Ranke, which the rapidity of my course of exposition has induced me to illustrate rather in its negative aspects, causing me, for instance, to allude solely to the contradictions in the _History of the Popes,_ which is notwithstanding a masterpiece. The cogent quality of the romantic spirit at its best is revealed in the typical instance of Taine, who is so ingenuously naturalistic in his propositions and in the directive principles of his work, yet so unrestrainedly romantic in particular instances, as, for example, in his characterization of the French poets or of the Dutch and Italian painters. All this led to his ending in the exaggerated anti-Jacobin romanticism of his _Origines de la France contemporaine,_ in the same way that Zola and the other verists, those verbal enemies of romanticism, were lyrical in all their fiction, and the leader of the school was induced to conclude his works with the abstract lyricism of the _Quatre évangiles._ What has been observed of Taine is to be applied to Buckle and to the other naturalists and positivists, obliged to be historical against their will, and to the positivists who became followers of historical materialism, and found the dialectic established in their house without being able to explain what it was or whence it came. Not all theorists of historiography showed themselves to be so resolutely and madly naturalistic as Bourdeau and one or two others; indeed these were few in number and of inferior reputation. Eclecticism prevailed among the majority of them, a combination of necessity and of liberty, of masses and individuals, of cause and end, of nature and spirit: even the philosophy of history was admitted, if in no other form, then as a _desideratum_ or a problem to be discussed at a convenient time (even though that were the Greek Kalends). Eclecticism, too, presented the greatest variety, from the low level of a trivial arranging of concepts in an artificial manner to the lofty heights of interior labour, from which it seemed at every moment that a new gospel, no longer eclectic, must issue.