, substituting a dialectical or poetic
history of the world for its natural development. German idealism,
accordingly, was not, like Plato's, a moral philosophy hypostasised but
a false physics adored.]

[Footnote B: This natural order and affinity is something imputed to the
ultimate object of thought--the reality--by the last act of judgment
assuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable by
consciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has been
made; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuous
material some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notion
of an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and
mature conception of the natural order arrived at after many such
experiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latest
hypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understand
events and compares them with the objective order which he believes
himself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest the
reader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before any
application of human categories, with the last conception of that order
attained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former is
faith's ideal object.]

[Footnote C: For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede
conceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things are
discovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second ideal
synthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may be
composed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names are
such secondary concretions in discourse. "Venice" is a term covering
many successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy,
belonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each of
these states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion in
existence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisable
qualities--light, motion, beauty--each of which was an original
concretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is
recognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by its
constituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an ideal
essence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raise
natural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon a
higher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations were
raised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this idea