The science of man has not, as yet, had its historian. This regrettable fact demonstrates that the human or cultural sciences have not attained their full growth. They rest upon a fragmentary and indecisive epistemology, the very idea of human reality being, in the minds of the specialists, still quite vague.

Nevertheless, this latecomer among the positive disciplines has had, throughout the ages, its prophets and its precursors; but their affirmation, isolated in the cultural context of the period, merely provide a steppingstone for the future. Several centuries ahead of his time, Ibn Khaldoun, in his Prolégomènes, defined the sociological and human reality of Arab civilization. With the appearance of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Jean Bodin, the Renaissance witnessed the first attempts to formulate a concrete anthropology and sociology. But the ways and means of this knowledge of man by man existed solely at the level of intuition. Even Vico was to rely only upon his own genius in order to evolve the total phenomenon of human reality in its becoming. A goodly number of the great historians of the nineteenth century, in Germany, in England, and in Spain, were to engage in a kind of doctrineless anthropology, entirely intuitive, extensions of which are encountered today in the works of an Ortega y Gasset, a Spengler or a Toynbee.