SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 69

correlation between two elements is not a knowledge of
their actual existence. The timeless relation which binds
B to A is incapable of determining that A exists. To ascertain
 that A exists, to ascertain the individual case, which
determines through its own qualities what laws apply to it,
is the task of history. Science asks for the law, history asks
for the specific instance of the law. for the specific case—
and not as a means of reaching inductively a knowledge
of the law, but as a final goal.!
But the historical laws may also be regarded as satisfactory
 projections of the actuality on a different mental
plane. In that case the independent epistemological requirements
 really demand that the original syntheses and
collective structures in which the actuality seems to shape
itself shall be treated as unities without further analysis.
From the point of view of exact science, they are not unities.
 But as they are then used for the purpose of historical
 knowledge and not for the purpose of exact knowledge,
there is no valid objection. History, then, does not go
down to elements, is not directed toward basic occurrences
and individual forces. Its material is different and lies in a
different mental plane.
A great many historical laws may be viewed as tentative
 formulations for relations to be further determined by
natural laws. Examples of these are the following: that
historical evolution tends toward an ever increasing differentiation
 of individuals or an ever narrowing collectivism,
that the moral culture develops in a fixed relation with the
intellectual culture or independently of it, and that social
liberty is accompanied by the building of an objective spirit
and a treasure of superpersonal cultural products. But, on
the other hand, on the plane of conceptual syntheses they
are in and for themselves satisfactory projections of actu-L

 Itid., o. 147.