development of a people form the quintessence of its existence.
[Footnote: See chapters IX, XVI, and others; also M. Bernfeld, _Da'at
Elohim_ ("The Knowledge of God"); and M. Landau, _Die Bibel und der
Hegelianismus_ (Dissertation).] But what he does not believe is that
the essential element in the existence of a people is the resultant. The
process of historical evolution is in itself an adequate reason for its
existence. More rational than Hegel himself, Krochmal thus avoids the
contradiction which follows from the mystical definition of existence in
the Hegelian system.

For the German metaphysician, existence is the interval between not
being and being, that is, the period of _becoming_. Krochmal simply
eliminates this more or less materialistic notion of the
_interval_. He substitutes the moral effects produced incidentally
to the course of historic action, for the idea of effects posterior to
the same action, the effects called the resultants. The more or less
materialistic manner in which historic action develops replaces with him
the idea of the transition period, the period of becoming, as a
mysterious intermediary between actual reason and absolute reason.

Proceeding from these axioms, Krochmal, at a time in which
_Volkerpsychologie_ and sociology were embryonic sciences, explains
the phenomena of Jewish history as well as the phenomena of the
religious and spiritual evolution of mankind, and does it with
remarkable originality and profundity.

Krochmal's ideas produced an effect not to be exaggerated upon the
intelligent among the Polish Jews, who had thrown off the trammels of
dogmatism and mystic hope, but were in a hesitating state of mind,
casting about for the reason of their very existence as Jews. His book