The new century glorified itself with the title of 'the century of history,' owing to its new departures, which were born or converged in one. It had deified and at the same time humanized history, as had never been done before, and had made of it a centre of reality and of thought. That title of honour should be confirmed, if not to the whole of the nineteenth century, then to its romantic or idealistic period. But this confirmation should not prevent our observing, with equal clearness, the _limit_ of that historicity, without which it would not be possible to understand its later and further advance. History was then at once deified and humanized; but did the divinity and humanity truly flow together in one, or was there not at bottom some separation between the two of them? Was the disagreement between ancient worldly thought and ultramundane Christian thought really healed, or did it not present itself again in a new form, though this form was attenuated and more critical intellectually? And which of the two elements prevailed in this disagreement in its abstractness, the human or rather the divine? These questions suggest the answer, which is further suggested by a memory familiar to all, namely, that the romantic period was not only the splendid age of the great evolutionary histories, but also the fatal age of the _philosophies of history,_ the transcendental histories. And indeed, although the thought of immanence had grown gradually more and more rich and profound during the Renaissance and the enlightenment, and that of transcendency ever more evanescent, the first had not for that reason absorbed the second in itself, but had merely purified and rationalized it, as Hellenic philosophy and Christian theology had tried to do in their own ways in their own times. In the romantic period, purification and rationalization continue, and here was the mistake as well as the merit of romanticism, for it was no longer a question of setting right that ancient opinion, but of radically inverting and remaking it. The transcendental conception of history was no longer at that time called revelation and apocalypse, but _philosophy of history,_ a title taken from the enlightenment (principally from Voltaire), although it no longer had the meaning formerly attributed to it of history examined with an unprejudiced or philosophical spirit adorned with moral and political reflections, but the meaning, altogether different, of a philosophical search of the sphere above or below that of history--in fact, of a theological search, which remained theological, however lay or speculative it may have been. And since a search of this sort always leads to a rationalized mythology, there is no reason why the name of 'mythology' should not be extended to the philosophy of history, or the name of 'philosophy of history,' to mythology, as I have extended it, calling all transcendental conceptions of history 'philosophy of