l affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of
astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the
same way does the force of free will form the content of history.
But just as the subject of every science is the manifestation of this
unknown essence of life while that essence itself can only be the
subject of metaphysics, even the manifestation of the force of free will
in human beings in space, in time, and in dependence on cause forms
the subject of history, while free will itself is the subject of
metaphysics.

In the experimental sciences what we know we call the laws of
inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital force. Vital force is
only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above what we know
of the essence of life.

So also in history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability,
what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an
expression for the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of
human life.

CHAPTER XI

History examines the manifestations of man's free will in connection
with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it
defines this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science
only in so far as this free will is defined by those laws.

The recognition of man's free will as something capable of influencing
historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for
history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly bodies
would be for astronomy.

That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws,
that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body
moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no
conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If
any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law
can exist, nor any conception of historical events.

For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one end
of which is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which a
consciousness of man's will in the present moves in space, time, and
dependence on cause.

The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, the more
evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and define those laws
is the problem of history.

From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards its
subject on the path it now follows, seeking the caus