II.

An opportunity is taken to introduce some further remarks of the author concerning History. They are found among a multitude of fragments, arranged under the three heads of Philosophical, Critical, and Moral; an amorphous heap of sayings, generally of great beauty and power. The present have little connexion with the text, but will be their own excuse. The total of his remarks will be seen to hint at a theory of History, with which most school-histories and respectable annals are in no wise infected.

'Luck or fate is talent for history. The sense for apprehending occurrences is the prophetic, and luck the divining instinct. (Hence the ancients justly considered a man's luck one of his talents.) We take delight in divination. Romance has arisen from the want of history.

'History creates itself. It first arises through the connexion of the past with the future. Men treat their recollections much too negligently.

'The historian organizes the historical Essence. The data of history are the mass, to which the historian gives form, while giving animation. Consequently history always presupposes the principles of animation and organization; and where they are not antecedent there can be no genuine historical _chef d'[oe]uvre_, but only here and there the traces of an accidental animation, where a capricious genius has ruled.

'The demand, to consider this present world the best, is exactly analogous to that which would consider my own wedded wife the best and only woman, and life to be entirely for her and in her. Many similar demands and pretensions are there, which he who dutifully acknowledges, who has a discriminating respect for everything that has transpired, is historically religious, the absolute Believer and Mystic of history, the genuine lover of Destiny. Fate is the mysticised history. Every voluntary love, in the common signification, is a religion, which has and can have but one apostle, one evangelist and disciple, and can be, though not necessarily, an extra-religion (Wechsel-religion.)

'There is a series of ideal occurrences running parallel with reality. They seldom coincide. Men and chances usually modify the ideal occurrence, so that it appears imperfect, and its results likewise. Thus it was in the Reformation. Instead of Protestantism appeared Lutheranism.

'What fashions the man, but his _Life-History_? In like manner nothing fashions great men, but the _World's-History_.

'Many men live better in the past and future time, than in the present.

'The Present indeed is not at all comprehensible without the Past, and without a high degree of culture, an impregnation with the highest products, with the pure spirits of the present and of previous ages; all which assimilating guides and strengthens the human prophetic glance, which is more indispensable to the human historian, to the

## active, ideal elaborator of historic facts, than to the grammatical and

rhetorical annalist.'