THE WORLD HISTORIANS
357
19th century the French historian Thiers proposed to himself to
rewrite all history as the history of the bourgeois class.)
The new, secularized form of medieval Christian history
which arose in the 18th century never recaptured that true univer–
salist spirit that had been achieved by the early historians of
Catholicism and of the various Gnostic systems of the East. These
had dealt with world history as, in Spengler's words, "a unique
and supremely dramatic act, having as its theatre the lands between
Hellas and Persia and as its subject matter a catastrophe, an
epochal change of phase between world-creation and world-decay."
Incidentally, this same world-historical conflict between Asia and
Europe had already been the great theme of Herodotus; and
another almost equally great subject had been dealt with by Poly–
bius. He had described "by what means and under what kind of
policy almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that
too, within the period of not quite fifty-three years."
2.
Where, then, are those great accomplishments which must
have been present at least during the first part of our period and
because of which the development of universal history and phil–
osophy from the later half of the 18th to the first half of the 19th
century will rank, for a long time to come, as a classical achieve–
ment of human thought?
This question is answered in an incredibly superficial manner
by the bulk of modem critics in both Europe and the United States.
The century here considered, i.e., the century of the great French
Revolution, was in fact one of the most sophisticated periods of
human thought. The greater part of the objections advanced
today against the unwarranted "philosophical" assumptions of
such writers as Turgot, Condorcet, St. Simon, Kant, Schelling,
W. von Humboldt, and Hegel do not deal with the real problem at
all. At best they only repeat the arguments that were raised over
and over again by the classical historians themselves against every
conceivable shade of
a
religious, metaphysical, moral, teleological
or otherwise not strictly empirical approach to the subject matter
of historical research. Modem writers on historical methodology
often fall far below the level that had been reached in an era which
