Theses on the Philosophy of History

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could ehindxist. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at moment of danger. "In relation to the history of organic life on earth," writes a modern biologist, "the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at close of a twenty-four-hour day. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.