received from _venerable antiquity,_ and of the crude dualism and conflict which were being instigated at that time between history and religion. The Renaissance was also itself an affirmation of human reason, but at the moment of its breaking with medieval tradition it was felt to be all the same tied to classical tradition, which gave it an appearance of historical consciousness (an appearance and not the reality). The philosophers of the Renaissance often invoked and placed themselves under the protection of the ancient philosophers, Plato against Aristotle, or the Greek Aristotle against the Aristotle of the commentators. The lettered men of the period sought to justify the new works of art and the new judgments upon them by appealing to the precepts of antiquity, although they