e shade on the foreigners
and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F.
Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than
superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which
was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that,
early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was
the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a
world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually
become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an
unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that
man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore,
consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was
incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men
studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of
nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the
progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had
its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in
the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man
had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to
sink into the background, and that of other influences to be
preponderant.

[Sidenote: Hegel]

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history
took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel,
pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable
"time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development
of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing
forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit,
or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the
necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720}
Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the
Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of
evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The
characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its
own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The
dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle
Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to
prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show t