Unpleasantness and ill-will were all the more inevitable in that the 'philosophers of history'--that is to say, the historians obsessed with transcendency--did not always remain content (nor could they do so, speaking strictly) with the distinction between philosophical and narrative history, and, as was natural, attempted to harmonize the two histories, to make the facts harmonize with the schemes which they had imagined or deduced. With this purpose in view, they found themselves led to use violence toward facts, in favour of their system, and this resulted in certain most important parts being cut out, in a Procrustean manner, and in others that were accepted being perverted to suit a meaning that was not genuine but imposed upon them. Even the chronological divisions, which formed a merely practical aid to narratives, were tortured (as was the custom in the Middle Ages) that they might be elevated to the rank of ideal divisions. And not only was the light of truth extinguished in the pursuit of these caprices, not only were individual sympathies and antipathies introduced (take as an instance typical of all of them the idealization of Hellas and of this or that one of the Hellenic races), but there appeared a thing yet more personally offensive to the victims--that is to say, there penetrated into history, under the guise of lofty philosophy, the personal loves and hates of the historian, in so far as he was a party man, a churchman, or belonged to this or that people, state, or race. This ended in the invention of Germanism, the crown and perfection of the human race, a Germanism which, claiming to be the purest expression of Arianism, would have restored the idea of the elect people, and have one day undertaken the journey to the East. Thus were in turn celebrated semi-absolute monarchy as the absolute form of states, speculative Lutheranism as the absolute form of religion, and other suchlike vainglorious vaunts, with which the pride of Germany oppressed the European peoples and indeed the whole world, and thus exacted payment in a certain way for the new philosophy with which Germany had endowed the world. But it must not be imagined that the pride of Germany was not combated with its own arms, for if the English speculated but little and the French were too firm in their belief in the _Gesta Dei per Francos_ (become the gestes of reason and civilization), yet the peoples who found themselves in less happy conditions, and felt more keenly the censure of inferiority or of senility thus inflicted upon them, reacted: Gioberti wrote a _Primato d'Italia,_ and Ciezkowski a _Paternostro,_ which foretold the future primacy of the Slavonic people and more especially of the Poles.