| It is the contention of this thesis that great historians have to be rescued from the cages into which their immediate successors try to confine them. In the case of Leopold van Ranke, this is a "rescue operation" which is necessitated by the fact that American historians perceived only the more obvious aspects of the German historian's method and failed to detect that the whole of the massive Rankean edifice is structured on a very definite philosophy of history.; Basic to this philosophy of history is the conviction that God takes an active interest in the affairs of His children, that God stands revealed in the historical process, that it is the function of the Scholar to recognize the will of God, and that, consequently, the vocation of the Scholar is as God-centered as that of the Priest. God's will, so Ranke believed, was executed on earth by spiritual forces which manifest themselves in terms of great tendencies or "ideas". (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
