We find in general in Ranke an inevitable tendency to subside into the pragmatic method. And what has been said of Ranke is to be repeated of his disciples and of those who cultivated the same conciliatory type of history. As for philological history, the description that has been given of the programme makes clear its nullity, for it leads by a most direct route to a double absurdity. When the most rigorous methods of examining witnesses is really applied, there is no witness that cannot be suspected and questioned, and philological history leads to the negation of the truth of that history which it wishes to construct. And if value be attributed to certain evidence arbitrarily and for external reasons, there is no extravagance that may not be accepted, because there is no extravagance that may not have honest, candid, and intelligent men on its side. It is not possible to reject even miracles by the philological method, since these repose upon the same attestations which make certain a war or a peace treaty, as Lorenz has shown by examining the miracles of St Bernard in the light of the severest philological criticism. In order to save himself from the admission of the inconceivable and of the nullification of history, which follows the nullification of witnesses, there remains nothing but appeal to thought, which reconstitutes history from the inside, and is evidence to itself, and denies what is unthinkable for the very reason that it is not to be thought. This appeal is the declaration of bankruptcy for philological history. We may certainly say that this form of history more or less sustains itself as history, to the extent that it has recourse to all the aids furnished by history proper, and contradicts itself; or it contradicts itself and yet does not sustain itself, or only for a little while and in appearance, by again adopting the methods of pragmaticism, of transcendency, and of positivism. And the last of these in its turn encounters the same experiences in a different order, because its principle of history that explains facts causally presupposes the facts, which as such are thought and therefore are in a way already explained. Hence a vicious circle, evident in the connexion between history and sociology, each one of which is to be based upon and at the same time to afford a base for the other, much in the same way as a column which should support a capital and at the same time spring from it. But if, with a view to breaking the circle, history be taken as the base and sociology as its fulfilment, then the latter will no longer be the explanation of the former, which will find its explanation elsewhere. And this will be, according to taste, either an unknown principle or some form of thought that acts in the same way as God, and in both cases a transcendental principle. Hence we have the fact of positivism leading to philosophies of history, as exemplified in the Apocalypses and the Gospels of Comte, of Buckle, and of others