If, on the other hand, the attempt to draw from history historical laws
and concepts be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws
and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science
thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of history, but rather,
according to the case, either philosophy in its various specifications
of Ethic, Logic, etc., or empirical science in its infinite divisions
and subdivisions. Thus are sought out either those philosophical
concepts which are, as has already been observed, at the bottom of every
historical construction and separate perception from intuition,
historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already
formed historical intuitions are collected and reduced to types and
classes, which is exactly the method of the natural sciences. Great
thinkers have sometimes donned the unsuitable cloak of the philosophy of
history, and notwithstanding the covering, they have conquered
philosophical truths of the greatest magnitude. The cloak has been
dropped, the truth has remained. Modern sociologists are rather to be
blamed, not so much for the illusion in which they are involved when
they talk of an impossible science of sociology, as for the infecundity
which almost always accompanies their illusion. It is but a small evil
that Aesthetic should be termed sociological Aesthetic, or Logic, social
Logic.
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