in time, as in Hegel, or the shadow of a God reappears, as in the deism of Laurent and of several others, or the God is that of the old religion, but modernized, noble, judicious, liberal, as in moderate Catholicism and Protestantism. And since the course has necessarily an end in all these schemes, announced and described and therefore already lived and passed by, attempts to prolong, to prorogue, or to vary that end have not been wanting, such personages as the Abbots Gioacchini arising and calling themselves the 'Slav apocalyptics' or by some other name, and adding new eras to those described. But this did not change anything in the general conception. And there was no change effected in it by the philosophies of history of the second Schelling, for example, which are usually called irrationalistic, or of the pessimists, because it is clear that the decadence which they describe is a progress in the opposite sense, a progress in evil and in suffering, having its end in the acme of evil and pain, or leading indeed to a redemption and then becoming a progress toward the good. But if the idea of circles, which repeat themselves identically, oppresses historical consciousness, which is the consciousness of perennial individuality and diversity, this idea of progress to an end oppresses it in another way, because it declares that all the creations of history are imperfect, save the last, in which history comes to a standstill and which therefore alone has absolute value, and which thus takes away from the value of reality in favour of an abstraction, from existence in favour of the inexistent. And both of these--that is to say, all the philosophies of history, in whatever way determined--lay in ambush to overwhelm the conceptions of development and the increase in historiographical value obtained through it by romanticism; and when this injury did not occur (as in several notable historians, who narrated history admirably, although they professed to obey the rules of the abstract philosophy of history, which they saluted from near or far, but took care not to introduce into their narratives), it was a proof that the contradiction had not been perceived, or at least perceived as we now perceive it, in its profound dissonance. It was a sign that romanticism too had problems upon which it laboured long and probed deeply, and others upon which it did not work at all or only worked a little and kept waiting, satisfying them more or less. History too, like the individual who works, does 'one thing at a time,' neglecting or allowing to run on with the help of slight provisional improvements the problems to which it cannot for the time being attend, but ready to direct full attention to them when its hands are free. [1] The exposition and criticism of Vico's thought are copiously dealt with in the second volume of my _Saggi filosofici i La filosofia di Giambattista Vico_ (Bari, 1911). VII THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POSITIVISM