estimated. “If the historical literature of our time,” said Zeller, “no longer contents itself with eruditely unravelling or critically sifting traditions, piecing together and pragmatically elucidating particular facts, but seeks first and foremost to understand the fundamental continuity of events, to comprehend broadly the development of history and the spiritual principles that control it, this advance is due not least to the influences that Hegel’s Philosophy of History has exercised.”[1] Now for Hegel human history meant struggle for rational freedom, as for Darwin natural history meant struggle for existence: both are teleological concepts, both imply individual agents and unique events, for both the physical world is provisionally a means to ends. The historical method, then, we may say, is altogether the product of the nineteenth century and there we find it claiming “to have invaded and transformed all departments of thought.” “A belief in this method,” said Sidgwick in the course of a polemic against it, “is the most widely and strongly entertained philosophical conviction at the present day.”[2]
Even the negative side of this transformation, the waning of scientific realism, is largely due to the growing conviction of the central importance of the concrete and historical. It is not merely the truth that laws imply agents, nor again the truth that scientific laws are only abstract formulae — what here becomes apparent is that scientific generalisations are an economic device necessitated by our limitations.
