Outline of the Principles of History (Grundriss Der Historik)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 Excerpt: ...History is to human beings. Ethics is the doctrine of the moral potencies and not merely that of the relations of persons to them and in them. Ethics and History are co-ordinates, as it were; for History furnishes the genesis of the 'postulate of the practical reason,' which postulate 'pure reason' could not discover. § 83. History is humanity becoming and being conscious concerning itself. The epochs of History are not the life periods of this 'I' of Humanity--empirically we do not know whether this race 'I' is growing old or renewing its youth, only that it does not continue to be what it was or is,--but they are stages in that ego's self-knowledge, its knowledge of the world and of God. § 84. According to the number of these traversed stages, grows the expression which man is able to form of the Supreme End, of his longing after it, and of the way to it. The fact that this expression broadens, enlarges and deepens itself with every stage, is the only thing which can wish to pass for the advancement of humanity. § 85. To the finite eye beginning and end are veiled, but the direction of the streaming movement it can by in 1 Xva Tov del Kal Tov delov nerixw(riv' vestigation detect. Condemned to the narrow limit of the here and the now, it yet dimly espies the whence and the whither. It sees what it sees by being filled with a light in which and from which everything is, even its seeing being a remote reflection of that light itself. The direct glory of that light our eye could not bear, but practicing, clarifying, inflaming its vision in the illuminated spheres which do disclose themselves to it, it catches gleams of ever greater reaches, ever more comprehensive empyreans. Among the circles thus formed the human world with its history is one....