If history is based upon distinction (unity) and coincides with philosophy, the high importance that research into the autonomy of one or the other special history attains in historiographical development is perfectly comprehensible, but this is merely the reflection of philosophical research, and is often troubled and lacking in precision. All know what a powerful stimulus the new conception of imagination and art gave to the conception of history, and therefore also to mythology and religion, which were being developed with slowness and difficulty during the eighteenth to triumph at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is set down to the creation of the history of poetry and myth in the works of Vico in the first place and then of Herder and others, and of the history of the figurative arts in the works of Winckelmann and others. And to the clearer conception of philosophy, law, customs, and language is due their renewal in the respective historiographical fields, at the hands of Hegel, Savigny, and Humboldt, and other creators and improvers of history, celebrated on this account. This also explains why there has been so much dispute as to whether history should be described as history of the state or as history of culture, and as to whether the history of culture represents an original aspect beyond that of the state or greater than it, as to whether the progress narrated in history is only intellectual or also practical and moral, and so on. These discussions must be referred to the fundamental philosophical inquiry into the forms of the spirit, their distinction and relation, and to the precise mode of relation of each one to the other.[1]
But although history distinguishes and unifies, it never _divides_--that is to say, _separates_; and the _divisions of history_ which have been and are made do not originate otherwise than as the result of the same practical and abstractive process that we have seen break up the actuality of living history to collect and arrange the inert materials in the temporal scheme, rendered extrinsic. Histories already produced, and as such past, receive in this way titles (every thought is 'without title' in its actuality--that is to say, it has only itself for title), and each one is separated from the other, and all of them, thus separated, are classified under more or less general empirical conceptions, by means of classifications that more or less cross one another. We may admire copious lists of this sort in the books of methodologists, all of them proceeding, as is inevitable, according to one or the other of these general criteria: the criterion of the _quality_ of the objects (histories of religions, customs, ideas, institutions, etc., etc.), and that of _temporal-spatial_ arrangement (European, Asiatic, American, ancient, medieval, of modern times, of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of modern Greece, of the Rome of the Middle Ages, etc.); in conformity with the abstract procedure which, when dividing the concept, is led to posit on the one hand _abstract forms of the spirit_ (objects) and on the other _abstract intuitions_ (space and time). I shall not say that those titles and divisions are useless, nor even those tables, but shall limit myself to the' remark that the history of philosophy, of art, or of any other ideally distinct history, when understood as a definite book or discourse, becomes empirical for the reason already given, that true distinction is ideal, and a discourse or a book in its concreteness contains not only distinction but unity and totality, and to look upon either as incorporating only one side of the real is arbitrary. And I shall also observe that as there are histories of philosophy and of art in the empirical sense, so also nothing forbids our talking in the same sense of a general history, separate from special histories, indeed even of a history of progress and one of decadence, of good and evil, of truth and error.