e of the
ideas of progress and development. Such notions were excluded by the
fundamental doctrines of the dominant religion which bounded and bound
men's minds. As the course of history was held to be determined from
hour to hour by the arbitrary will of an extra-cosmic person, there
could be no self-contained causal development, only a dispensation
imposed from without. And as it was believed that the world was within
no great distance from the end of this dispensation, there was no motive
to take much interest in understanding the temporal, which was to be
only temporary.

The intellectual movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
prepared the way for a new conception, but it did not emerge
immediately. The historians of the Renaissance period simply reverted to
the ancient pragmatical view. For Machiavelli, exactly as for Thucydides
and Polybius, the use of studying history was instruction in the art of
politics. The Renaissance itself was the appearance of a new culture,
different from anything that had gone before; but at the time men were
not conscious of this; they saw clearly that the traditions of classical
antiquity had been lost for a long period, and they were seeking to
revive them, but otherwise they did not perceive that the world had
moved, and that their own spirit, culture, and conditions were
entirely unlike those of the thirteenth century. It was hardly till the
seventeenth century that the presence of a new age, as different from
the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and Rome, was fully realised.
It was then that the triple division of ancient, medieval, and modern
was first applied to the history of western civilisation. Whatever
objections may be urged against this division, which has now become
almost a category of thought, it marks a most significant advance in
man's view of his own past. He has become conscious of the immense
changes in civilisation which have come about slowly in the course of
time, and history confronts him with a new aspect. He has to explain how
those changes have been produced, how the transformations were effected.
The appearance of this problem was almost simultaneous with the rise
of rationalism, and the great historians and thinkers of the eighteenth
century, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, attempted to explain
the movement of civilisation by purely natural causes. These brilliant
writers prepared the way for the genetic history of the following