Page:Prolegomena to history- the relation of history to literature, philosophy, and science (IA prolegomentohist00teggiala).pdf/83

 discussion to a close, he says that "the answer to the question, 'What is the position of modern history in the domain of universal knowledge?' depends in the first instance on our view of the fundamental philosophical question at issue between idealism and naturalism."

Professor Bury has evidently adopted the philosophical system of his Cambridge colleague, Professor James Ward. "Nothing but a spiritualistic view of the world can, without encountering the difficulty of absolute idealism, afford an intelligible explanation of the unity of nature and thought, and the universal teleology of the 'ought to be,' which the philosophy of values regards as controlling the evolutionary movement of experience. If the universe be not a brute mechanism, but the realm of ends and of history, the outcome of the interweaving of spontaneous individual activities whose goal is the actualisation of the ethical order, only a theistic conception will enable us to comprehend it. The logical completion of the philosophy of values can only be found in a form of spiritualism, and to James Ward belongs the credit of having frankly recognised this fact. Ward, in his Gifford Lectures [Naturalism and Agnosticism (London, 1899), and The Realm of Ends (Cambridge, 1911)] waged a glorious warfare against agnostic naturalism, and sees, like Eoyce, Miinsterberg, and Eickert, in the historical and concrete aspect of the world its true reality as opposed to the abstract, mechanical fictions of science."

The point of view of this modern school which embraces history in philosophy seems to me to be adequately expressed by George Galloway: "We seem driven to the conclusion that the goal and meaning of history are not to be found in this temporal order of things at all. The facts themselves appear to necessitate the acceptance of some form of transcendency. . . . We are not able to find a meaning in history, viewed as a mundane process in time, which will satisfy the reason and do justice to the moral values involved. That the process is not meaningless we are bound to assume. Accordingly we make the postulate that the ultimate meaning of history must lie in a sphere which transcends the present temporal order."

This, then, is the end at which the modern historical school, setting out with the resolution to avoid philosophical entanglements, has arrived. The views of Caird, Croce, and Ward, Windelband, Eickert, and Bury, however unpalatable, are based upon the practice of historians of—Thucydides and Ranke, the models