ABSTRACT
The same holds true of historical explanations. Our basic motiva tion is the need for explanation. The ‘blank spots’ are provided by our historical consciousness. The historian intends the understanding of something when this understanding has an affinity to the needfor-understanding of a particular group with which the historian shares a historical togetherness. New knowledge and new information are provided in order to satisfy this need. More correctly, new knowledge (information) is not a goal in itself. It is a means which serves the rearrangement of items in the space-time co-ordinate until the intellectual feeling of ‘I’ve got it’ is aroused in the historian and in the recipients of historiographical works. It may even happen that the need of some is satisfied while that of others is not. In the latter case, another historian rearranges the same items in a different way and arouses in himself and in the remaining unsatisfied recipients the same feeling: that ‘Now I understand, now I’ve got it.’ It is perhaps superfluous to state again that historiography is justified in satisfying the need for understanding only if it meets the norm formulated by Ranke: it ought to fill the blank spots and arouse the feeling of ‘I’ve got it’ only by following the regulative idea of true knowledge.
