preceding; and that the business of
historians is to trace this genetic process, to explain each change,
and ultimately to grasp' the complete development of the life of
humanity. Three influential writers, who appeared at this stage and
helped to initiate a new period of research, may specially be
mentioned. Ranke in 1824 definitely repudiated the pragmatical view
which ascribes to history the duties of an instructress, and with no
less decision renounced the function, assumed by the historians of the
_Aufklaerung_, to judge the past; it was his business, he said, merely
to show how things really happened. Niebuhr was already working in the
same spirit and did more than any other writer to establish the
principle that historical transactions must be related to the ideas
and conditions of their age. Savigny about the same time founded the
"historical school" of law. He sought to show that law was not the
creation of an enlightened will, but grew out of custom and was
developed by a series of adaptations and rejections, thus applying the
conception of evolution. He helped to diffuse the notion that all the
institutions of a society or a nation are as closely interconnected as
the parts of a living organism.

4. The conception of the history of man as a causal development meant
the elevation of historical inquiry to the dignity of a science. Just
as the study of bees cannot become scientific so long as the student's
interest in them is only to procure honey or to derive moral lessons
from the labours of "the little busy bee," so the history of human
societies cannot become the object of pure scientific investigation so
long as man estimates its value in pragmatical scales. Nor can it
become a science until it is conceived as lying entirely within a
sphere in which the law of cause and effect has unreserved and
unrestricted dominion. On the other hand, once history is envisaged as
a causal process, which contains within itself the explanation of the
development of man from his primitive state to the point which he has
reached, such a process necessarily becomes the object of scientific
investigation and the interest in it is scientific curiosity.

At the same time, the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here
Wolf, a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His
_Prolegomena_ to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack.
Historical investigation was soon transformed by the elaboration of
new methods.