inclined to conceive the stages in the process of
history as marked by incarnations, as it were, of ideas, and sometimes
speaks as if the ideas were independent forces, with hands and feet. But
while Hegel determined his ideas by a priori logic, Ranke obtained his
by induction--by a strict investigation of the phenomena; so that he
was scientific in his method and work, and was influenced by Hegelian
prepossessions only in the kind of significance which he was disposed
to ascribe to his results. It is to be noted that the theory of Hegel
implied a judgment of value; the movement was a progress towards
perfection.

8. In France, Comte approached the subject from a different side, and
exercised, outside Germany, a far wider influence than Hegel. The 4th
volume of his "Cours de philosophie positive", which appeared in 1839,
created sociology and treated history as a part of this new science,
namely as "social dynamics." Comte sought the key for unfolding
historical development, in what he called the social-psychological point
of view, and he worked out the two ideas which had been enunciated by
Condorcet: that the historian's attention should be directed not, as
hitherto, principally to eminent individuals, but to the collective
behaviour of the masses, as being the most important element in the
process; and that, as in nature, so in history, there are general laws,
necessary and constant, which condition the development. The two points
are intimately connected, for it is only when the masses are moved into
the foreground that regularity, uniformity, and law can be conceived
as applicable. To determine the social-psychological laws which
have controlled the development is, according to Comte, the task of
sociologists and historians.

9. The hypothesis of general laws operative in history was carried
further in a book which appeared in England twenty years later and
exercised an influence in Europe far beyond its intrinsic merit,
Buckle's "History of Civilisation in England" (1857-61). Buckle owed
much to Comte, and followed him, or rather outdid him, in regarding
intellect as the most important factor conditioning the upward
development of man, so that progress, according to him, consisted in the
victory of the intellectual over the moral laws.

10. The tendency of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to the
sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived stimulus
and plausibility from the vista offered b