But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to philosophy--witness the services which, though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of Germany--even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into nature and history. Nature _and_ history: but they lie closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil history the tale composed to string together the succession of human actions on the public and national field of life. We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant, and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the whole scheme of human life, are _res naturales, quae communes naturae leges sequuntur_, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical, more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference--almost equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an _Imperium in imperio_--by which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought--the tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative--is its impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying it, but of carrying it up into a unity which would do justice to both, without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,--no longer an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of