In these seven lectures, the author looks at the ways in which philosophical historians over the last 2000 years have looked at the nature of man and the shape of human history. He identifies two modes of historical perception, the cyclical and progressive: on the one hand the historical world seen as movement either to a fixed end, or to an indefinite end that defines itself in the course of progression, history as novelty-creating and always variant; on the other hand circularity, eternal recurrence, return to the beginning of things, sheer reiteration or similar recapitulation..... By tracing the development of these two shapes of philosophical history from the onset of the Christian era through to the present, the author argues, they reveal themselves to be less a logical than a psychological polarity. In some periods there may be a weightier commitment to one or the other, but neither has dominated the European intellectual field without the presence in some form of its rival.