The student, or even the schoolboy, who has been brought by good (and therefore mutually disagreeing) teachers to meet the past where alone the past still lives, is taken out of the narrowness of his own age and class into a more public world. He is learning the true Phaenomenologie des Geistes; discovering what varieties there are in Man. ‘History’ alone will not do, for it studies the past mainly in secondary authorities. It is possible to ‘do History’ for years without knowing at the end what it felt like to be an Anglo Saxon eorl, a cavalier, an eighteenth-century country gentleman. The
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