Note 5 — PART I (continued 3)

It will be of further use to draw attention here, in a note, to the already mentioned distinction between the history of practice in politics and in ethics, because thus alone can be set at rest the variance which runs through historiography, between political history or history of states and history of humanity or of civilization, especially from the eighteenth century onward. In Germany it is one of the elements in the intricate debate between Geschichte and Kulturgeschichte, and it has sometimes been described as a conflict between French historiography (Voltaire and his followers), or histoire de la civilisation, and the Germanic (Möser and his followers), or history of the state. One side would absorb and subject the history of culture or social history to that of the state, the other would do the opposite; and the eclectics, as usual, without knowing much about it, place the one beside the other, inert, history of politics and history of civilization, thus destroying the unity of history. The truth is that political history and history of civilization have the same relations between one another in the practical field as those between the history of poetry or of art and the history of philosophy or thought in the theoretical field. They correspond to two eternal moments of the spirit—that of the pure will, or economic moment, and that of the ethical will. Hence we also see why some will always be attracted rather by the one than the other form of history: according as to whether they are moved chiefly by political or chiefly by moral interests.