ABSTRACT
Historical science begins by reaction to the imagined happenings of the past. The Kantian type of critique of historical knowledge derives fairly simply from certain controlling ideas. It is more difficult than is usually supposed to distinguish the science and the philosophy of history. For the present purpose, that of discovering the frontier between the science and the philosophy of history, the basic problem is that of the broadest units of history, namely, societies or civilizations. Marxism is the sole philosophy of history in this sense with which the people need to be concerned for it is the only interpretation of man's whole past related to a metaphysical system that today exercises any wide or deep influence on Western civilization. Existentialism, whether negative or positive, atheistic or Christian, is the final result of a crisis that has robbed man of order in nature and of history and left him, naked and alone, face to face with his mysterious destiny.
