How did the idea of the ‘historical’ arise in the history of the human consciousness and human spirit? How did the human consciousness first grasp the historical process and fulfilment? How did it first become aware that history fulfilled itself, that there existed an everyday reality which we term the historical world, the historical movement and the historical process? To answer these questions we must go back to the Hellenic and Hebraic worlds.

Both the Hellenic and the Hebraic principle enter closely into the constitution of the European consciousness; their organic union in the Christian world had helped to inaugurate a new era. It is clear, I think, to any student of history that the Hellenic culture, world and consciousness were lacking in historical sense. They had no conception of history as fulfilling itself. Even the greatest Greek philosophers were unaware of the ‘historical’ and the possibility of a philosophy of history. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any of the other great philosophers has left us a conception of history. This is the result, I think, of the way in which the Greeks interpreted the world. They conceived the world aesthetically, as a finite and harmonious cosmos. The most representative Hellenic thinkers conceived creation as something static, as a sort of classical contemplation of a well-ordered cosmos. This is true of all the great Greek philosophers, who could grasp neither the historical process nor that of historical fulfilment. To them history had no issue, no goal, no beginning even; in it everything was recurrent, eternally rotating and governed by a cyclic motion. The Hellenic consciousness was, in fact, never concerned with the future in which history fulfils itself and in which lie both its centre and issue, but only with the past. This view of futurity contained no basis for a conception of the historical process in general and of its fulfilment as a specific drama in particular.