This applies to love as well: the thought of the infinite,
eternal love must transfigure and ennoble all that which is natural and
human.
If my theories are correct, they prove the ontological character of
historical evolution and the value of the study of history for the
comprehension of the human soul. I have shown in a specific and highly
important domain that that which we are fond of regarding as the
characteristic quality of man was not present from the beginning, but
has gradually been evolved in historical time. In other words: history
can and must teach us the origin and evolution of the spirit and soul of
man, as anthropology teaches us the construction of the body. In
philosophically approaching history, it must not be our object to
discover "what has been," but "what has become, how we became and what
we are." The science of history which loses sight of its bearing on our
time, content with its knowledge of the past, is antiquarian and dead;
at the most it has aesthetic value, but it is worthless as far as the
history of civilisation is concerned.
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