German professor years ago) that the 'philosophy of history' must be treated as 'sociology'--that is to say, the adornment with that ancient title of so-called sociology, the empirical science of the state, of society and of culture. These denominations are all permissible in virtue of the same right as that invoked by the adventurer Casanova when he went before the magistrates in order to justify himself for having changed his name--"the right of every man to the letters of the alphabet." But the question treated above is not one of the letters of the alphabet. The 'philosophy of history,' of which we have briefly shown the genesis and the dissolution, is not one that is used in various senses, but a most definite mode of conceiving history--the transcendental mode. V THE POSITIVITY OF HISTORY We therefore meet the well-known saying of Fustel de Coulanges that there are certainly "history and philosophy, but not the philosophy of history," with the following: there is neither philosophy nor history, nor philosophy of history, but history which is philosophy and philosophy which is history and is intrinsic to history. For this reason, all the controversies--and foremost of all those concerned with progress--which philosophers, methodologists of history, and sociologists believe to belong to their especial province, and flaunt at the beginning and the end of their treatises, are reduced for us to simple problems of philosophy, with historical motivation, all of them connected with the problems of which philosophy treats.