h the
medium of successive peoples. This theory, which has been popularised in
France by Cousin and Michelet, has had its day, even in Germany, but it
has been revived, especially in Germany, in the form of the historical
mission (_Beruf_) which is attributed to peoples and persons. It will
here be enough to observe that the very metaphors of "idea" and
"mission" imply a transcendental anthropomorphic cause.

From the same optimistic conception of a rational guidance of the world
is derived the theory of the continuous and necessary _progress_ of
humanity. Although it has been adopted by the positivists, this is
merely a metaphysical hypothesis. In the ordinary sense of the word,
"progress" is merely a subjective expression denoting those changes
which follow the direction of our preferences. But, even taking the word
in the objective sense given to it by Spencer (an increase in the
variety and coordination of social phenomena), the study of historical
facts does not point to a _single_ universal and continuous progress of
humanity, it brings before us a _number_ of partial and intermittent
progressive movements, and it gives us no reason to attribute them to a
permanent cause inherent in humanity as a whole rather than to a series
of local accidents.[211]

Attempts at a more scientific form of explanation have had their origin
in the special branches of history (of languages, religion, law). By the
separate study of the succession of facts of a single species,
specialists have been enabled to ascertain the regular recurrence of the
same successions of facts, and these results have been expressed in
formulae which are sometimes called laws (for example, the law of the
tonic accent); these are never more than empirical laws which merely
indicate successions of facts without explaining them, for they do not
reveal the efficient cause. But specialists, influenced by a natural
metaphor, and struck by the regularity of these successions, have
regarded the evolution of usages (of a word, a rite, a dogma, a rule of
law), as if it were an organic development analogous to the growth of a
plant; we hear of the "life of words," of the "death of dogmas," of the
"growth of myths." Then, in forgetfulness of the fact that all these
things are pure abstractions, it has been tacitly assumed that there is
a force inhering in the word, the rite, the rule, which produces its
evolution. This is the theory of the development (_Entwickelung_