But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to philosophy--witness the services which, though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of Germany--even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into nature and history. Nature _and_ history: but they lie closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil history the tale composed to string together the succession of human actions on the public and national field of life.