ABSTRACT
The rise of historical thinking in the nineteenth century gave birth to three major history journals in Germany, England, and France. Among the three, it was the German periodical that was most outspoken about its philosophical intentions. Friedrich Meinecke expressed the compatibility of artistic creation and historical inquiry, since both pursuits are predicated on intuitive relationships. Ernst Troeltsch's assessment of historical inquiry and the nature of historical, wherein the incorporation of all individuals in a super-individual connection is fed by tradition and the past, led to his belief in the pre-eminence of the individual and the "moment of originality" of the historical spectator. History, and the investigation of development, requires the simultaneous evaluation of the part and the whole, a hermeneutical posture that places historical investigation on other than positivistic foundations. Critical philosophy, which receives its primary impetus from the ontological character of time, then, must transform Immanuel Kant's unity of apperception into a historical unity which relates a story.
