) of
usages and institutions; it was started in Germany by the "historical"
school, and has dominated all the special branches of history. The
history of languages alone has succeeded in shaking off its
influence.[212] Just as usages have been treated as if they were
existences possessing a separate life of their own, so the succession of
individuals composing the various bodies within a society (royalty,
church, senate, parliament) has been personified by the attribution to
it of a will, which is treated as an active cause. A world of imaginary
beings has thus been created behind the historical facts, and has
replaced Providence in the explanation of them. For our defence against
this deceptive mythology a single rule will suffice: Never seek the
causes of an historical fact without having first expressed it
concretely in terms of acting and thinking individuals. If abstractions
are used, every metaphor must be avoided which would make them play the
part of living beings.

By a comparison of the evolutions of the different species of facts
which coexist in one and the same society, the "historical" school was
led to the discovery of solidarity (_Zusammenhang_).[213] But, before
attempting to discover its causes by analysis, the adherents of this
school assumed the existence of a permanent general cause residing in
the society itself. And, as it was customary to personify society, a
special temperament was attributed to it, the peculiar genius of the
nation or the race, manifesting itself in the different social
activities and explaining their solidarity.[214] This was simply an
hypothesis suggested by the animal world, in which each species has
permanent characteristics. It would have been inadequate, for in order
to explain how a given society comes to change its character from one
epoch to another (the Greeks between the seventh and the fourth
centuries, the English between the fifteenth and the nineteenth), it
would have been necessary to invoke the aid of external causes. And the
theory is untenable, for all the societies known to history are groups
of men without anthropological unity and without common hereditary
characteristics.

In addition to these metaphysical or metaphorical explanations, attempts
have been made to apply to the investigation of causes in history the
classical procedure of the natural sciences: the comparison of parallel
series of successive phenomena in order to discover those which always