It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past.  The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the present.  Looked at in this light nothing can be shallower than the oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French Revolution; nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of our times.  Johannes von Mueller, in his Universal History as also in his History of Switzerland, had such moral aims in view.  He designed to prepare a body of political doctrines for the instruction of princes, governments, and peoples (he formed a special collection of doctrines and reflections, frequently giving us in his correspondence the exact number of apothegms which he had compiled in a week); but he cannot assert that this part of his labor was among the best he accomplished.  It is only a thorough, liberal, comprehensive view of historical relations (such for instance, as we find in Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois) that can give truth and interest to reflections of this order.  One Reflective history, therefore, supersedes another.  The materials are patent to every writer; each is prone to believe himself capable of arranging and manipulating them, and we may expect that each will insist upon his own spirit as that of the age in question.  Disgusted by such reflective histories, readers have often returned with pleasure to narratives adopting no particular point of view—­which certainly have their value, although, for the most part, they offer only material for history.  We Germans are content with such; but the French, on the other hand, display great genius in reanimating bygone times and in bringing the past to bear upon the present condition of things.

3.  The third form of Reflective history is the Critical.  This deserves mention as preeminently the mode, now current in Germany, of treating history.  It is not history itself that is here presented.  We might more properly designate it as a History of History—­a criticism of historical narratives and an investigation of their truth and credibility.  Its peculiarity, in point of fact as well as intention, consists in the acuteness with which the writer extorts from the records something which was not in the matters recorded.  The French have given us much that is profound and judicious in this class of composition, but have not endeavored to make a merely critical procedure pass for substantial history; their judgments have been duly presented in the form of critical treatises.  Among us, the so-called “higher criticism,” which reigns supreme in the domain of philology, has also taken possession of our historical literature; it has been the pretext for introducing all the anti-historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest.  Here we have the other method of making the past a living reality; for historical data subjective fancies are substituted, whose merit is measured by their boldness—­that is, the scantiness of the particulars on which they are based and the peremptoriness with which they contravene the best established facts of history.