TN ITS way the grim flare of the atomic bomb has become the symbol for our age. Like all symbols it mirrors a multiplicity of meaning, the striking aspect of which drives home to the most insensitive of mankind the possibility of the race's imminent demise. That out of a mathematical formula on the most abstract conceptual level should come such a directly felt overpowering fact gives cause for wonder. It demonstrates once and for all that the realm of theory and that of practice cannot be separated, that, though psychologically the man of learning and the man in the street move in different worlds, historically their diverse paths converge. The atomic bomb, in forcing all to recognize the precarious juncture in world history which faces us, has taken the historical crisis into the market place where all strata of society must grapple with it. This widespread concern lays bare one of the fundamental characteristics of this age which is passing into limbo-its neurotic consciousness of history. Historicism has either consciously or unconsciously become a fundamental assumption of all thinking and human effort. In our individual as well as our social lives we are guided by what each action means in regard to the past and the future, rather than in its immediacy. The overconcern among the intellectuals about what history means or does not mean and the real possibility that it might come to an end heighten the tendency to examine the past for some sign of the future. Historicism, a neurotic cultural symptom which denudes the spontaneity of life, is also an instrument of cure for the very sickness it represents, for to understand the present as link in a chain frees the way for living that present for its own sake. In searching for the roots of historicism it is not without significance that it is Hegel more than any other thinker who is responsible for the present obsession with it. What he put on the level of Geist, Marx was to impute to the actual material processes; but it was the Prussian academic who elaborated the pattern. He lived at the dawn of the social order which we now hear ticking away into oblivion. Hardly a current of modern thought has not felt the impact of Hegelianism. Even those who have most strongly rejected his enchanting theology, the pragmatists of James and Dewey persuasion, have had, nonetheless, to assimilate the pulp of his thought before spewing it forth, and the Deweyan logic, though not of the Hegelian dialectic, implicitly recognizes the historical underpinnings of its uses. The Hegelian scheme, which has ineffaceably marked the modern world, posits that society can be understood only in the light of its peculiar stage of historical development. Drawn from it we have the emphasis upon the constant interplay between thought life and the teeming flux of everyday affairs. The theological overtones which give the character of inner necessity to the historical process have been largely abandoned; but the recognition of the clash and provisional resolution, the presence of the antithesis in each synthesis which renews the dialectic on each historical plateau, has been generally accepted.