ons of this class has been the role of the individual.

The increasing prominence of economic history has tended to encourage
the view that history can be explained in terms of general concepts or
types. Marx and his school based their theory of human development on
the conditions of production, by which, according to them, all social
movements and historical changes are entirely controlled. The leading
part which economic factors play in Lamprecht's system is significant,
illustrating the fact that economic changes admit most readily this
kind of treatment, because they have been less subject to direction or
interference by individual pioneers.

Perhaps it may be thought that the conception of _social environment_
(essentially psychical), on which Lamprecht's "psychical diapasons"
depend, is the most valuable and fertile conception that the historian
owes to the suggestion of the science of biology--the conception of
all particular historical actions and movements as (1) related to and
conditioned by the social environment, and (2) gradually bringing
about a transformation of that environment. But no given
transformation can be proved to be necessary (predetermined). And
types of development do not represent laws; their meaning and value
lie in the help they may give to the historian, in investigating a
certain period of civilisation, to enable him to discover the
inter-relations among the diverse features which it presents. They
are, as some one has said, an instrument of heuretic method.

20. The man engaged in special historical researches--which have been
pursued unremittingly for a century past, according to scientific
methods of investigating evidence (initiated by Wolf, Niebuhr,
Ranke)--have for the most part worked on the assumptions of genetic
history or at least followed in the footsteps of those who fully
grasped the genetic point of view. But their aim has been to collect
and sift evidence, and determine particular facts; comparatively few
have given serious thought to the lines of research and the
speculations which have been considered in this paper. They have been
reasonably shy of compromising their work by applying theories which
are still much debated and immature. But historiography cannot
permanently evade the questions raised by these theories. One may
venture to say that no historical change or transformation will be
fully understood until it is explained how social environment acted on
the ind