attempts at writing a universal history as premature until an adequate knowledge of facts had been gained, and this would demand long preliminary labours; (2) that he discussed the question whether history is an indefinite progression or a series of constant cycles, and decided for the former view. (Memoire sur le cours periodique, 1785).  Bock’s monograph is the best study of Wegelin; but see also Flint’s observations in Philosophy of History, vol. i. (1874).]

Herder brought down his historical survey only as far as the sixteenth century.  It has been suggested [Footnote:  Javary, De l’idee de progres, p. 69.] that if he had come down further he might have comprehended the possibility of a deliberate transformation of societies by the intelligent action of the human will—­an historical force to which he does not do justice, apparently because he fancied it incompatible with strict causal sequence.  The value of his work does not lie in the philosophical principles which he applied.  Nor was it a useful contribution to history; of him it has been said, as of Bossuet, that facts bent like grass under his feet. [Footnote:  Jouffroy, Melanges, p. 81.] But it was a notable attempt to do for human phenomena what Leibnitz in his Theodicy sought to do for the cosmos, and it pointed the way to the rationalistic philosophies of history which were to be a feature of the speculations of the following century.

2.

The short essay of Kant, which he clumsily called the Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan, [Footnote:  1784.  This work of Kant was translated by De Quincey (Works, vol. ix. 428 sqq., ed.  Masson), who is responsible for cosmopolitical as the rendering of weltburgerlich.] approaches the problems raised by the history of civilisation from a new point of view.

He starts with the principle of invariable law.  On any theory of free will, he says, human actions are as completely under the control of universal-laws of nature as any other physical phenomena.  This is illustrated by statistics.  Registers of births, deaths, and marriages show that these events occur with as much conformity to laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.

It is the same with the great sequence of historical events.  Taken alone and individually, they seem incoherent and lawless; but viewed in their connection, as due to the action not of individuals but of the human species, they do not fail to reveal “a regular stream of tendency.”  Pursuing their own often contradictory purposes, individual nations and individual men are unconsciously promoting a process to which if they perceived it they would pay little regard.

Individual men do not obey a law.  They do not obey the laws of instinct like animals, nor do they obey, as rational citizens of the world would do, the laws of a preconcerted plan.  If we look at the stage of history we see scattered and occasional indications of wisdom, but the general sum of men’s actions is “a web of folly, childish vanity, and often even of the idlest wickedness and spirit of destruction.”