as more exposed to danger); they almost persuaded themselves that philosophy had been invented to alter the names and confuse the dates which, had been confided to their amorous care, that it was the abyss opened by the fiend to lead to the perdition of serious 'documentary history.' The third band of those opposed to the philosophy of history was composed of philosophers or of historian--philosophers, but of those who rejected the name and selected another less open to suspicion, or tempered it with some adjective, or accepted it indeed, but with opportune explanations: they styled themselves positivists, naturalists, sociologists, empiricists, criticists, or something of that sort. Their purpose was to do something different from what the philosophers of history had done, and since these had worked with the conception of the _end,_ they all of them swore that they would work with the conception of the _cause;_ they would search out the cause of every fact, thus generalizing more and more widely the causes or the cause of the entire course of history: those others had attempted a _dynamic_ of history; they would work at a _mechanic_ of history, a social physics. A special science arose, opposed to the philosophy of history, in which that naturalistic and positivistic tendency became exalted in its own eyes: sociology. Sociology classified facts of human origin and determined the laws of mutual dependence which regulated them, furnishing the narratives of historians with the principles of explanation, by means of these laws. Historians, on the other hand, diligently collected facts and offered them to sociology, that it might press the juice out of them--that is to say, that it might classify and deduce the laws that governed them. History and sociology, then, stood to one another in the same relation as physiology and zoology, physics and mineralogy, or in another relation of the same sort; they differed from the physical and natural sciences only by their greater complexity. The introduction of mathematical calculation seemed to be the condition of progress for history as for all the sciences, physical and natural. A new 'science' came forward to support this notion, in the shape of that humble servant of practical administration and inspired creation of bureaucracy known as statistics. And since the whole of science was being modelled upon the idea of a factory of condensation, so were 'syntheses' invoked and outlined for history--that is to say, historical frameworks, in which the laws and facts chat dominate single histories should be resumed, as though in a sort of table or atlas, which should show at a glance causes and the facts which arose from them. Need we recall the names and supporters of this school--Comte, Buckle, Taine, and so on, until we come to those recent historians who follow them, such as Lamprecht and Breysig? Need we recall the most consequent and the most paradoxical programmes or