ABSTRACT
Historiography influenced in various ways the people’s political views. It is indeed characteristic of the very essence of historical investigation to have points of contact with politics and to overlap its domain. The field of history is the yesterday, that of politics the morrow. History is the field of cognition, politics that of volition. The ‘yesterday’ can be perceived, while we cannot will it, for it is already realized; realization, however, means a completion of volition, be it in fulfilment or in definite resignation. Politics, on the other hand, is a task which the human will sets or at any rate may set itself. The sharp line of demarcation separating history as the domain of cognition from politics as that of volition points to a scientific conception in which the relation between cognition and volition formed the subject of a special investigation and in which decisive points of view have been found for the discrimination between these two mental functions.
