productions perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a long history, of which we become conscious from time to time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we can now practically _do_, all our sentiments as so-called civilized men--courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, and the like--all our institutions in the strict sense of the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the spirit, utilitarian or moral)--the family, the state, commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on--have a long history; and according as one or other of those sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true 'nature'--that is to say, its historical genesis. Anyone who has followed the developments of modern social historiography with care and attention has been able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the _chroniclistic chaos_ of disaggregated notes of events in _ordered series of histories of social values,_ and that its field of research is the history of the human soul in its practical aspect; either when it produces general histories of _civilization_ (always due to particular motives and limited by them), or when it presents histories _of classes, peoples, social currents, sentiments, institutions,_ and so forth. _Biography,_ too (only when not limited to a mere chroniclistic collection of the experiences of an individual or to a poetical portrait, improperly regarded as a historical work), is the history of an 'institution' in the philosophical acceptation of the word and forms part of the history of practice: because the individual, in the same way as a people or a social class, is the formation of a character, or complex of specific attitudes and actions consequent upon them; and it is of this that historical biography consists, not of the individual looked upon as external or private or physical, or whatever it be called.