The demand for radical or abstract reform also cannot be given that other meaning of a reform of the 'idea of history,' of the discovery that is to be made or is finally made of the _true concept_ of history. At all periods the distinction has to some extent been made between histories that are histories and those others that are works of imagination or chronicles. This could be demonstrated from the observations met with at all times among historians and methodologists, and from the confessions that even the most confused of them involuntarily let fall. It is also to be inferred with certainty from the nature itself of the human spirit, although the words in which those distinctions are expressed have not been written or are not preserved. And such a concept and distinction are renewed at every moment by history itself, which becomes ever more copious, more profound. This is to be looked upon as certain, and is for that matter made evident by the history of historiography, which has certainly accomplished some progress since the days of Diogenes of Halicarnassus and of Cicero to those of Hegel and of Humboldt. Other problems have been formed in our own day, some of which I attempt to solve in this book. I am well aware that it affords solutions only to some among the many, and especially that it does not solve (simply because it cannot) those that are not yet formed, but which will inevitably be formed in the future.
In any case it will be thought that the clearness acquired by the historical consciousness as to the nature of its own work will at least avail to destroy the erroneous forms of history, that since we have shown that philological history or chronicle is not history, and that poetical history is poetry and not history, the 'facts' that correspond to those beliefs must disappear, or become ever more limited in extension, to the point of disappearing altogether in a near or distant future, as catapults have disappeared before guns and as we see carriages disappearing before, automobiles.
And this would be truly possible were these erroneous forms to become concrete in 'facts,' were they not, as I have said above, mere 'claims.' If error and evil were a fact, humanity would have long ago abolished it--that is to say, superseded it, in the same way as it has superseded slavery and serfdom and the method of simple barter and so many other things that were facts, that is to say, its own transitory forms. But error (and evil, which is one with it) is not a fact; it does not possess empirical existence; it is nothing but the negative or dialectical moment of the spirit, necessary for the concreteness of the positive moment, for the reality of the spirit. For this reason it is eternal and indestructible, and to destroy it by abstraction (since it cannot be done by thought) is equivalent to imagining the death of the spirit, as confirmed in the saying that abstraction is death.