If the history of philosophy has several times tried to devour the history of poetry and art, it may also be said to have several times tried to devour the _history of practice,_ that of politics and ethics, or 'social history,' as people prefer to call it in our day. It has also been asserted that such history should be set free from the chroniclism in which it had become involved and assume a scientific and rigorous form. To do this, it was heedful to reduce it to a history of 'ideas,' which are the true and essential practical acts, because they generate them--that is to say, the error which we noted above in respect to poetry and art has here been repeated. What is peculiar to practical acts has been neglected, and only the 'ideas,' which are their antecedents and consequents, have been retained. But on other occasions the 'ideas' to which it was claimed to reduce practical acts were not really ideas or intellectual formations, but truly practical acts, sentiments, dispositions, customs, institutions. The originality of political and ethical history was thus unconsciously confirmed. Its object is just what can be designated with the single word _institutions,_ taking the word in its widest signification--that is to say, understanding by it all practical arrangements of human individuals and societies, from the most recondite sentiments to the most obvious modes of life (which, too, are always will in action). All are equally historical productions, the sole effective historical productions perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a long history, of which we become conscious from time to time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we can now practically _do_, all our sentiments as so-called civilized men--courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, and the like--all our institutions in the strict sense of the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the spirit, utilitarian or moral)--the family, the state, commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on--have a long history; and according as one or other of those sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true 'nature'--that is to say, its historical genesis. Anyone who has followed the developments of modern social historiography with care and attention has been able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the _chroniclistic chaos_ of disaggregated notes of events in _ordered series of histories of social values,_ and that its field of research is the history of the human soul in its practical aspect; either when it produces general histories of _civilization_ (always due to particular motives and limited by them), or when it presents histories _of classes, peoples, social currents, sentiments, institutions,_ and so forth.