even in these it may be contended
that it furnishes only partial explanations.

17. The truth is that Darwinism itself offers the best illustration of
the insufficiency of general laws to account for historical
development. The part played by coincidence, and the part played by
individuals--limited by, and related to, general social
conditions--render it impossible to deduce the course of the past
history of man or to predict the future. But it is just the same with
organic development. Darwin (or any other zoologist) could not deduce
the actual course of evolution from general principles. Given an
organism and its environment, he could not show that it must evolve
into a more complex organism of a definite predetermined type; knowing
what it has evolved into, he could attempt to discover and assign the
determining causes. General principles do not account for a particular
sequence; they embody necessary conditions; but there is a chapter of
accidents too. It is the same in the case of history.

18. Among the evolutional attempts to subsume the course of history under
general syntheses, perhaps the most important is that of Lamprecht, whose
"kulturhistorische" attempt to discover and assign the determining causes.
German history, exhibits the (indirect) influence of the Comtist school. It
is based upon psychology, which, in his views, holds among the sciences of
mind (_Geisteswissenschaften_) the same place (that of a
_Grundwissenschaft_) which mechanics holds among the sciences of nature.
History, by the same comparison, corresponds to biology, and, according to
him, it can only become scientific if it is reduced to general concepts
(_Begriffe_). Historical movements and events are of a psychical character,
and Lamprecht conceives a given phase of civilisation as "a collective
psychical condition (_seelischer Gesamtzustand_)" controlling the period,
"a diapason which penetrates all psychical phenomena and thereby all
historical events of the time."[244] He has worked out a series of such
phases, "ages of changing psychical diapason," in his _Deutsche
Geschichte_, with the aim of showing that all the feelings and actions of
each age can be explained by the diapason; and has attempted to prove that
these diapasons are exhibited in other social developments, and are
consequently not singular but typical. He maintains further that these ages
succeed each other in a definite order; the principle being that the
collective p