that he prophesied, and materialism itself no longer wished to be the naturalistic materialism of a d'Holbach or a Helvétius, but presented itself as 'historical materialism.' If nostalgic historiography is poetry and that with a purpose is practical and political, the historiography, the true historiography, of romanticism is not to be placed in either of the two, in so far as it is considered an epoch in the history of thought. Certainly, poetry and practice arose from a thought and led to a thought as its material or problem: the French Revolution was certainly not the cause or the effect of a philosophy, but both the cause and the effect, a philosophy in the act, born from and generating the life that was then developed. But thought in the form of thought, and not in the form of sentimental love of the past or effort to revive a false past, is what determines the scientific character of that historiography, which we desire to set in a clear light. And it reacted in the form of thought against the thought of the enlightenment, so crudely dualistic, by opposing to it the conception of development. Not indeed that this concept was something entirely new, which had then burst forth in bud for the first time: no speculative conception that is really such can be absent at one time and appear at another. The difference lies in this, that at a given period scientific problems seem to apply to one rather than to another aspect of thought, which is always present in its totality. So that when we say that the conception of development was absent from antiquity and from the eighteenth century, we utter a hyperbole. There are good reasons for this hyperbole, but it remains a hyperbole and should not be taken literally and understood materially. Nor are we to believe that there was no suspicion or anticipation of the important scientific conception of development prior to the romantic period. Traces of it may be found in the pantheism of the great philosophers of the Renaissance, and especially in Bruno, and in mysticism itself, in so far as it included pantheism, and yet more distinctly in the reconstruction of the bare bones of the theological conception with the conception of the course of historical events as a gradual education of the human race, in which the successive revelations should be the communication of books of a gradually less and less elementary nature, from the first Hebrew scriptures to the Gospels and to the revisions of the Gospels. Lessing offers an example of this. Nor were the theorists of the enlightenment always so terribly dualistic as those that I have mentioned, but here and there one of them, such as Turgot, although he did not altogether abandon the presupposition as to epochs of decadence, yet recognized the progress of Christianity over antiquity and of modern times over Christianity, and attempted even to trace the line of development passing through the three ages, the mythological, the metaphysical,