II. Reflective History.
III. Philosophical History.

I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will
furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides,
and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the
most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they
had before their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply
transferred what was passing in the world around them to the realm of
re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated
into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the
material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for
the conceptive faculty.

These original historians did, it is true, find statements and
narratives of other men ready to hand; one person cannot be an
eye-and-ear witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they
make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an
already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind
together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for
immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and
traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim
and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to
nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary,
we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what
they were about. The domain of reality--actually seen, or capable of
being so-affords a very different basis in point of firmness from that
fugitive and shadowy element in which were engendered those legends and
poetic dreams whose historical prestige vanishes as soon as nations have
attained a mature individuality.