; 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 century. But
in the spirit of the _Aufklaerung_, that eighteenth-century
Enlightenment to which they belonged, they were concerned to judge all
phenomena before the tribunal of reason; and the apotheosis of
"reason" tended to foster a certain superior _a priori_ attitude,
which was not favourable to objective treatment and was incompatible
with a "historical sense." Moreover the traditions of pragmatical
historiography had by no means disappeared.

3. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the meaning of
genetic history was fully realised. "Genetic" perhaps is as good a
word as can be found for the conception which in this century was
applied to so many branches of knowledge in the spheres both of nature
and of mind. It does not commit us to the doctrine proper of
evolution, nor yet to any teleological hypothesis such as is implied
in "progress." For history it meant that the present condition of the
human race is simply and strictly the result of a causal series (or
set of causal series)--a continuous succession of changes, where each
state arises causally out of the