We have already mentioned that the three classes of opponents of the 'philosophies of history' and the three methods by which they proposed to supplant it--diplomatic, philological, and positivistic history--showed that they disagreed among themselves. Confirmation of this may now be found in the contempt of the diplomatic historians for mere erudition and in their diffidence for the constructions of positivism, the erudite, for their part, being fearful of perversions of names and dates and shaking their heads at diplomatic histories and the careless style of the men of the world who composed them. Finally, the positivists looked upon the latter as people who did not go to the bottom of things, to their general or natural causes, and reproved the erudite with their incapacity for rising to the level of laws and to the establishment of facts in accordance with these laws, sociological, physiological, or pathological. But there is further confirmation of what has been noted in respect to the common conception that animated them all and of their substantial affinity, because when the erudite wished to cloak themselves in a philosophy of some sort, they very readily strutted about draped in some shreds of positivistic thought or phraseology. They also participated in the reserve and in the agnosticism of the positivists and the diplomatic historians toward speculative problems, and in like manner it was impossible not to recognize the justice of their claim that evidence should be reliable and documents authentic. The diplomatic historians agreed with them in the formula that history should not be philosophy and that research should dispense with finality and follow the line of causality. In fact, all three sorts of opponents, at one with the transcendency of the philosophy of history, negated the unity of history with philosophy, but in various degrees and with various particular meanings, with various preliminary studies and in various ways. And although these schools were in agreement as to what they negated, all three of them become for us exposed to a criticism which unites them beneath a single negation. For not even do the ability and the intelligence of a Ranke avail to give vigour to the moderatism and to maintain firmly the eclecticism of diplomatic history, and the transaction breaks down before the failure on the part of those who attempted it, owing to its being contrary to their own powers and intrinsically impossible. The idea of an agnostic history turns out to be fallacious--that is to say, of a history that is not philosophical but does not deny philosophy, that is not theological but is not anti-theological, limiting itself to nations and to their reciprocal influence upon one another, because Ranke himself was obliged to recognize powers or ideals that are superior to nations and that as such require to be speculatively justified in a philosophy or in a theology. In this way he laid himself open to the accusations of the positivists, who discredited his ideas as 'mystical.' For the same reason others were proceeding to reduce them little by little from the position of ideals or movements of the spirit to natural and physiological products, as was attempted by Lorenz, an ardent follower of Ranke, who, with his doctrine of generation and of heredity, fell into that physiologism and naturalism from which the master had preserved himself. And when this passage from spirituality to nature was accomplished, the dividing line between history and pre-history, between history of civilization and history of nature, was also not respected. On the other hand, a return was made to the 'philosophies of history,' when ideas were interpreted as transcendental and as answering to the designs of the divine will, which governs the world according to a law and conducts it according to a plan of travel. The boasted impartiality and objectivity, which was based upon a literary device of half-words, of innuendoes, of prudent silences, was also equally illusory, and the Jesuit who objected to Ranke and his history of the popes will always prevail from the point of view of rigorous criticism--either the Papacy is always and everywhere what it affirms itself to be, an institution of the Son of God made man, or it is a lie. Respect and caution are out of place here. _Tertium non datur._ Indeed, it was not possible to escape from taking sides by adopting that point of view; at the most a third party was thus formed, consisting of the tolerant, the tepid, and the indifferent.