5. WORLD HISTORY Twofold significance of the concept 'history'--History as self-conscious experience--The rôle of will in history--Prehistoric and historic periods--Influence of world culture and world religions on the rise of the historical consciousness--The philosophy of history--Its relation to a psychological history of the development of mankind.
The word '_Völkerpsychologie_'(folk psychology) is a new compound in our [the German] language. It dates back scarcely farther than to about the middle of the nineteenth century. In the literature of this period, however, it appeared with two essentially different meanings. On the one hand, the term 'folk psychology' was applied to investigations concerning the relations which the intellectual, moral, and other mental characteristics of peoples sustain to one another, as well as to studies concerning the influence of these characteristics upon the spirit of politics, art, and literature. The aim of this work was a characterization of peoples, and its greatest emphasis was placed on those cultural peoples whose civilization is of particular importance to us--the French, English, Germans, Americans, etc. These were the questions of folk psychology that claimed attention during that period, particularly, to which literary history has given the name "young Germany." The clever essays of Karl Hillebrand on _Zeiten, Völker und Menschen_ (collected in eight volumes, 1885 ff.) are a good recent example of this sort of investigation. We may say at the outset that the present work follows a radically different direction from that pursued by these first studies in folk psychology.