People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and public character and its influence on events. History was practised--we may even say--more as an art than as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical method arose. The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy, should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow transition line between a past and a future,--a line of points intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego. The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first, the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to