sings Brother John characteristically.  But our period is conscious of the need of realising all our desires, and attaining to the highest possible spiritual perfection in this earthly life, and this not by destroying the transcendent ideals, but by stripping them of their metaphysical character, and bringing them to bear on this life, so that it may become a higher and holier one.  The will of our intellectual heroes is not the rejection of the doctrine of the survival of the soul, but the comprehension of past transcendental values, so that they may become a safe guide to us in this earthly life; a more perfect blending of realism and idealism; the glorification of life under the aspect of eternity.  This applies to love as well:  the thought of the infinite, eternal love must transfigure and ennoble all that which is natural and human.

If my theories are correct, they prove the ontological character of historical evolution and the value of the study of history for the comprehension of the human soul.  I have shown in a specific and highly important domain that that which we are fond of regarding as the characteristic quality of man was not present from the beginning, but has gradually been evolved in historical time.  In other words:  history can and must teach us the origin and evolution of the spirit and soul of man, as anthropology teaches us the construction of the body.  In philosophically approaching history, it must not be our object to discover “what has been,” but “what has become, how we became and what we are.”  The science of history which loses sight of its bearing on our time, content with its knowledge of the past, is antiquarian and dead; at the most it has aesthetic value, but it is worthless as far as the history of civilisation is concerned.  Only that which has been productive in the past, which has had a quickening influence, producing new values, is historical in the highest sense.  It creates a new and close relationship between psychology and history.  The principal purpose, or one of the principal purposes of psychology, that is the knowledge of the construction of the normal human being, has received a new possibility of solution:  every essential quality which the human race has evolved in the course of history must be present in every normally developed individual of our time.  The normal man of to-day is not the normal man of the past; every successive century finds him richer and more complex, but he can always be discovered intuitively in history.  In this sense history is an auxiliary science of psychology, or rather, the psychology of the human race, for the evolution of the psychology of the individual—­which has been studied very little—­is merely an abbreviated history of the evolution of the psychology of the species.  A past period of civilisation can be traced in the life of every fully developed man, and vice versa the stages in the life of the individual point the way in history.