into
the historical fabric.

It is, to be sure, true that it is an economy for human
understanding to be able to reduce to a formula or a general
concept the common characteristics of individuals. But the more
man seeks to reduce facts to concepts and laws, the more he is
obliged to sacrifice and neglect the individual. Men have, to
be sure, sought, in characteristic modern fashion, "to make of
history a natural science." This was the case with the
so-called philosophy of history of positivism. What has been
the net result of the laws of history which it has given us? A
few trivial generalities which justify themselves only by the
most careful consideration of their numerous exceptions.

On the other hand it is certain that all interest and values of
life are concerned with what is unique in men and events.
Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some
object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand.
"She is not the first" is one of the cruel passages in _Faust_.
It is in the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that
all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that
Spinoza's doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge
rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the
individual in the universal, the "once for all" into the
eternal.

The fact that all our livelier appreciations rest upon the
unique character of the object is illustrated above all in our
relations to persons. Is it not an unendurable thought, that a
loved object, an adored person, should have existed at some
other time in just the form in which it now exists for us? Is
it not horrible and unthinkable that one of us, with just this
same individuality should actually have existed in a second
edition?

What is true of the individual man is quite as true of the
whole historical process: it has value only when it is unique.
This is the principle which the Christian doctrine successfully
maintained, as over against Hellenism in the Patristic
philosophy. The middle point of their conception of the world
was the fall and the salvation of mankind as a unique event.
That was the first and great perception of the inalienable
metaphysical right of the historian to preserve for the memory
of mankind