The pragmatic histories of the last centuries, therefore, melted away at the simple touch of these new historiographical convictions, rather than owing to direct and open criticism or polemic. The word 'pragmatic,' which used to be a title of honour, began to be pronounced with a tinge of contempt, to designate an inadequate form of historical thought, and the historians of the enlightenment fell into discredit, not only Voltaire and the French, but the Humes, the Robertsons, and other English historians. They appeared now to be quite without colour, lacking in historical sense, their minds fixed only on the political aspect of things, superficial, vainly attempting to explain great events by the intentions of individuals and by means of little things or single details. The theory, too, of history as the orator and teacher of virtue and prudential maxims also disappeared. This theory had enjoyed a long and vigorous life during Græco-Roman antiquity and again from the Renaissance onward (when I say that all these things disappeared, the exception of the fossils is always to be understood, for these persisted at that time and persist in our own day, with the air of being alive). The attitude of the Christian spirit toward history was resumed. This spirit contemplates it as a single process, which does not repeat itself, as the work of God, which teaches directly by means of His presence, not as matter that exemplifies abstract teaching, extraneous to itself. The word 'pragmatic' was indeed pronounced with a smile from that time onward, as were the formulas of _historia magister vitæ_ or that directed _ad bene beateque vivendum_: let him who will believe these formulas--that is to say, he who echoes traditional thoughts without rethinking them and is satisfied with traditional and vulgar conceptions. What is the use of history? "History itself," was the answer, and truly that is not a little thing.
The new century glorified itself with the title of 'the century of history,' owing to its new departures, which were born or converged in one. It had deified and at the same time humanized history, as had never been done before, and had made of it a centre of reality and of thought. That title of honour should be confirmed, if not to the whole of the nineteenth century, then to its romantic or idealistic period. But this confirmation should not prevent our observing, with equal clearness, the _limit_ of that historicity, without which it would not be possible to understand its later and further advance. History was then at once deified and humanized; but did the divinity and humanity truly flow together in one, or was there not at bottom some separation between the two of them? Was the disagreement between ancient worldly thought and ultramundane Christian thought really healed, or did it not present itself again in a new form, though this form was attenuated and more critical intellectually? And which of the two elements prevailed in this disagreement in its abstractness, the human or rather the divine?