Capitolo 15
contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are more often defeated
from violence that from clement arts, if the trend and motion of things are
toward convulsions and catastrophes #52, if the world owes religious
the liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the
The republicanism English, federal to the American, the political equality to
French and his/her successors #53, what is docile becoming of us and
careful students of the absorbent Past? The triumph of the
Revolutionary it annuls the historian #54. You give his/her authentic exponents,
Jefferson and Sieyes, the Revolution of the last century repudiates
history. Their followers surrendered knowledge with him, and it were
ready to destroy his/her records and to abolish his harmless
teachers. But the unexpected truth, extraneous that the fiction, is that
this was not the downfall but the renewal of history. Directly and
indirectly, from process of development and from process of reaction, a
impulse was given what it made him/it very more strength as a factor
of civilisation that never before, and a movement started in the world of
you lie that were deeper and more serious than the revival of venerable old man
learning #55. The dispensation under which we live and we work consists
before in the leap back from the negative spirit of which it refused the law
growth, and partly in the endeavour to classify and to repair the
Revolution, and to give account of him from the disposition working of historian
causes. The Conservative line of writers, under the name of the
Romantic or Historical school, had its place in Germany, it looked on
the Revolution as an alien episode, the error of an age, an illness to
is treated by the investigation of his/her origin, and it strove him to unite the
broken threads and to restore the normal conditions of organic
evolution. The Liberal School whose house was France, explained and
justified the Revolution as a true development and the matured fruit
of every history #56. These are the two principal matters of the generation to