[Footnote 2: A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The Indo-German,' says Misteli _(__Typen des Sprachbaues,_ p. 363), 'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. Our _He_ includes four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a whole:--third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas the Magyar _ö_ is the vehicle only of one category, the third person, which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural by the addition of _k_: gender in these languages does not exist: and as subject again _ö_ is specially interpreted from the context. The unification of the four categories makes _He_ an individual and a word; the generality and isolation of one category makes _ö_ an abstract and a stem.'] [Footnote 3: Häckel, _Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte_, p. 157.] [Footnote 4: See above, pp. 155, 198.] [Footnote 5: Hegel's _Werke,_ vol. i. p. 15.] CHAPTER XX. GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the process by which in history the past throws light on the present and gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems, each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer and clearer appreciation of another.