ABSTRACT
History as the course of events was conceived by Acton as progress towards liberty, history as the record of those events as progress towards the understanding of liberty: the two processes advanced side by side. Clearly a history which has played so scurvy a trick on them cannot be a meaningful or rational process. But, if we are to retain the hypothesis of progress, we must accept the condition of the broken line. It is a presupposition of history that man is capable of profiting by the experience of his predecessors, and that progress in history, unlike evolution in nature, rests on the transmission of acquired assets. To the extent the author agree with the theologians and the mystics who assert that perfection is not realizable in history. History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself.
