[Footnote 5: _Satz vom Grunde,_ § 16: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Ergänzungen._ Cap. i.]
When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,--be their other differences what they may--all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's _Rob Roy_, they cry--
'What need of books? Burn all the statutes and their shelves.
We'll show that we can help to frame A world of other stuff.'
On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds, and crying out _Écrasez l'infâme_,--instead of throwing medievalism behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that housed its early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.
People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and public character and its influence on events. History was practised--we may even say--more as an art than as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical method arose.