What I have been expounding may be resumed by saying that the history of historiography is neither _literary_ history nor the history of cultural, social, political, moral doings, which are of a _practical_ nature, but that it is certainly all these things, by reason of the unbreakable unity of history, though with it the _accent_ does not fall upon practical facts, but rather upon _historiographical thought,_ which is its proper subject.
Having pointed out or recalled these distinctions, which, as we have seen, are sometimes neglected with evil results, we must now utter a warning against other distinctions, employed without rational basis, which rather overcloud and trouble the history of historiography than shed light upon it.
Fueter (I cite him again, although the error is not peculiar to him) declares that he has dealt in his book with _historiographical theories_ and with _historical method_ only in so far as they seem to have had influence upon actual historiography. The history of historicity (here is the reason he gives for the method he has followed) is as little the history of historiography as is the history of dramatic theories the history of the drama. This he considers to be proved by the fact that theory and practice often follow different paths, as, for instance, in Lope de Vega, whose theory of the drama and actual dramatic work were two different things, to such an extent that it was said of the Spanish dramatist that although he reverenced the poetical art, when he sat down to compose "he locked up the correct rules under seven keys." This argument is without doubt specious, and I was myself formerly seduced by it; but it is fallacious, as I realized when I thought it over again, and I now affirm it to be an error with all the conviction and authority of one who criticizes an error at one time his own. The argument is founded upon a false analogy between the production of art and that of history. Art, which is the work of the imagination, can be well distinguished from the theory of art, which is the work of reflection; artistic genius produces the former, the speculative intellect the latter, and it often happens with artists that the speculative intellect is inferior to their genius, so that they do one thing and say another, or say one thing and do another, without its being possible to accuse them of logical incoherence, because the incoherence is between two discordant thoughts, never between a thought and an act of the imagination. But history and theory of history are both of them works of thought, bound to one another in the same way as thought is bound to itself, since it is one. Thus no historian but possesses in a more or less reflective way his theory of history, because, not to put too fine a point upon it, every historian implicitly or explicitly conducts a polemic against other historians (against other 'versions' and 'judgments' of a fact), and how could he ever conduct a polemic or criticize others if he did not himself possess a conception of what history is and ought to be, to which to refer, a theory of history? The artist, on the other hand, in so far as he is an artist, does not polemize or criticize, but forms. It may quite well happen that an erroneous theory of historiography is expounded, while on the contrary the history as narrated may turn out to be well constructed. This is, of course, to be incoherent, but is so neither more nor less than when progress is effected in one branch of historiography, while there is backwardness in another. There may obtain, on the contrary, an excellent theory of history, where history itself is bad; but in the same way that in one field of historiography there is the sense of and striving for a better method, while there is adherence to old methods in all the other fields. The history of historiography is the history of historical thought; and here it is impossible to distinguish theory of history from history.