Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/426

422 the Kampf um die Kulturgeschichte it is necessary first to review briefly the Ranke method.

Leopold von Ranke's first great service to accurate scholarship was his practical discovery of the Venetian relation. From this time on he was a most tireless student of European archives; his books are all most faithful interpretations of the contents of these store houses of history. From the time of the appearance of his ‘Roman Popes’ and the ‘German History in the Time of the Reformation,’ 1834 to 1847, a sort of ideology has prevailed in almost all historical writing not only in Europe, but in our own country. With Ranke great ideas not dissimilar to those of Plato's philosophical system furnished the motif according to which all his work was done. These ideas were the state, the church, the reformation, the counter reformation, etc. The individual had but to adjust himself to the greater almost God-given idea of the time; he was not the author of the idea or one of the makers of movements, as Lamprecht would have him. In truth Ranke's history deals almost exclusively with politics and political heroes, representatives of certain ideas. This idealism was a part of the prevailing philosophy, an application in history of Fichte and Hegel and Schelling in philosophy. Now the followers of Ranke, instead of adding to and broadening the Ranke method as times changed and new Weltanschauungen took the place of the older idealism, considered themselves fortunate if the world called them successful imitators and pupils. Great works they produced, indeed, such, for example, as Curtius' ‘Greece,’ Trietschke's ‘Germany in the Nineteenth Century’ and Mommsen's ‘Roman History’; but they were all of essentially the same nature—page after page of accurate history bridged up on tiers of learned notes. A statement of Ranke or of Mommsen is capable of mathematical demonstration. Aside from those greater Rankianer, who are all dead except Mommsen, we have a whole brood of Jungrankianer, writing biographies, Staatengeschichte and theses on isolated ideas. These fill to-day the majority of German professor-and docent-ships; and history in their hands has reached a scientific accuracy never dreamed of by Gibbon or Niebuhr.

Looked at from one point of view, one would have expected these students and writers to endorse heartily Lamprecht's claim that history is a science. All their efforts, since Ranke's latter years at any rate, had been directed toward that goal; but the author of the new ‘Deutsche Geschichte’ took them off their feet by cutting asunder all connection between history and its supposed ‘makers,’ princes and heroes, by putting first and above all the great masses of the people and by making havoc with the Ranke tradition. Instead of seeking the sources of historical information in the greater or smaller European state archives, Lamprecht had diligently studied the Stadt and