The actual modern motives, which present themselves as sentiments in nostalgic historiography, acquired a reflex form with the same or other writers, as tendencies to the service of which their narratives were bent. Here, too, it would be superfluous to give an account of all the various forms and specifications of these tendencies (which Fueter has already done admirably), from the persistent Rousseauism of Giovanni Müller to Sismondi, or from the ideal of a free peasantry of Niebuhr, the ultramontane ideal of Leo, the imperialistic-medieval ideal of the already mentioned Giesebrecht and Ficker, the old liberal of Raumer, the neo-liberal of Rotteck and Gervinus, the anglicizing of Guizot and Dahlmann, or the democratic ideal of Michelet, to the neo-Guelfish ideal of Troya and Balbo and Father Tosti, to the Prussian hegemony of Droysen and of Treitschke, and so on. But all of these, and other historians with a particular bias, lean, with rare exceptions, on the past, and find the justification of their bias in the dialectic of tradition or in tradition itself. Nobody any longer cared to compose by the light of abstract reason alone. The extreme typical instance is afforded by the socialistic school, which took the romantic form in the person of its chief representative, Marx, who endowed it with historiographical and scientific value. His work was in complete opposition to the socialistic ideals that had appeared in the eighteenth century, and he therefore boasted that they had passed from the state of being a Utopia to that of a science. His science was nothing less than historical necessity attributed to the new era that he prophesied, and materialism itself no longer wished to be the naturalistic materialism of a d'Holbach or a Helvétius, but presented itself as 'historical materialism.'
If nostalgic historiography is poetry and that with a purpose is practical and political, the historiography, the true historiography, of romanticism is not to be placed in either of the two, in so far as it is considered an epoch in the history of thought. Certainly, poetry and practice arose from a thought and led to a thought as its material or problem: the French Revolution was certainly not the cause or the effect of a philosophy, but both the cause and the effect, a philosophy in the act, born from and generating the life that was then developed. But thought in the form of thought, and not in the form of sentimental love of the past or effort to revive a false past, is what determines the scientific character of that historiography, which we desire to set in a clear light. And it reacted in the form of thought against the thought of the enlightenment, so crudely dualistic, by opposing to it the conception of development.